My daughter can make the moon move

Kids can help you focus on the bigger picture... kind of

Hi, everyone. This essay is from the archives, way before my Substack newsletter days. I came across it this morning, and it happens to be the last day of Elementary School Runner’s Club for the year, so it feels like a serendipitous time to share it. After this year, I’ll only have one child left in elementary school, which is wild. It’s hard to believe this piece is five and a half years old. I’ve been doing this a long time.

“Daddy! Come look! The moon looks like a banana!”

My 5-year-old was very excited. Me? Not so much. It was just past seven in the morning, we’d been up since just after six, and we needed to get to school.

The second training session of the elementary school running club was that morning, so we had to be at school even earlier than usual. School starts at a soul-suckingly early time every day, but I was willing to get moving before dawn because running club is that important.

I hadn’t really thought about running club until this year — about six days ago to be exact — but I’m very passionate about it now. I mean, where else can school children gather as the sun rises to run, jog, walk, amble, or backpedal while making large arm circles around the P.E. field in pursuit of little blue tickets for completing laps? Nowhere. That’s the beauty of running club.

As everyone knows, the first rule of elementary school running club is try to run as far as you can without stopping. The second rule is show up on time if at all possible.

I was uncertain how well my children would do with the first rule, but with Mo Farah as my witness, you better believe we were going to live up to rule number two.

My first thought as I followed my son out the front door was it’s too early for this.

My second thought? It’s not exactly like a banana, but okay.

My third thought? If we’re late to the most important thing that’s ever happened because we’re too busy gazing at a banana moon, I’m going to lose it.

The sun was still just peeking through the branches of the trees to the east, but the sky was already a startling blue. The only blemishes were the kind-of-banana-shaped moon and a crisp, white trail left by an airplane passing overhead.

While I worried about whether we were going to ever get loaded into the car and if we could possibly make it on time, my 3-year-old daughter was busy making the moon move.

She trotted along, her bare feet slapping against the concrete driveway, her hair bouncing off her shoulders, looking up to the sky furtively with every step. She was keeping a close eye on the moon like it was her kite and she was pulling the string.

She stopped at the end of the driveway, looked back at me, and said, her eyes dancing with excitement, “I can make the moon move!”

I often feel like my worldview is at loggerheads with my children’s, but it’s rarely this stark. There I was worrying about a few minutes on the clock while my daughter was in the process of re-positioning celestial bodies using just her feet and legs.

Perhaps that’s just the job of parents — to worry about the mundane so our children can explore the extraordinary. We worry about big things and little things. We worry about unlikely things. We worry about what people think of our parenting. We worry about how every little decision we make will affect what our children will become. We worry about elementary school running club for some reason.

I constantly worry about getting to school on time. Every single day it makes me anxious. And the thing is, we always make it on time. We are never late to school. But still, every day I anticipate that this is finally going to be the day it all falls apart.

And if we were a few minutes late, what would happen? My thinking never really gets that far. But I guess we’d be permanently banned from school and possibly sent to a tardy prison. The presence of such unlikely consequences is the only way to explain the level of anxiety I have about being late. If the only consequence is that I have to walk into the office and sign my kids in, that would make my worry seem downright silly.

And while I remain firm in my conviction that I’m teaching my children more than they are teaching me (hello… banana moon?), they do impart some good life lessons from time to time.

Like, find excitement in the little things. Don’t let the time of day or lack of sleep get in the way of your joy. And put the worries aside and believe in your abilities. After all, if you can make the moon move, are there any limits on what you can achieve?

Note from the present: I still obsess about being on time every single day. I have learned nothing in the last five to six years.

Don’t forget to check out my books.

Love’s a Disaster - contemporary fiction about a marriage proposal gone wrong, complicated families, second-chance love, Florida, sword fighting, and punk rock music.

Fatherhood: Dispatches From the Early Years - essays and humor about the very early years of my parenting journey

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