School’s out – forever?

My five-year-old son is about to graduate from preschool. It’s the same small preschool his older sister graduated from three years ago and the same one where I have been taking both children since they were two years old in toddler class. Seven years ago, when I first visited the preschool, I had no idea what an important role the place would play in our family’s life. Over the years there have been some staff changes, and some years have been better than others. But every year, the school has been a nurturing place full of friends and kind teachers. In a city where nothing seems easy, the preschool has been a sheltering place that exudes peace, authenticity, and low-key simplicity. The only difficulty in the last couple of years has been maneuvering around the traffic outside the school, situated square in the middle of the dreaded 405 freeway expansion project.

I just had my last parent-teacher conference. Maybe I was feeling hormonal, but it was hard for me to stay dry-eyed. My daughter went from barely speaking to her teachers and classmates to playing cooperatively with the other 11 children as though they were her family members. Her love of books and stories deepened, and she learned about nature, history, and the Jewish religion. Although the developmental approach to early childhood education was new to me when we enrolled her at preschool, I could see that this was the ideal setting for her. She developed close friendships and thrived during her years at the little preschool.

My son was always more outgoing than my daughter. His focus on play gave him comparatively easy access to new situations and groups of people. When he started in the first-year class, I assumed he would make an easy transition. Just as I was about to shrug and wonder where such an “easy” child came from, so unlike his sister, he turned out to need me to stay with him for much of the first couple of weeks. Both of my children really milked the school policy of requesting that a parent or caregiver stay for as long as necessary in order to transition the child to the three-year-old class. The first time, when my daughter was adapting, I was pregnant with my son and busy reading “The Blessing of a Skinned Knee” and knitting. The second time, when my son was mostly just seeing how long he could get me to stay, I kept getting roped into playing with the kids, or being shown someone’s sand “cake,” or regaled with stories about older siblings and pets.

Over the years, I helped out in the ways that made sense to me. One dreadful year I was in charge of way too much stuff at both my children’s schools, and I managed it pretty badly. But most years, I helped serve Thanksgiving lunch and other holiday meals. (The kids were so cute when they received their plates with little bits of food we hoped they would eat.) Some years I was one of the people who gave a gift or a meal to a family with a new baby. Sometimes we gave meals to families who had experienced a loss, like the time my daughter’s friend’s father died of a sudden heart attack. Each Friday, the children brought gifts of food and money for a Los Angeles food bank. We felt like an authentic community, where the teachers were patient, wonderful people who became partners in raising our children. It was through my children’s preschool that I met many of the parents I respect the most, people who didn’t always have everything in common with me. But somehow we agreed on the essentials.

A year ago, when I was hanging out with my new nephew, I realized that I knew an embarrassing amount of toddler songs. Even though he was just a baby, I was using my ace abilities at singing the greatest hits of the genre to him. With a laugh, I told my brother and sister-in-law that I’d spent a lot of time in preschool over the years. I didn’t mind looking like the idiot savant in the room. At the school under the eucalyptus trees, in the middle of a throbbing city, we found a place to have a sweet, slow-paced beginning to our children’s lives. And I know we are all better off because of it.