'Now that my 4-year-old son has started kindergarten, I am flooded with memories of those years, some incredibly visceral and overwhelming. The thought of those little indignities, those small, sharp pains already shaping my son, kills me,' writes amil
of those years, some incredibly visceral and overwhelming. The time when I was 8 that I finally made it to school in the appropriate outfit for whatever special-color day it happened to be and my classmate Frances vomited all over me as soon as the national anthem started and I had to walk all the way home by myself to change into the only clean shirt I could find, which of course didn’t fit the theme.
Now I’m merely imagining his days instead of living them together with him, which is both freeing and incredibly painful.In some ways, we’re both going back to school. He’s learning to exist in a new social sphere, and so am I. Every morning we each face the gauntlet of new people, people who will be in our lives for the next eight years. As I watch my child struggle to integrate into the pack, I worry he gets his shyness and reserve from me, like I’ve passed on something faulty.
The daily school drop-off has become a kind of ritualistic torture for me, gawking at my child and hanging around just a little too long as he walks into the playground, full of nerves, tearfully waving at us from the other side. I’m aware that part of what I’m feeling is my own bruised recollection of wanting to belong, of longing for something you think other people already intrinsically understand, something you feel like you will never grasp. A social master key you just never got.
There are so many important things about school that are changing him for the better too, building an independence that is surprising and endearing and inspiring. Still, nothing really prepared me for how this part of it would feel, for how much it seems like I’m suddenly parenting myself, or rather a younger version of me, healing old wounds and trying to prevent new ones.
I have to constantly remind myself that there is another side and I’m standing on it, scathed but fine, happy in fact. It still doesn’t change how strange and sometimes sad it is to watch someone else go through many of the same things you did in what often feels like slow motion. Because it’s not happening to me, it’s happening to someone I love intensely, each wound, each rejection feels as though it’s occuring twice.
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