And Then There's Dad

Other People's Children (continued)

by Gary Drevitch

In the end, though, while I couldn’t tell you the eye color of any of my children’s friends, or which activities they do during the week, I do appreciate that they’ve decided to make my kids their friends, and there's nothing I could possibly admire them for more than that.

On the first day of first grade, for example, my son started at a new public school. For a variety of reasons, we’d switched him from the public school where he had spent kindergarten. I met him after school that day and escorted him to his new school’s playground, where he roamed about aimlessly, for what seemed like hours, nervously nibbling on his shirt collar, as I struggled to resist the urge to get up and play with him myself. Finally, a boy who had been in his nursery school class two years earlier strolled over, put his hand out, and asked my son to join him and some other boys playing with Pokemon cards. Finally my boy’s shoulders relaxed, and he jogged over to play. Now, THAT I noticed.

Gary Drevitch is a former assigning editor at Teen People, Parade Publications, and Scholastic. He’s also a dad with three young kids. A veteran producer of educational content for McGraw-Hill, Scholastic Inc., and Time Inc., he’s written several non-fiction books for children.  

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