On seasonal relationships, small acts, and the ripples we never get to see
I looked them up on a whim, really. I was visiting my parents, staying in the neighborhood where I used to live when I was young and broke and piecing myself together after something I didn’t yet have words for. Something about being back there — geographically close to that version of myself — sent me down a thread of memory I hadn’t pulled in years.
I used to tutor two boys. Their mother had been my ESL student, and when she saw that her sons needed someone to sit with them through book reports and posterboard presentations, she asked if I would help. I was a broke college student. Any cash income sounded amazing. And so started one of the lovelier chapters of my early twenties.
I looked them up last night, and what I found stopped me completely.
The eldest is a library assistant. At a law library! A writer himself now — philosophy, history, politics. His younger brother is at a prestigious university, scholarship in hand. Both of them doing, in retrospect, exactly what you’d expect from the boys I knew. And yet I sat there genuinely stunned, because I hadn’t really let myself expect anything at all.
They were clever — almost inconveniently so.
The kind of clever that makes traditional teaching feel beside the point. They didn’t need me to explain things to them. They needed someone to keep them in the room long enough to do the work. And so that became the art of it: enough rabbit holes to hold their interest, enough structure to give their mother proof we’d accomplished something. When I figured out that balance — when I consciously recognized we’d found our rhythm — it felt like a breakthrough. Not a teaching breakthrough — a relationship one.
Because by then it was a relationship. We had a dance. They knew what I would and wouldn’t tolerate; I knew what would light them up versus what would make them go glassy-eyed. We’d built enough trust to be honest with each other. That didn’t happen in a single session. It accumulated.
I should say, in the spirit of full honesty: I was not always my best self in those sessions. I was in my early twenties. There were Saturday mornings I showed up to tutor with a headache that had nothing to do with studying. God bless the obliviousness of children… I showed up anyway, and I tried, and somehow that was enough. Maybe more than enough. Because I wasn’t performing anything. I was just… there. Genuinely present, even on the rougher mornings, because I actually liked them.
Here is the part I keep coming back to: I was becoming someone, right alongside them.
When I first walked through their door, I was an undergraduate. I had just escaped a situation I was still making sense of. I wasn’t a mentor with wisdom to dispense. I was a young woman who needed the work, needed the warmth of a household that felt safe, needed proof that I could show up somewhere consistently and be trusted.
They watched me go from undergrad to gap year to law student to law school graduate. They asked me questions about law school with genuine curiosity — both boys, at different points, circled the idea of pursuing law themselves. Their father worked in technology; their mother had been a doctor in her home country before immigrating and raising a family. And somehow this woman, who had built an entire life around her sons’ futures, extended some of that care to me. She tried to set me up with someone once! I loved her for it.
I didn’t just help them. I grew up with them as witnesses. And the version of me that learned to show up, to be reliable, to find the rhythm of a relationship built on consistency and genuine warmth — that version of me was being shaped in that house, too.
I never walked into a tutoring session thinking: this is where I change their lives.
That thought never crossed my mind. I walked in wanting to understand what would hold their attention that day. I walked in genuinely curious about what they’d been thinking about, what had annoyed them that week, what they actually cared about. I opened myself up to them, simply because they were interesting and I liked them.
I think that’s the thing, actually. The absence of agenda is what made it real. Children — especially clever ones — can sense performance from across a room. They don’t need you to be impressive. They need you to be genuine. To treat their intelligence as actual, their questions as worthy, their distraction as something to meet rather than overcome.
Impact, I’ve come to think, is rarely the thing you aim for. It’s the byproduct of showing up honestly, repeatedly, without needing to know what it’s building toward. The people who changed me most weren’t trying to. They were just present in a way that happened to reach me.
The strangest part of all of this is that I didn’t know any of it.
They grew up entirely without my awareness. The eldest sat with his college application essay, and then I stopped being part of their story. Not dramatically. The way those things end: gradually, naturally, because the season had passed. They didn’t need a tutor anymore. I didn’t need the extra income. Life filled in around the absence and we drifted, the way you do.
But here’s what last night gave me: a window. A small, improbable glimpse of a thread I hadn’t known I’d woven. A law library. Philosophy and politics. A scholarship. The evidence, quiet and particular, that those boys had become exactly themselves — and that somewhere in the accumulation of all those Saturday mornings, maybe I was a small part of the conditions that made that possible.
I hold that lightly. I don’t want to claim too much. But I’m also done pretending it’s delusion to wonder if I made an impact.
We have a particular cultural story about meaningful relationships: that they last.
That if something mattered, you stay in touch. That a relationship without continued contact is somehow incomplete, a draft that never got finished. I don’t think that’s true. I think some relationships are — exactly that word — complete. They have a beginning and a middle and an end, and they do precisely what they were meant to do, and then they finish. Not fail. Finish.
The tutoring relationship with that family was whole. It had an arc. The fact that I’m not still sitting at their kitchen table on a Saturday morning doesn’t diminish what it was — it just means it’s finished. And last night, when I found them doing well and felt nothing but warmth and pride, I understood that there was nothing unresolved. No loose ends. Just love for people whose season in my life had its own perfect shape.
I think about that now when I walk into a SART shift.
The work is not always legible. You sit with someone in the immediate aftermath of something shattering, and you cannot know — you will almost certainly never know — whether anything you offered made it through the noise. Whether the quiet presence, the unhurried pace, the simple act of staying made any difference at all. There is no looking them up years later. There is rarely a window.
But what if it does? What if the space you held — the grace, the stillness, the refusal to rush someone through their own story — is exactly what plants something? Not a dramatic transformation. Just a seed. Just the faint, durable knowledge that someone showed up and was real with them at the worst possible moment.
I am a person now who has faced what happened to her. I have named it, sat with it, built a life on the other side of it. That didn’t happen because someone fixed me. It happened slowly, in accumulated moments, in the safety afforded by people who showed up without agenda. People who were just — present. Who let me be wherever I was.
And here I am, trying to continue that. Walking into rooms I couldn’t have imagined entering a decade ago, trying to be for someone else what was quietly, imperfectly given to me. Not to change anyone. Not to perform healing or guide someone toward a particular outcome. Just to be there. Authentically. Openly. With kindness and whatever grace I can manage.
Maybe that’s enough. I have to believe it’s enough.
The roots grow. You just have to tend them faithfully while you can.
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