Your Child's First Day of School
February 25, 2011, By Jason Avant 1 comment
It’s a story as old as the Internet itself – a parent writing about the sense of abandonment, loss and time’s inexorable passage as he or she sends their child off to school for the very first time. How did she get so big? Where did the days go? Will her teacher replace me in her heart? My son started daycare at a very early age; with both of us working, and life being very expensive, my wife and I had little choice. It was hard, dropping him off at the daycare center that first day. He seemed fairly oblivious to it all, having not quite reached his second year. We were dropping him off in a big building full of strange grownups and children, but any anxieties he might have felt were tempered by the piles of stuffed animals and the bowls full of graham crackers. My wife and I were not so easily soothed.
As our daughter grew, I worried that I’d take her first sojourn into the classroom even harder; she is, after all, my little girl. Days passed, then months; she learned how to walk, how to talk in complete sentences, how to use crayons and how to properly assemble her big block legos. As she passed the fuzzy border between baby and kid, I quickly realized that I wasn’t feeling those same pangs of impending separation anxiety that I’d felt when it was time to send Lucas off to daycare. And something else: I didn’t feel bad about not feeling bad. Let’s not kid ourselves: there’s a big part of us that cannot wait for our children to start school.
Our neighborhood is technically kid-friendly; it’s small, gated, and on those rare occasions when they arrive and depart, the neighbors’ cars roll down the street at a snail’s pace. Every morning, one of us drives Lucas to school, and we sometimes bring Zoë. His excitement is palpable; he likes to read, and hasn’t yet learned to hate math, but more than that, he can’t wait to see other kids. When I say we live in a kid-friendly area, I mean we live in a kid-free area. There’s an older boy that lives a few houses down from us; he’s a fourth grader, and Lucas is in the first grade, so apart from the love of Star Wars and Transformers that all boys share, they have very little in common. Lucas’ social life is in the classroom and on the recess yard; he spends hours each day with kids his own age. The preschool is next to Lucas’ school; we mentioned that to Zoë several months ago, and the request in the form of a question began. “Can I go to school?”
The facts: she’s more than capable of entertaining herself. The girl has a tremendous imagination, talking to her dolls, coloring on her easel, singing and dancing to songs composed in her head. We do what we can, taking her on errands, to the park, on the occasional playdate. Her big brother does his best to play with her. Zoë is a happy little girl; she runs everywhere, to the sink to wash her hands, to the table to eat her lunch, to the bedroom to put on her jammies because running is So! Much! Fun! She’s engaged with the world around her, inquisitive, observant, and always with a smile on her face. We don’t claim to be perfect parents – far from it – but we’re pretty sure we haven’t messed her up. There are little kids who, for whatever reason, merely exist in the world. She lives in it.
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