No more preschoolers

It feels like we have been preparing for this day for two years.  Endless discussions about when it would all begin.  When would she be a big girl like her brothers?  When would she have her own set of uniform?  There were no doubts, no tears, just confidence that this was the place she should be tinged with some frustration that it wasn’t happening quickly enough.

On her fourth birthday, having been told many times that she would be going when she was four, she looked at me with expectant eyes and asked if she was starting that day and I could see the frustration and disappointment when I had to gently tell her that it was another few months.  “But you said that when I was four …” Yes, I had said that but I had to explain that it wasn’t quite as simple as that.

Move up days came and went and she breezed in and out as though it was something that happened every day.  She bid a slightly farewell to her nursery friends who were all going to a different school without any real sadness.  The summer was a flurry of uniform buying and excited conversations about big school.

The countdown was on.  “How many days until …?”

Then it was here.  The big day.  She was up and out of bed extra early and couldn’t wait to put her uniform on.  We would have been at the school gat at 6:30 in the morning if she had had her way.  Other children were clinging to their parents and looked fearful of what was to come.  Not my little girl.  Head held high, she ran to the line as soon as the bell went without so much as a backward glance and certainly without any tears.  It was all smiles.

Was it wrong that a small part of me wanted her to scream and cry and cling to my coat tails?  Maybe something less dramatic; a lingering hug, cries of how much she would miss me? No, absolutely nothing.  I blinked and she was gone and I was left to go back home by myself.

It was a strange feeling.  The house was silent.  The bustle and noise of the holidays was a distant memory and at last I had the chance to tick off some of the many jobs on my to do list.  But I couldn’t settle.  I paced around the house, turned the television on and off but nothing could distract me.  I kept wondering what the children were doing.  Wondering if my ‘baby’ was enjoying those first experiences of education.

It was a strange feeling as I hadn’t felt like that before.  Three times I have been in this position but it never felt like this.  On the teen’s first day at school, I was shellshocked by the whole experience as a first time mum.  With R, I had his brother with me as a toddler and then when it was his turn, I was pregnant with his sister.

A is the last one.  The final child to go to school.  There will be no more preschoolers, no more babies, no more toddlers. In a ridiculous way I felt redundant.

That was what made this day the hardest of them all.  I was handing my baby over and there was a big part of me that wanted her to stay with me.

At the end of the morning, I duly lined up with the other anxious parents and waited for my little girl to come back.  As soon as she saw me, she hurtled towards me with the biggest smile and threw herself at me with the loveliest hug ever.

She loved school.  She loved everything about it and it was lovely to hear her chattering away about her morning in the car all the way home.  She did utter those heart-wrenching words “no-one played with me at playtime” and my heart skipped a beat.  It turned out that she had walked out into the playground on her own but had been quickly scooped up by an older girl who had made sure she had someone to play with.  That was a relief.

“So when do I go back?” she asked eagerly and she was pleased when I said the next day.  As hard as it is, I hope that she continues to enjoy it the next day and all the days after that.

As for me, well I had better get started on my to do list.