I few years ago, I stumbled on a superpower. I could become invisible by uttering a simple incantation in answer to a question.

“And what do you do?” someone would ask. I’d sense my vanishing drawing near.

“Me?” I’d reply, looking around as if any number of people were nearby. “I’m a stay-at-home mom.” And then I’d feel myself fade to nothing, as a final a nervous giggle, an averted glance, a performative “Oh, that’s a lot,” was tossed my way to end the conversation. And just like that, I’d be gone.

As a new mom I didn’t see myself represented anywhere in media, in literature, or even many public places in real life. Where were all the 18-month olds, the two- and three-year-olds? I was reprimanded by a stranger for bringing my daughter to a coffee shop when she was four months old, and I can’t say I ever forgot it. I began to notice how toddlers were written out of TV shows, how pregnancy seemed interesting enough for a whole season character arc, but then a summer hiatus later the baby delivered in the finale was somehow walking, talking, and safely enrolled in preschool so their mom could pursue some new kind of growth. Parenting tiny kids, it seemed, wasn’t a story worth telling.

That’s the story on my mind today, the last day of preschool, as we sing a medley of songs from the year under the hot sun of a June afternoon. We’ve nominated our favorites, and now sing them in chronological order, so that the music progresses from the apples of autumn to the jingle bells of winter to the dinosaurs of spring. (Because what says “spring” more clearly than a hungry dinosaur, stomping down the street?) We end with the song that always closes our class time, which we sing fast or slow, depending on how late we are. It’s been stuck in my head the better part of forever, but still the lyrics bring tears to my eyes today.

The more we get together

Together, together

The more we get together,

the happier we’ll be.

Cause your friends are my friends

And my friends are your friends.

The more we get together

the happier we’ll be.

It’s always made me smile to end our classes this way, because more than anything, this preschool has been about being together. To be honest, I didn’t know what a cooperative preschool was before my oldest daughter started at this one three years ago. I imagine there are many iterations of this, but the basic formula seems to be that parents are engaged with the schools at a high level, performing some of the instruction and caregiving alongside the teachers, as well as filling most of the administrative roles. In our case, this also meant a bit of parent education, monthly group meetings on topics like positive discipline, technology use and kids, and a topic aptly named “parental frustration.” We take turns working in the classroom each week, so throughout the year we spend a good amount of time in conversation with one another, watching our kids grow and change and interact. For a year, this all happened mostly in Zoom sessions, and it really is true: the more we’ve gotten together, the happier we’ve been.

After songs, the kids line up for their commencement ceremony, which will take place in the sandbox. It’s a casual affair, with “Pomp and Circumstance” wafting out of a bluetooth speaker, and kids posing for photos with their adored teacher and a preschool certificate. My youngest daughter, her felt mortarboard balanced jauntily on yellow curls, bursts into tears when it’s her turn. It’s all been so good, and as with our house a few months ago, this is the only school and teacher she’s ever known. It’s been a good season, one that almost didn’t happen.

In “The Road Not Taken,” one of Robert Frost’s most famous poems, the speaker stands at a crossroads and looks down two paths. Though he fancies for a moment that one “was grassy, and wanted wear,” though he admits a line later that “the passing there / had worn them really about the same.” He pauses to examine two paths, admits that they’re basically the same, and picks one. Because he has to. We all have to. In the end, he says he’ll tell another story, will claim that he “took the road less traveled by / And that has made all the difference.” But he’s already told us the truth; he has no idea the difference it made. We never get to know.

A few years ago, feeling invisible and perplexed, I thought I saw two ways ahead, both replete with challenge and opportunity. I’d always planned to wait to teach again until both of my kids were in school, but I began to wonder if for the price of full-time childcare for one it would be sensible for me to go back to teaching. I wouldn’t make much money, of course, but I’d make some, more than the nothing I’d have made if I needed to pay for care for two children at once. I’d have Kindergartener, and then my youngest would be in preschool, and I could shed my invisibility cloak and rejoin the land of people with jobs. I gave it a bit of thought, but the timing of the academic calendar delayed any serious decision, and then a global pandemic came and bulldozed the teaching path to oblivion.

To be clear, I could have done it even then, and it wouldn’t have been wrong. I could have taught online and raised two kids who were also trying to go to school online, though they were still too young to really do that. But I didn’t want to. In the end, I looked at the paths available and they were different, vastly so. So I kept on the one I’d started, plunging into co-op and leadership with MOPS, surrounding myself with young kids and young parents.

And it’s not until the ceremony is over, and the kids are eating popsicles and hugging teachers and chasing each other around their favorite playground anywhere, that I realize just how seen I’ve felt as a parent in this place and these years. Sometime in the last three years, one harried morning and honest conversation and muddy afternoon at a time, I found that one of the benefits of living in community is that we see and know each other, just as we are in the slow, dailyness of this season of life. No one would set a sitcom here, maybe. Yet while I watched my daughter grow from a clumsy toddler to a small child who tells stories and makes friends, somehow I also grew into an adult woman who knows the value of this time and my role in it.

There will be more roads diverging someday, but not today. Today it’s summer, then another year of pre-K at a different school before I can peer down any roads to inspect their traveled-ness, once both of my children are in elementary school. For now I’m left a bit in awe that these years that I could have remembered for fear, stress and isolation instead leave me with the feeling that my girls’ early education was kind, leisurely and warm, rich with the sort of community we’re so often missing in this city and century. Like Frost’s speaker, squinting down his paths, I had no idea what I was choosing three summers ago, desperate to find a preschool that seemed safe and meaningful, but this one truly has made all the difference.