Tag Archives: nursery

The Pain (and Joy) of Sending Your Kid to School

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Jack’s last day of nursery was melancholic. For me. Not for him. He ran out with a smile on his face and a spring in his step, just like he had every other day. I alone was left to feel the weight of time pressing upon both our shoulders, leaving Jack free to dance between sunbeams in the soft summer breeze. As it should be. That’s part of a your job as a parent: to absorb life’s upsets and irreconcilable truths on behalf of your children so that in later life their existential horrors can be all their own.

When that nursery door slammed shut behind Jack on that last day, he had no idea it would stay shut forever. It sounded like a gun-shot to me, but he didn’t even flinch. Future, past, and present run together in his thoughts like an artist’s palette in the rain. His life – time itself – isn’t portioned or partitioned, and so existence simply is, and things simply are. There’s nothing to fret about; no subtext to analyse. Christ, I envy him. [gulps down another Citalopram]

My wife and I took Jack out of nursery on a Thursday, a week before term officially ended, because we were flying out for a family holiday/honeymoon combo that very afternoon. I collected him at mid-day, a few hours before take-off. As we left the building his classmates were still whooping and dashing and laughing, business as usual, so Jack had no sense of something momentous having happened. There were no cues around him to tell him how to feel. It made me wonder just how much of our sadness is ceremony, a ritual learned like the steps of some lugubrious waltz. It is sad, though. The best, happiest and most innocent days of his life are now behind him, and, in a cruel twist of fate and biology, he probably won’t ever remember them.

Us on Jacks first day of school. His crazy little brother his doing his Gollum thing in the background

The end of nursery and the beginning of primary education can be a tough transition for children and parents alike. Walking through your kid’s nursery class as a parent or guardian is like walking through some wonderful dream. It’s a magical, toy-filled living room you never have to tidy up, with grubby, screaming kids in it that you never have to endure for any longer than you absolutely need to. You can spend as little or as much time in there as you like. When you drop your kid off in the morning you can spend twenty minutes helping them to settle, feigning wonderment at their ten thousand identical pictures of stick men, and variously tripping over other people’s children; when you pick them up at the end of the day you can spend another twenty minutes in hovering about, hoping that the nursery teacher isn’t going to pull you aside to tell you that your little cherub has stabbed a fork into another kid’s eye, or started reciting grandpa’s favourite racist rhyme about Chinese people.

During the day you can pop in to drop off egg cartons, or bits of pasta with googly eyes drawn on them, or a bag of Y-Fronts, or illuminous hymn books, or whatever crazy shit they’ve asked you to donate this month. You can stick around for the bulk of the day helping them to make fairy cakes with bogies baked into them, or build towers out of tea-bags, tea-spoons and tubs of butter. You can turn up in the middle of the day and take your kid out of class to attend a Mongolian throat singing lesson, if that’s what tickles your fancy. Nursery is an amorphous, collective experience.

School isn’t, and by necessity it can’t be, because part of school’s function is to prepare children for the hellish institutions in which they’ll find themselves trapped as adults, and you can’t take your favourite aunty, rolls of sticky-back plastic, coloured paper and a stuffed parrot to work with you as an adult, unless, that is, your favourite aunty has a massive stroke and you’re employed as her carer.

When you drop your child off for their first regular day of school, you’re bundling them into a fortress. This isn’t your world anymore. YOU… SHALL NOT PASS! The military discipline starts aproper. The kids are organised into quiet, at-heel little lines, awaiting the clanging-ding of the school bell and the Pavlovian rigours of the education system… although with rather more of an emphasis on gluing things and drawing pictures of cats than that last sentence implies.

Jack jumped into his first day with happiness and curiosity. As we all sat in the gymnasium receiving our talk from the headmistress, teachers started calling out kids’ names so they could be grouped together for the walk to class. When Jack heard his name, you’d have thought he’d won an Academy Award. ‘That’s me! That’s my name!’ he said, jumping out of his seat.

I have only vague recollections of my early years at primary school, little flutters of memory, like magic cuts of video-reel blown in the wind: pipe cleaners; that glue that sets on your hand like a second gooey skin; the smell of chalk and sadness; little desks arranged like rows of square islands at which our tiny forms were marooned, adrift in a sea of quiet and boredom; dusters the size of 100-year-old tortoises.

Things are different for Jack (and will be for his brother, Chris, who’s still got a few blissful years of googly-eyed pasta in-front of him). They’re better. The powers that be have closed the gulf between nursery and the early years of primary school. They now all bleed into each other, making the transition between the two a lot smoother, and a lot less daunting. We’ve finally cottoned on to the fact that little kids are better taught through play, fun, and tactile learning. There’s plenty of time for them to sit deathly still in a suffocatingly quiet room bored shitless and wishing they could escape once they join the work-force.

I remember my primary one teacher, Miss Donaldson, a thin, teetering waif of a woman whose head looked altogether too delicate to rest upon her stick-like shoulders. She was like Popeye’s Olive Oil but with big 80s glasses, and the personality of an awkward and squirrelly church organist who didn’t really like children. Her skin was a waxy alabaster, her cheeks a bright rosy red, like they’d just been pinched by a crab. She once shouted at me for opening my packed lunch about a minute before the lunch bell, and my mum came to school to shout at her. I had some of my first sexual thoughts about Miss Donaldson. They were wholly PG in flavour, of course, because no 18-rated input had yet reached my eyes (and glands). I had a dream where she gently rebuked me while parading about in white underwear. This tells me that I must’ve studied the lingerie section of the Argos catalogue in some detail at some point in my very formative years.

Luckily – or perhaps unluckily – for Jack, most primary school teachers these days are young, attractive urban professionals in their mid-twenties, so any burgeoning romantic and sexual fantasies he goes on to develop around the authority figures in his life will be a little less Dickensian in character.

It scares and excites me in equal measure that Jack is now a few notches removed from the sphere of our parental influence, and will continue to move further away with each passing year. Our input, once absolute, will now be diluted, and sometimes overwhelmed by the data and cues he receives from other sources: peers, teachers, other authority figures. I’m excited to see him learn new skills and information, uncover hidden talents and barter with exciting ideas and concepts, but I’m terrified of that inevitable day when some wee git in his class tells him what a dildo is.

I was largely a good little guy when I was a nipper, although I was undeniably off-kilter. At home, when I was 4, the local farmer had to chap my mum’s door to tell her I was in his field ‘yaa-ing’ at the half-wild horses like I was a cowboy. When I was 5, at the height of my parents’ divorce, amid the uncertainty and confusion, I blagged my way out of the class at day’s end and walked 2 miles home on my own. A few years later I tried to get our headteacher to sign off on distributing a comic I’d co-produced with a classmate, a request she denied on the grounds that the strip on the front cover showed a man boiling a baby. FASCIST!

I wonder what stories and memories my kids will have to share once they’re looking back on their school days, Wonder Years-style, like I am now.

God bless technology, is all I can say. It’s a modern scourge, certainly, but also an indispensable window on Jack’s learning. We, as parents, may be physically blocked from the classroom (except on play-days and parents’ nights), but social media grants us full access to their daily activities and highlights. We need this, because Jack has already become a teenager.

‘How was school?’

‘Good.’

‘What did you learn about?’

‘Stuff.’

[sigh]

[consults phone]

It’s going to be an interesting twelve years.

When Kids Compete

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‘As long as you enjoy yourself, it doesn’t matter if you win or lose. You’re a winner just for trying.’

You say it. You mean it. You believe it. You want your kid to believe it, too. Hell, it’s true. Winning isn’t everything. Life is a rich tapestry of experiences that it’s an honour to… well, experience, I suppose. Reducing everything to a cross in a box robs us of the chance simply to enjoy being: to think, to feel, to explore: to get something out of existence that’s spiritual and inspirational rather than fleeting and relational. Sometimes talent and genius marches to the beat of its own drum. It’s true, all true.

But it’s also true that when a four-year-old girl beat my four-year-old son in a poetry competition, there was a small part of me that wanted to pick her up by her pigtails and drop-kick her through a fucking window.

Or at the very least pursue a Larry David-esque vendetta against her: a campaign of harassment culminating in the whole audience pointing at her and singing ‘Happy birthday to you, you live in a zoo, you look like a poo poo, and you smell like one, too’ – as the little girl cries so hard that she actually falls over.

Just joking, of course…(coughs)

Winning isn’t everything.

Jack did very well. His first public speaking engagement, and he strode up to that podium and its waiting microphone with the speed and zeal of a seagull closing in on an unattended sandwich. He stood with his upper torso bent forwards, his legs anchored a small way behind his hips, his hands at his back, like a rock-star of the poetry world; a little Liam Gallagher, minus the recreational drugs (unless cocoa counts as a drug, which in kids, it probably does).

His delivery was clear and confident, only faltering at the very last line, which he rushed through a little too quickly, the rhythm speeding then halting as if met by a sudden traffic jam. Still, he’s only four, bless him. Most four-year-olds can’t even say disestablishmentarianism properly, the stupid little idiots. With that in mind, we decided not to issue too severe a punishment beating this time around. Rest assured, though, if he fluffs next year’s poem the tooth-fairy’s going to be leaving a cheque under his pillow.

By default, Jack was first up to bat (if you’ll permit the jazzy Americanism), which hadn’t been the original plan. A sullen, curly-haired boy had trudged up to the podium first, but had quickly left without saying a word after he was overcome with shyness. He’d stood with his lips almost engulfing the mic, a noise like a desperately upset Darth Vader emanating from his mouth. The poor wee fella came back for a second attempt a little later, managed a few lines this time, but was again overcome with nerves. We felt really sorry for him, and later took pains to explain to Jack that what they were all doing was exceptionally brave. Nobody was a loser today. Nobody had failed. The little boy had tried his best, and that’s a cause for celebration and camaraderie, not condemnation. Jack nodded his approval.

It was a lesson, however, that wasn’t to stick. A little later in the show, a boy who was a year or so older than Jack – and not half as steely – took to the podium. He kept fluffing his lines, and each time his mother would whisper prompts into his ear, and he’d shrug or shake his head. Occasionally he’d step away from the microphone and have a soundless argument with his mother, bordering on comic mime, no doubt appealing for release from his poem-shaped nightmare. When he finally got to the end, after more than a few stutter-steps, he received a huge and heart-felt round of applause. It was a sweet, funny and tragic spectacle that elicited waves of empathy from everyone in the audience.

From everyone, that is, except our son, who sat cackling away like The Joker.

‘He gets that from you,’ I told my partner, as I continued to imagine the little girl from Jack’s heat getting chewing-gum stuck in her hair during an important family occasion.

We teach Jack to frame his experiences in a compassionate and zen-like manner, and always try to help him manage his expectations without knocking himself or others. That doesn’t always work. One: because he’s a kid, and the world of kids is lawless and savage, like the old Wild West. And two: because he spends a lot of time around us, his parents, and most of the time our defences are down and our filters are off. He learns much more from us by way of osmosis than he does by rote, meaning that it’s one thing for us to coach him to be compassionate and to repeatedly remind him that it’s the taking part that counts, quite another for him to witness me or his mother losing at a computer game, and cursing everyone from God on down to the smallest louse on the back of a mouse. Deep down, he must know that we’re hypocrites and assholes, despite how much we pretend otherwise.

Imperfect assholes. Assholes who love him. Assholes who will protect him and his little brother and any future sprogs from the very real assholes out there in the world, and will keep doing so until the day we die, hoping against hope that we don’t turn them into assholes in the process, even though it’s almost inevitable. We’re all assholes, when it comes right down to it. Every one of us. There’s a poem in there somewhere. Actually, there’s a hundred thousand poems, a million movies and TV shows, and the entire field of psychoanalysis in there. They fuck you up, your mum and dad, as Philip Larkin once opined.

The little girl who bested him (more ‘pipped’, I’d say, yes, pipped) was a little more demonstrative with her hands, and slightly more poised and expressive in her delivery, which my partner and I figured was probably down to her being a NASCENT NARCISSIST WHO ATE BOGEY SANDWICHES AND SMELLED OF POO POO.

Jack didn’t appear too bothered not to have come first, until he saw the gift basket – filled with sweeties and the like – awarded to and held aloft by his nemesis. That he wanted. It’s tempting to feel sorry for him, until you discover his Darwinian perspective on non-merit-based rewards for participation.

Remember the wee curly-headed boy who was supposed to have gone first? Well, he was called forward to receive a certificate – all of the kids got certificates, you see. Even if they didn’t win, they’d been chosen to represent their nursery or school-year, and thus they were already winners by default. The wee boy started walking towards the stage to receive his recognition, and as he did so Jack leaned back in his chair with a disgusted look on his face.

‘Why is that boy getting that? He wasn’t even good.’

‘Shhhhhh,’ said his mother.

‘He gets that from you,’ I told her, a smug smile dancing across my lips.

I imagined the wee girl tripping over her own dress on the way to collect her first Oscar in 2045.

My partner scowled.

‘Shut it, you loser,’ she said with a smile.

Read ‘This Be The Verse’, Philip Larkin’s short and visceral poem on parenting and the human condition.