He can’t wait to go back tomorrow. Seriously, that’s what he said.
Zan is a sensitive little guy, and, as I’ve mentioned in the past, he has a history of not being able to easily separate from us when it comes time for him to participate in a group activity. There was a time when it would have been easier for his mother to chew off her own leg with him still clinging to it than to convince him to jump in and join the other kids during [insert group activity here].
Many were the mornings when she had to leave a crying Zan inside the doorway of his preschool as he pleaded with her not to go. (I am not ashamed to say that I totally wimped out, turned the car around with him in it and drove home when he started melting down on me during one of the rare Daddy-drop-off days.)
That was our frame of reference as we braced ourselves for Zan’s first day of kindergarten. He had, for many days, been saying how excited he was to go, which was a great sign, truly great, but saying he was excited while in the comfort of his own home and in the ongoing presence of his parents is one thing; remaining excited when it came time to bid us adieu and walk into the gaping jaws of the unknown, we feared, might turn out to be quite another.
First potential disaster: he dressed himself this morning … in a pair of cut-off, gray sweatpants and sorely mismatched shirt. He wanted to accent this ensemble by wearing a fluorescent orange wristband on one wrist, and a fluorescent blue one on the other.
Wonder Woman asked me how concerned I thought we should be about what he wore to school. I said I thought it made sense to encourage him to change, but that if it became a stand-off, fuck it, let him wear a clown suit if that’s what it takes to get him in the door. (In the end, it was a compromise; he wore some kooky, dinosaur-and-dirt-bike-rider shirt, along with a relatively nice pair of shorts and sneakers … and, yeah, I’m mostly of the “Who gives a shit what he wears?” mindset, except that we were sending him into his first-ever full-on “Lord of the Flies” environment; one wrong move and he could end up spending the next dozen years sitting by himself at lunch while the other kids snicker about that outcast known only as “Wristband Kid.” Little bastards.)
When the time came to load into the car and head to school, he was still excited. Holy cow. Get this vehicle moving, woman, before he changes his mind and goes thermonuclear.
As Wonder Woman guided the car into a parking spot outside the school, he did a little headfake to make us think things were about to go off the rails.
“My stomach hurts,” he said. Uh oh.
His Academy Award-winning parents broke into a jaunty, light-hearted, fun-filled performance about “butterflies,” and how incredibly normal it is to feel that sensation, and, hey, remember when we were watching the Olympics, and there was that one commercial where they showed a gymnast getting ready to do her routine, and they made it look like there were butterflies flying around outside of her tummy? Wasn’t that cool? So, you see, basically, what we’re saying is, your tummy is totally supposed to hurt, in fact, it is so awesome that it hurts, the more the better, and so let’s get out of the car, quick, before this whole shooting match goes south.
And that was it. He held our hands as we walked him to the door, and we spent a few minutes milling around with the other parents, and he jumped right in and hung out with a couple of kids he knew, and then it was time for him to leave us. He gave us each a hug (including Jayna, so he was really putting the love out there, people), turned and walked his big-boy, backpack-wearing self right through the door and into the classroom.
Turns out he wasn’t the one who got tearful at the moment of separation; his mom and I were, thanks to the bittersweet combination of relief and happiness from seeing that he is so much more well-adjusted now than we once feared he might be, and profound sorrow about seeing him slip one step further away from us, and further into a world that is filled with lots of people, some good, some bad, but none of whom love and cherish him as much as we do, or want to protect him from the hard-knock lessons that life has to dish out as much as we do.
But, for now, it’s just a few hours a day, right down the street, with us bringing him to the door when it’s time to go in, and meeting him at it when it’s time to come out, and, wow, I always thought of kindergarten as a training ground where kids become acclimated to being in school, which it is, but what I didn’t realize until today is that it is at least as much of a training ground for parents who have to become acclimated to letting their children go.
The good news is that he did great, we did reasonably well, and he can’t wait to go back tomorrow. Somewhere in all of that, there’s something that says we’re doing a good job, and that he’s going to be just fine.
Nice job, Buddy Boy.
