Different Hands Held Down Different Halls 5/11/2025

By: Jennifer Richardson Holt

They are tearing down my old school.

If you’ve read here for a while you know that I live in an achingly rural community and the school that my daughter attends is the same one I attended. In fact, this community is so small, there was only one school for the entire student population from kindergarten all the way through 12^th grade.  The community is growing in number and popularity however and this has merited new facilities. In the past roughly ten years or so, they built a new separate high school.  Then a new elementary school was built and opened three years ago.  My daughter had only one year, her first start at school, in the old building where I went to school. So, while our alma maters will be the same our school experiences will be vastly different even beyond the decades later time frame.

I’ll admit that seeing the excavators’ claw into those old bricks makes me feel many things. It is sad to see such a massive piece of this community’s history gone.  But the newer better school is here. However, many of those little ones that walk through those new halls had mothers that walked the old ones that are now piles of cinder block and rubble. I suppose it is the holiday at hand but all I can think of is the mamas and the babies.  My mother took me to that school. I took my daughter to that school. I’ve seen the way some of those mamas look at the debris during morning drop off. I know what they’re thinking. I feel similar.

My mother deserves a medal for many things but most certainly for what she went through taking me to school. I would begin to build with dread the night before. She would have to deal with those pathetic eyes pleading with her to not make me go. Then each morning I would get sick to my stomach (as is the joy of having a nervous stomach that I still have). My mother would clean up messes at home. She would clean up messes at school. She told me she would go home and call her mother and cry.  I don’t know exactly how long this went on. But the thing is, I had a similar (yet not quite as severe) experience with my daughter. There is nothing like holding up the drop-off line as you are attempting to remove pancake slime from every surface of your vehicle interior and your child and still somehow managing to get them presentable enough (though oddly maple syrup scented) to go into school anyway. And as is tradition, I went home, cried and called my mother.

The tearing down of the old school makes me feel like a chapter has closed and that makes sense. But what surprises me is the new chapter that feels as though it has begun. In a strange way, I feel like perhaps, as I watch a piece of my youth crumble, I am now more a grown-up. But then again, I am still so madly in love with my mother.  I still talk to her every day. I see her most days.  I am still so dependent upon her. She has become my best friend. I may not need escorting into school but she is still so inexplicably important to me. I know how fortunate I am to have her at my age as I know many don’t.  I truly cannot fathom my life without her. She spoils me terribly but she’s just that amazing.

While the school coming down feels like something new beginning, there is one thing that I am not going to be able to ever accomplish no matter how many new pages I turn.  And my inability to accomplish this achievement is sad, but to me it’s also understandable. I will never, ever be able to be to my daughter the mother that mine was to me. This saddens me to know that my daughter won’t get to have the lavishly loving experience that I had back then and still have today.  Though she now has a grandmother that is utterly incredible so, there’s that. I wish I could be the woman that my mother is, but I simply am not capable.  She is made of different stuff. She is platinum and I am well-polished tin on a good day.  I suppose I can be a decent mother, though I frequently question that. My child does occasionally assault me with a ferocious hug and tell me that I am the best mom ever and I would be lying if I said it didn’t cause me to nearly burst.  However, I know what level of mothering I received, and I will not ever come close.

Maybe it’s something like that new school building.  It will all be well and good, but it won’t be the same. I guess I can only pray that when she is taking her kids to school one day, she’ll remember her mom’s coffee in the cupholder, and the game she so loved called Spooder which was the name of the spider that I made with my  hand that loves to crawl across her head, tickle her sides and bounce on her belly like a trampoline. I remember those childish oddities with my mother. I can’t help but tear up thinking about them now and how much they mean though they were so little and insignificant then.  The bar was set terribly high for me to live up to, but how blessed am I that I am here between a mother and daughter who do such a good job loving me. May God keep me grateful for what I have had and purposeful to serve well in what is to come.