The first day of school recently arrived at our house. I woke up early to get the kids ready in time to take a few pictures out on the front porch before we left. I have to admit, I made them do the chalkboard thing – the mug shot where you write their teacher’s name and their grade on a placard and they hold it up – with varying degrees of compliance and cheer. Our chalkboard also has a section, my favorite one, for what they want to be when they grow up.

One year, my younger son insisted I write “nothing” in the spot, and I did. Maybe it was sort of sullen or bratty, but it was also so characteristically him that I loved it. He told me that he didn’t ever want to get married, either. “Oh, why?” I asked, surprised he’d gotten around to deciding that at 6 years old. “Because she probably won’t want to live with my brother,” he answered. I had to admit, he was probably right.

But these milestones, the first days of school, the big and small events, that’s when you think about who your kids are. You see how they’ve changed over the years, becoming themselves more with each day. You realize how much time has already passed. It makes you clutch at life. You take the pictures, you perform the rituals, you marinate in the joy that you’ve been granted another glorious day with them.

Parenting is an avocation that’s less popular all the time, and I get why that is. Raising children is difficult. It’s expensive (though sometimes you realize it doesn’t always have to be so expensive). It’s physically demanding, emotionally exhausting and spiritually draining to be a parent. If you’re doing it right,that is.

Like a farmer tending a beanstalk, you build supports for your children. You give them what they need to survive, sometimes what they need to thrive,and then eventually you teach them how to do it all for themselves.

It’s tricky, especially because you’re no more perfect than your imperfect parents were (and their imperfect parents were, and so on). But you’re trying, mostly succeeding and occasionally failing, and as a reward for your efforts, you get to watch your little plant stretch up to the sun, sprout tender leaves and twist its tendrils into the earth of the world.

You’ll get to hear them tell you they want to be “nothing” when they grow up, nothing special, nothing that requires college or job transfers or being out of the house at all, because they want to live with you and their dad and their brother, in this same place, in this same moment, forever. They want to be 6 years old, always.

Sometimes they do, anyway. And you want that, too, kind of. You don’t want them to ever leave or change. You want to always pick them up from school and hear in the car about when a kid was mean to them, or when a TV show made them sad or when they learned something that upset them, except you actually don’t.

You want them to become strong,confident adults and you want them to reject you in the kind way that all healthy children reject their parents, by moving out, getting a job, building a family in whatever way they like.

Because being a parent is lifting them up until they’re so high they don’t need to be lifted anymore. In the meantime, though, while you’re raising, you write on the chalkboard. You pose them outside for pictures. You learn who they are. And it’s magnificent and terrible and confusing and sweet.

Every day is the first day of school, and for however many days class is in session, you’re always the student.