Starting school is difficult!
My eldest started school this September and I was so excited about them starting school – their main aim in life is to read, learn and understand, so we were confident this was going to be really good for them. They’ve been ready for school for months, and though leaving their wonderful nursery was very sad all round, to quote Rafiki, ‘It is time’.
I had thought that starting school would be difficult, as new chapters often are; everything is new for them - uniform, new friends, new teacher, being away from their sibling for the first time they’ve ever known, going there five days a week. It’s all new. It’s all scary.
Naturally, we’ve read a lot of books about starting school and how to deal with my eldest’s emotions around starting school. But now, in week three of school, I think it’s me who needs to be reading books about my emotions around my eldest starting school. I have found this whole process very difficult, not because I wanted to keep them at home or still wish they were a baby; I’ve never felt sadness around stuff like that. My favourite thing is this world is watching them grow up and do new things. I have to admit, sometimes I miss the times when they were quieter because they don’t stop talking, though when I think about when this magical quieter time was, it was when they were in-utero, and life is much more fun with them Earth-side.
I did not anticipate how hard I would find them going to school. How destroying it is when you drop them off and there is tears, screaming, frantic bargaining of reasons why they want to go home, or take in their favourite toy and hide it in their book bag and then try and promise they’ll only take it out in case they are sad.
How difficult it is just to watch how tired school makes them and not being able to do anything to help. Tiredness is an issue I am particularly sensitive about with my eldest due to a number of factors, but all the reception children are super tired. And all it feels you can do as a parent is watch and wait until they get used to things. It’s made me realise just how much we have been managing tiredness since they were born. When you have a newborn, sleep is an obsession; lives are run by awake windows and nap schedules, and to an extent as they grow into toddlers and young children, this doesn’t fully go away. If we had a big few days full of activities, I’d then plan a more chilled day, so they can relax, rest and not get too tired. I didn’t realise the extent to which I was managing this without fully comprehending what I was doing until this option has been taken away and only exists in my previous life as a mother to two young children, rather than my new one as a mother to a toddler and a school-aged child.
With tiredness, the tears at the gate become more frequent, the walks to school are slower, the emotions become more wild; and everything in our life has been more difficult. Then, there’s homework that you have to make sure gets done, which started huge fights and stubborness (on all sides) in order to get anything done. I took it upon myself to write fun activities around the letters they had to write, as I do for work, in order to get the spirit of homework done at least in some fashion. There’s also lots of apps to download, emails to keep up with, newletters, parents’ whatsapps groups…
At all times, I feel as though I am fighting the urge to protect them versus the social, academic, legal expectations that school will benefit them. And I know it will, but I am still not fully comfortable with it. Yet? I felt I was fighting against myself this morning when they woke up tired, with a lingering, niggly cold and one of my instincts was to let them rest at home, but the other was thinking about how much they will get from school, and that we just have to push through this difficult bit… but they’re only 4 and a half and ‘pushing through difficult bits’ doesn’t seem like something they should have to do yet.
My algorithm has been cruel these last few weeks too, which has not helped at all; throwing up articles about how parents today are molly-coddling their children, how children are being treated as babies for too long by millennial parents and it is damaging them socially and making their behaviour difficult to manage in schools. I am not sure how much that is true, or how much this even applies to us - when I am being kind to myself, I don’t think we overly shelter our little ones too much, but when I am not being kind, I catch myself worrying that maybe I do with my eldest because of the circumstances with their vision, or am I just meeting their needs where they are. It’s impossible to tell from the inside.
There’s no dramatic conclusion to this, for now at least. It’s just this: starting school has been really fucking difficult for everyone in our home. My eldest’s teacher said to give it 6 weeks and it’ll get easier, which seems like forever, but we’re already half-way there and to quote Jarvis Johnson, I’m just trying my best.
