Mrs R's Classroom

I don't even know how it happened, really. It was perhaps more than a year in the making, if I'm honest, with a friend I'd met nearly a decade prior when we were both room moms for the same Kindergarten class at the onset. Last school year, she told me she was going back to work as a teacher aide. We'd both been at home with our babies for about 15 years - often commiserating about school germs, cranky teachers, and the number of lunches we had left to pack each June.  It shouldn't have mattered that she was going back to work. She wasn't even a talk-all-the-time friend. But it poked at something within me. It wasn't about her having a job. It was about the job. She was about to do what I'd always planned to do when I was ready to work again.  Teacher aides come and go in all of our schools all the time - but knowing someone well enough and watching them step into the role that was always my "someday, I'll probably do this when the kids are big