Last week my youngest started kindergarten. All day long my social media feeds were filled with posts from other parents who were also sending their babies to kindergarten, and nearly all of them talked about how sad it made them. “Devastated!” they said.
After we took the obligatory first-day-of-school pictures and sent the kids off with lots of hugs and kisses, I fixed myself an enormous iced coffee and went for a long walk on the beach, prepared to be bowled over by all the emotions that come with reaching a parenting milestone such as this. And, as expected, there were lots of feelings. I cried three times. But I have to be honest; I can’t say I was devastated.
It’s not that sadness was completely absent. There was a thread of grief running through the emotional soup that morning and all the mornings that have followed, a thread stemming from the bittersweet knowledge that the adorable toddler years are behind me and I can never get them back. The nagging worry that maybe I didn’t appreciate it all enough before I lost those tiny humans to the unstoppable forces of time. But in all honesty, sadness has not been my chief emotion.
The reality is that while it is sad to say goodbye to one season of life as you embark on the next, we - my children and I both - were all very ready for this moment. My kids were excited to start to school, and I felt a tremendous amount of pride watching my daughter take her little brother’s hand and walk him into the building. There was the faintest sting when he didn’t turn around to wave one last time, but it was overshadowed by the pleasure I took in watching him so confidently walk into his classroom and greet his teacher.
At the same time, this is a big deal for me. Namely, the freedom that comes from having both kids in school all day. I’ve shared before about the tension between the desire to be both a fully-present, emotionally available mother, and yet still wanting time to pursue the dreams I have for my life outside of motherhood. And now, after many years of telling myself, “Be patient! Don’t wish this away! There will be time later. Kindergarten is coming,” I am reaping my reward — the gratification long delayed. My favorite little people are off to the sacred halls of learning, and I am off to finally, hopefully, finish this manuscript! I would be lying if I said I wasn’t feeling positively giddy about it.
When you’re marveling at the wonder of your first, perfect baby sleeping peacefully in your arms, kindergarten sounds as though it’s lifetimes away. It seems impossible that someone so soft and bitty and helpless could become a roaring, hilarious five year old. And then later, when you’re juggling multiple kids and you’re exhausted because one of them isn’t sleeping so you aren’t sleeping and you can’t remember the last time you showered and the soundtrack to every trip to the grocery store is a combination of whining for treats and full-on wailing as you retrace your steps to find the pacifier that got dropped somewhere between the bananas and the dairy aisle, kindergarten feels like a distant sign post, somewhere far, far away, barely visible through the fog of years. But then you blink and here they are, donning their comically large backpacks and marching off to school. They always did say that the days are long but the years are short.
But I think in many ways, for parents of young children in this particular moment in history, the emotional experience that accompanies the moment you first send your kids to school has been somewhat heightened, because recent events made a lot of us wonder if maybe this would never happen at all.
For the last year, the part of me that is prone to anxiety and catastrophic thinking was biting it’s nails, muttering in the back of my mind about all the calamitous possibilities outside of my control. “What if there’s another, more serious strain of COVID and the schools all have to go remote again?” Or “What if there’s another novel virus that’s even worse?” And maybe, just once or twice, “What if all the political strain in our country comes to a head and we find ourselves in the middle of another civil war? Or fucking World War Three?”
The rational part of me knew that all of these things were (mostly) very unlikely, but then it wasn’t like we were all walking around in 2019 knowingly enjoying our last vacations and family get-togethers before the next regularly scheduled global pandemic blew up our lives.
My daughter started school a week before my son, and I joked that she would probably bring home our family’s first case of COVID just in time for my son to miss his first week of kindergarten. (She didn’t, but she did catch a well-timed cold, which she generously shared with her brother. But they both were over it by the end of the long weekend and no one missed any school. Hooray!)
So when I took a break during my walk to sit on the rocks at the beach, as I sipped my coffee and watched the gulls contend with the waves, I realized that the dominant emotion I was experiencing was relief.
Like taking a big breath after staying underwater for too long. Like after a long run; glad for having done it, but also glad its over. Like the delicious feeling of sliding into bed under my weighted blanket at night after a good but very long, challenging day.
Several years ago, before my daughter started kindergarten, when I was still toying with the idea of homeschooling, before we’d actually tried it and realized that at this stage of life it was a terrible fit for all of us, I was a part of a group of moms with young children who planned to homeschool. I remember one of the other moms once said that she wanted to homeschool because she hated the idea of missing out on the best of her children all week, of them coming home from school tired everyday and having nothing left for her. I remember thinking, “Oh god, am I a bad mom? I don’t feel that way at all.” Even though I had joined this group, I hadn’t fully committed to homeschooling yet. Mostly we were considering it because we liked the idea of having the flexibility in our schedule, as well as the freedom to travel and allow our kids to experience different places and cultures. Nearly all of my doubts about homeschooling were centered around whether or not I thought I, massively introverted mama that I am, could handle it. Or if I was even willing to give all those years of my life to educating my kids in that way. I wondered, “Is it selfish of me to consider sending my kids to school in order to seize the opportunity to get a little freedom for my own pursuits? Is it terrible that if I do decide to send my kids to school, I don’t think I’ll miss them every moment of every day?”
Fast forward to present day, when in my first session after the start of the school year I told my therapist how excited I felt about the kids going back to school, laughing about how, at least on social media, everyone else seemed to feel so differently about having reached this milestone. She replied, “What I don’t hear you saying is, ‘Is there something wrong with me that I don’t feel sad?’. So that’s good!”
And it’s true. Somewhere along the way I came to accept that my experience of motherhood will not always match the experience of other women, and that’s okay. I decided not to compare my emotional experiences to what what I perceived to be the emotional experience of others, as if to use them as a litmus test to determine whether I was a “good mom” or a “bad mom.” I came to know that I can love my kids fiercely and not be devastated when they leave me to go to kindergarten. After all, isn’t that the goal of parenthood? To raise our babies into self-sufficient adults? Not that I don’t want my grown children to call me to tell me about their problems, or to feel they can’t ask for my help or advice. But I do want them to grow up and feel the freedom to live their lives without feeling like it’s their responsibility to make me feel needed. Going to school is one of the many baby steps along that road to independence. It’s right to celebrate it for both them and for me.
We’re only just starting the new school year, and while my kids do come home tired and extra sensitive as they adjust to long days in school after a summer without structure or schedules, I can already feel the benefit of what this new season means for us. My daughter has developed a new interest in baking, and I’ve found that because I’m not picking her up from school every day already feeling done, we’ve spent a lot more time making things together. My son has been showering me with so many scrumptious kisses and cuddles and “I love you, mama”s, as if he is trying to give me an entire day’s worth of affection condensed into the more limited number of hours we have together, and I am eating it up. And in the hours that they have been away at school I have checked SO MANY things off my to-do list. And, of course, I have enjoyed getting reacquainted with the story that I haven’t had time to work on all summer. It’s been really lovely.
So no, I wasn’t really sad to send my kids to school. I love that they are off doing things without me. And I love picking them up at the end of the day and hearing about the new friends they made and the things they learned. And I love that in those hours in between, I am sitting here in a quiet house with a mug of hot tea and some moody music on my headphones, spending my days capturing the specters of my imagination one word at a time.
