Sometimes there comes a day when your kids who have been depressed, aren’t anymore. The new meds are working, they’ve learned cognitive skills, things are just better. Then one kid plunks herself down and chatters to you about her life for two hours, some of which covers events in elementary school. Which leads you to look up favorite teachers to see if they’re still at the school. And they are. So the next day you grab the younger brother, who also had these teachers, and you drive over to the school for a visit. It turns out that you arrived early and the kids aren’t out yet, but the teacher you visit first just happens to have an empty classroom because her current crop of fifth graders are all in the computer lab. She’s always busy, but this day she has an hour to smile as she watches your kids talk and reminisce.
Then, when you seek out the other teacher, she almost cries because she’d been thinking about your kids only a few days before. She’d been wondering about them and and planning to write you a letter to ask about them, but then you walked into the office. And there they are: standing tall (in one case, 1.5 feet taller than when last seen) with bright faces, and cheerful chatter about their lives and their plans for the future. And when the kids go run off to see the playground, you get to stand with these two teachers who cried with you over your kids when they were struggling hard, and you cry a little bit again, but this time it is happy. Because here you are on the far side of a hard dark place, which lasted much longer than anyone wanted, but which also laid all sorts of necessary groundwork for the growing that is happening now.
Sometimes you get to have that day. And it is a beautiful one.