Coach

I didn't want to call it daycare for the adults. First of all because it was at night and misnomers really ruffle my feathers. And second because it sounds childish, which it isn't.

I settled on coaching. Reasonable adults get coaching for all kinds of things: relationships, jobs, workouts. And a coach didn't require any kind of special training or certification so I wouldn't be lying. I didn't want to get sued. 

Don’t get me wrong. It's not that I was unqualified for what I had in mind. I knew everything I needed to know about people after working at a nursery school.

It was the perfect job for me. I have always been an idealist, the children-are-our-future variety, which sounds corny and outdated but really is just a fact. Kids are the future because they will one day be adults who might need to decide if humanity should drop another atomic bomb, and wouldn't it be better if the person deciding this was an emotionally stable, well-adjusted individual?

That was how I saw my job. I was trying to ensure that our future leaders would be a little less trigger happy than the last tough-love generation by providing them with care and crunchy snacks. I watched up to ten kids at a time ping-pong through their day in the midst of an emotional tornado. That teaches you a lot about the best and worst of what humanity is capable of. 

In fact, I was so focused on the kids that I had worked at the nursery school for five years before I even thought about the adults, the kid's parents. But once I started thinking about the adults it was hard to stop. They were troubled, stressed, anxious, overtired, lonely. They were crying out for help, and no one was answering them. Then it hit me: kids didn't stop needing care as soon as they could tie their own shoes, or hit puberty, or became (by no fault of their own) adults themselves. Adults were just really big kids that didn't have anyone to make sure that they had been to a dentist recently or that they were getting enough time outdoors.

When I realized the truth about being an adult, I remember closing my eyes and looking inside of myself for the first time in a very long time. At first all I could see was collection of squishy organs and empty subatomic space, but then I looked closer. I saw inside of myself a smaller, slightly younger version of me perfectly nestled inside of adult me like a Russian doll. I looked deeper and found 20-year-old me just starting out on her own. I dug deeper, past 16-year-old pink hair me, past 12-year-old me with a backpack full of Tamagotchis, past 8-year-old me making friendship bracelets out of neon colored gimp, until I made it to 4-year-old me in a yellow and white striped sundress that smiled and waved hello. She was still in me. 

I understood at that moment that if I really wanted to save the children then I couldn't just focus on the children who were currently children, but I also need to help all these children trapped in adult bodies, my nursery school kids parent’s bodies. 

I knew I could do it. I was good at my job. I always received disproportionately more homemade cookies and cards compared to the other teachers. My desk was practically a shine. Most importantly the parents knew that they could trust me. I took care of their kids; I wasn't some wacko. 

So, when I casually mentioned to my favorite kid's parents at the annual parent-teacher social that I was also offering private life-balance coaching classes on Tuesday nights, they listened. 

Marie, Emma, and Henry came to the very first lesson at my apartment. They all arrived as discussed in T-shirts and sweatpants at 6 pm while their partner took over the bedtime routine for the kids. 

My apartment wasn’t very big. For the lesson, I shoved all my living room furniture into my bedroom. I wanted everyone to have space to move their bodies however they chose. I didn't want them to be constrained by a sectional sofa and an entertainment center. 

When they walked into the empty space of my living room, they looked a bit lost and naked without their cell phones that I collected in a box by the front door. I got them moving right away to shake off any doubt they might have had about coming.

I told them we would start with some stretching and posing. They nodded in agreement. I started simple and asked them to pretend to be a tree. At first, they all just stood there, as if they were unsure what a tree looked like. After some gentle reminders that trees had branches, leaves and roots, I saw some flickers of recognition in their eyes. Emma lifted her arms into branches and then spread out her fingers as if they were leaves. Marie and Henry followed and soon we were a forest. I told them to feel the breeze through their leaves and they jiggled their fingers. Then I told them it was snowing in the forest and they all shivered. Then I told them a hurricane was coming through and Emma lost a branch by dropping her arm and Henry pulled himself up by the roots and fell to the floor. They were starting to get me. 

Then we moved on to cartwheels. Cartwheels take a surprising amount of concentration. Kids make them look easy but when was the last time you saw an adult starfish-ing their way across the beach? It was clear that no one in the room had even attempted a cartwheel in the last twenty years and after so long it's easy to forget the mechanics of it. 

Marie didn't seem to remember what happened after your hands went down and got stuck in a Downward-Facing-Dog pose. Henry stood with his arms wide and tried to tip his body over, but he wasn't giving himself enough momentum and he just swayed from side-to-side waiting for something to happen. Emma squatted and then did a frog kick landing flat on her back. They were doing a great job. 

We moved on to tossing cushions. I grabbed my couch cushions from the cramped bedroom and put them in a pile in the middle of the room. I told them they had three seconds to get the pillows as far away from one another as possible. When I said go, they charged to the middle of the room, tossing the pillows like madmen. Marie threw one cushion into the kitchen cabinet. Emma slide across the room on hers like a sled. Henry managed to toss two out the living room window and onto the street. He didn't notice and I didn't get mad (although for future classes I always remembered to shut the windows).

I called break and patted everyone on the back. They each went to the bathroom and washed their hands. I made ham and cheese sandwiches without the crust for the occasion. There were bowls of pretzels and gummy bears. To drink we had glasses of water or apple juice with blue plastic straws that turned red when you drank something cold. They loved that. 

When snack time was over, we switched to crafts. 

Emma, Henry, and Marie sat crossed legged on the floor. I gave each of them a small stack of plain white copy paper and a pair of scissors. I asked them to show me their day in paper. For a full minute they all paused before getting started. It wasn't an obvious task. A lot happens in a day and most of it we forget the moment after it happens. But something from every day stays with us; I wanted them to show me that thing that was following them through their day.

When I came back to check on Marie, she had cut up one piece of paper into tiny squares and was in the process of cutting those squares into even smaller squares. When I asked Marie what she was doing, she told me that each square was something she had forgotten to do today. I told her I could see it, exactly what she meant. I told her to make a second stack of squares for all the little things she didn't forget to do today and for her to then tell me which one was bigger. She smiled and got back to work.

Henry had made for himself a whole office set up with curled up paper pencils and a coffee mug, and the outline of a large chair. He had folded a piece of paper into an L shape and was pretending to type on his paper laptop. I asked him what he was writing, and he said what he needed to write at work was boring. I told him he should write something exciting that was just for him, and he feverishly started typing on the paper. 

Meanwhile Emma had made an origami fortune teller because it was the only thing she knew how to fold. She told me that she had woken up at 5:30 am to fold the laundry today and then dropped the whole basket as she was walking up the stairs and needed to fold it all over again. She looked down at her paper fortune teller and let out a big yawn. 

I asked Emma to wait a moment. I went into my storage room and grabbed the reclining wheelchair. It had soft blue leather upholstery that you could really sink into. It was my grandmother’s chair before she died. I’m glad I didn’t get rid of it. I knew it would come in handy one day. 

I asked Emma to sit in the chair and I slowly wheeled her around the living room. She started talking. Most of the time I had no idea what she was talking about. It's so hard to understand someone else's life. When she seemed nervous or stressed, I told her it would be ok, because it would be. Everything is ok after enough time, no matter how horrible. That seemed to comfort her.

After a while Emma started to cry softly and I made soothing ocean sounds, like waves crashing against the shore. Shh. Shh. Shh. 

When I was certain Emma was asleep, I wheeled her over to a quiet spot by the kitchen. I grabbed a thin blanket from the bedroom and placed it gently over her legs. I looked at her face. She was so peaceful. I looked closer, deep into her closed eyes, past 35 years of layer upon layer of Emma’s life until I found a tiny 4-year-old Emma sleeping soundly and I knew that I had done the right thing.

Lanay Griessner is an emerging American short story writer with a PhD in biology that she doesn’t know what to do with yet. Originally from Springfield, Massachusetts, Lanay moved to Austria in 2008 for graduate school and couldn’t figure out how to leave because the signs were all in German. She now lives in Neunkirchen, Austria with her husband and two children. Read more at www.lanaygriessner.com.