Writing: Articles & Essays
| The Rite of Passage of the First Day of School |
My daughter was eight months old the first day I dropped her off at daycare. It was an expensive, carefully researched, highly recommended, in-home daycare that had a waiting list a year long. I was lucky to have gotten her in. But lucky was not how I felt as I laid out her stained but clean bib on this stranger's kitchen counter.
My voice quaking, I sounded young and scared as I said: "Here's my baby's bib. Will you need her spoon?" The hearty, blond daycare woman, the best in the business, so they said, plucked my baby out of my arms reassuring me, "We have bibs and spoons. She'll be fine. Have a great day."
A great day!? How could I when I was doing something so wrong? Wasn't it best for my baby to be with me 24/7? Why couldn't I be the kind of mother who ties the baby around her body with a bedspread and goes to work?
I didn't want to admit that after eight months of round-the-clock care I needed time off from the baby. I was tired. The voice in my head snarled: Eight months?! What a wimp! Try eight years! Try 80!
I kissed the top of my baby's warm head and let her go into this highly recommended stranger's hands. In my deluded state, I saw this robust woman as the witch from Hansel and Gretel. I worried that she wouldn't respond to my baby's every whimper like I had. No wonder I needed a break.
I walked out of her kitchen and through her garage. My legs, heavy and numb, hit the oil-stained cement floor, then her driveway, then the sidewalk. I found my car and slid into the front seat. I can't drive away, I thought. But somehow I turned the key, somehow I engaged the clutch. Somehow I found first gear and then backed up and out onto the street. When I reached the first stop sign I turned right onto Northeast Sandy Boulevard.
The next thing I knew I was weeping into the pay phone in front of Schuck's Auto Supply. "I can't leave her!" I sputtered to my husband at work. "She's too young! "Two days a week is too much."
He tried to reassure me: "It's only two days a week. The daycare woman has our phone number." It was all I could do not to drive back. "Just get in the car and drive home," he said at last. "You can always pick her up early." All I wanted that day was to run back and take her home and never leave her anywhere again.
I did leave early to pick her up that first day and I drove to daycare with the excitement I once felt meeting a new boyfriend for a hot date. Baby, I want you! Baby, I need you! Baby, I'm coming to get you!
The first day was the hardest but eventually I looked forward to her daycare days and time for my own life and work. But it was always a thrill to be on my way to pick her up.
That baby will start fourth grade this fall and although the first day of school is less traumatic now, it's still sad for me. After I drop her off at her classroom door, I walk away with those heavy legs and my longing to take the baby back home. I envy the parents who whiz off to busy offices. I want the distraction of wall-to-wall appointments. Instead, as a freelance writer, I go back to my home office where the only sounds are from my own hands on the computer keys and the dog's nails tapping the wooden floors.
Each year the sadness of the first day takes me by surprise as if somehow I expect to have "matured" by now and not feel sad. The truth is all of August I couldn't wait for school to start but once it's here, I can feel my heels digging in – I don't want to let my baby go.
The first day of school reminds me that life is full of growth and change and sometimes I hate that. Some days I want to wrap my world in Saran Wrap. Keep the baby forever the baby. I forget that the world – the real, alive world – needs to breathe and move and (God forbid) change. And it can't do that wrapped in plastic.
So this year I will do a few things differently. I won't complain when my daughter insists on new clothes and a new lunchbox because a new outfit is a way to honor this important day – as much a rite of passage as a birthday. I'll remember to take a photo of her standing on the back steps as she's about to leave: we have one for every year starting when she was three years old.
This year I will remember to feel my feet as they strike the front steps of her school as I walk back to the car. I will remember that my daughter is doing what we are all programmed to do: grow up and leave home. And my job, a most painful one, is to help her go. So, today is a rite of passage for me too filled with both the dread and excitement I feel every time I take a step forward. Because in helping her grow up, I grow up too.