Eric took this picture of his empty cubby.
Chasing his friend Sylvia, who's been in his class since they were three.
Singing his SOLO verse of Old Dan Tucker...he was amazingly confident and poised!
I love this picture because he looks so grown up and so little at the same time...I'm pretty sure they'll always look that way to me.
My heart is bursting. Today we said goodbye to the preschool that has been so much a part of our lives these past few years that I can't imagine life without it. When we moved here three years ago, Eric had given up his nap and he and I were both desperate for a little time away from each other. On my neighbor's recommendation, I called to ask if there was a spot for Eric in her kids' old preschool, making sure to describe in detail what a wonderful, mature, compliant child he was. There wasn't one, but somehow, later that day, there was. I took him in to meet his teacher and see the school before I signed him up. The carpet was orange and had obviously been there since the seventies, maybe longer. The toys were old and wooden and durable-looking. The teachers had all been there for years, some of them since they'd been students themselves. There was a skin horse feeling about the whole place...it wasn't beautiful and shiny and it didn't have mechanical parts- but it was wonderful and sweet and real. The director and founder of the school, in her eighties, stood outside every single morning, rain or shine, to greet the children as they came in. I knew I had found a place where my kids would be valued and treasured almost as much as they were at home.
Eric loved every minute of school that first year. He learned songs and stories that I hadn't taught him and didn't know. For the first time he had a world that was separate from mine. The next year was a milestone...with Eric in 'junior kindergarten' five days a week and Brigham in the three-year-old class, I had my first small taste of freedom. Two precious mornings a week to move and think and act without the wonderful but cumbersome burden of my boys. When the time came to decide whether to send Eric to the public school for kindergarten this year, or keep him with Brigham at what had become "our school", I hesitated. I worried at first that when he got to first grade he would lag behind the other kids who had gone to full-day kindergarten, who'd been tested and grouped and assessed. What I learned is that education is as much about developing a love of learning as it is about the learning itself. I learned to relax and let my kids grow at their own pace- that forcing a child to learn something he's not ready to learn is pointless and silly. And that, when it's approached correctly learning is, to a child, pure joy.
It was the rainbow song that undid me yesterday. We were sitting in little yellow chairs in Eric's classroom, smiling and clapping and video-taping our way through the end-of-year program. Just that morning I'd thought of how little I remember from my own kindergarten year. A few blurry recollections are all I have left of what is, for Eric, the center of the universe right now. That broke my heart- the thought that this momentous year will fade into his subconscious until he barely remembers it at all. And then they started singing the rainbow song and at the words, "I can sing a rainbow, sing a rainbow, sing a rainbow too....", I suddenly started to cry. My favorite quote from Margaret Atwood sprang to mind: "time [is] like a series of liquid transparencies, one laid on top of another. You don't look back along time but down through it like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away." The long-buried memory of that song floated up from my own forgotten kindergarten days. In that moment I knew that this treasured year, this little class of nine boys and three girls, these beloved teachers wouldn't fade in Eric's mind so much as get overlaid by all the experiences to come, and that one day, when he needs to feel the love and safety and wonder of kindergarten, they'll be there, floating up through the years.
Words cannot express the love and gratitude I feel for these women to whom I've entrusted my boys these last three years. I only hope that they can feel, in some small measure, the honor of being so loved by so many little hearts. On days when I was barely holding it together, and sometimes just plain not holding it together, they stood at the classroom door with wise, kind smiles. They said goodbye today with teary eyes and that same wisdom and kindness...they've done this before. None of us are quite ready to look ahead yet, but the six short weeks of summer vacation have already begun, and soon I'm sure we'll be picking strawberries and hunting for sea-turtle nests. I do hope though that my adult mind can keep these precious preschool years close to the surface, and never forget the lessons the boys and I have learned together.
