There is no one universal emotion for the day your first child reaches her first day of kindergarten, any more than there was a single predictable reaction to have at the moment you met that child for the first time. What is universal on both of those dates, though, is that whatever you feel will be marked in your memory like a time stamp. It is an Occasion.
I am not one of those parents who looked at my child upon her first day of elementary school and thought that the last five years had passed in a flash. They have not. I have felt every day of them; I have reveled in every minute of the joy and, sometimes, the difficulty of them. I thought I would look at her on that first day of school and think,
She is so old!, especially as I have thought that nearly every day of her life. But, on this occasion, it was quite the opposite. We were an hour earlier than we meant to be, having been misinformed about the schedule for the first day, and while we waited we walked around the school, watching middle school girls admiring a friend's arm cast and teenage boys running in late, hair flopping, or alternatively, sauntering about, literally too cool for school. Later, as we sat in her classroom together and parents began to depart, she looked at me with great big eyes beginning to swim with tears, grasped my hand tightly, and begged in a whisper,
Please stay! Don't go to our home without me! She looked so tiny for such a big school.
I said whatever soothing words I could, and as I stood up to leave, I saw her set her jaw and fix her eyes on the paper she was coloring, determined to be brave. She did not watch me walk out of the room. I was so proud, and yet my heart broke at the same time; at that instant she embarked on a whole world of experiences, six hours a day of them, that I will have very little to do with, aside from having chosen where she would have them. Much of what will happen during that time, or how she will feel about it, I will never know, no matter how many questions I ask or how close our relationship may be. When she was about eighteen months old, I was trying to spare her some pain or another and was suddenly shocked to realize that this was her life, not mine, and that the pains and joys were uniquely hers, no matter how much I might want to (and try to) own them. I realized that again at the end of preschool when, looking through the memory book her school sent home, I found that I had heard about none of the activities from her. None, not even the really cool ones. I had asked her probing questions every single day about what she had done and with whom she had played, and had received very flat answers in return, and annoyance if I pressed her more.
So I will let her have her life for these six hours a day because I have no choice in the matter. Her life belongs to her alone. All I can do is love and teach in the moments we have together, and pray for wisdom enough to place her in the right places at the right times, and to be there and ready to listen when she does want to share with me. Because those moments, the ones when she pours her heart out or gives some detail in passing, those are what we parents live for. That is the Best Feeling Ever!, as the new kindergartener herself would say. One might even say they are Occasions.
