The most popular kid on the preschool playground

My younger child just started preschool, the same one that his older sister just graduated from.  It’s a developmental school, which I take to mean gentle and child-centered, though I don’t want to sound hung-up on labels.  Just as I was last time, when my daughter “transitioned” to preschool, I am the last parent there.  My son has finally stopped protesting when I don’t sit with the children on the rug for story time, but he still comes unraveled when I try to sit on the chairs or couch outside the classroom.  So I sit on a chair at the periphery, trying to blend in with the tree mural on the wall.  When it’s time to go outside, he takes my hand and insists that I accompany him, as though I am an errant child or pet.  If this all sounds crazy-making, and it is, I am happy to discover that it’s actually not as rough the second time around.

 

I think that my sanguine reaction to all of this is made up of having managed my expectations this time.  Three years ago, when I got copious amounts of reading and balancing my checkbook done while sitting on the old couch, I had imagined that my daughter would need or want me to stay at school for a few days, and then I would be off on my own, going to the gym or at least buying groceries.  But it was not to be.  My desire to be left alone for the last few weeks of my second pregnancy was in inverse proportion to my daughter’s heart-wrenching insistence that I stay.  Finally she did stay, but she refused to use the bathroom.  She would hold it for the entire 3 or so hours, then unleash a torrent of pee into the mini toilet when I picked her up.  All of the stages of her adjustment seemed to take forever.

 

So today, on Day Four of Operation “Try Harder to be in the Moment”, I came equipped.  I brought reading – a book on writing that I’ve been trying to read for years, the New Yorker Style Issue, my journal, and some knitting.  Bringing my journal is a joke, and I ought to know better by know.  It would be like bringing my laptop – futile.  But I read the article on Marc Jacobs, then began knitting.  It sounds quite retro, but I really love knitting.  It’s my guilty pleasure.  Also, the pattern, just a knit stitch square of some beautiful, fluffy pink and purple yarn (to be a blanket for my daughter), is pretty mindless.  It’s much easier to feel like I’ve accomplished something, even if it’s not much, by knitting than by trying any of the other choices.

 

When I sat outdoors, a cluster of children sat around me to watch me knit, pet the yarn, and ask me questions.  (What are you making?  Who’s it for?  Why are you doing this?  What are these called?)  My own son ran happily along the perimeter of the yard, pushing a dump truck, then riding a giant tricycle.  He was not remotely interested in what I was doing, nor why half of the older children were clumped around me.  But it was good to be there for him and his friends.