The Unequivocal Truths of an Aching-Hearted Almost Kindergarten Mom
By: Ariana Sheehan
Tags: Parenthood, Schools, Back To School, Emotions, Kids

The fine for keeping your kid home from kindergarten in New York State is $10. I know this because I looked it up.

To be completely honest, $10, or even the worst-case scenario of 10 days of jail time, seems like a reasonable trade to keep my first baby a baby for just a little bit longer.

I’ve lost sleep over kindergarten. I’ve stress eaten over kindergarten. I’ve completely zoned out at traffic lights until I was snapped back together by honks over kindergarten. I’ve spent countless hours looking at pictures in my Newsfeed of “first-day” first-graders and fifth-graders and thought to myself, “How did their parents survive this feeling already for years?”

I’ve questioned how I will.

I don’t have the answer just yet, but I’m trying to put aside my sad, sappy feelings and choke back my crocodile tears long enough to tell myself the following truths:

I can’t keep her a baby forever, especially if she doesn’t want to be one.

Sure, she still loves to talk in a baby voice (which drives me bonkers), but if she’s excited to grow into her independence, I need to nurture that by at least appearing excited. She doesn’t need to know I’m crying into a pillow in my closet when she goes to sleep.

I can’t protect her from every danger the world may throw at her.

I’ve spent so much time thinking of every possible thing that could go wrong when it comes to her safety, namely that she could get lost somewhere between getting on/off the bus, that an intruder could easily visit the window of her classroom, that I haven’t taught her enough about strangers and how to avoid them. I don’t remember when I learned about these things myself, but I need to remind myself how frequently bad things don’t happen.

I can’t control other kids and how they treat her.

I have so many fears about how other kids will act toward her and how that will impact her, despite knowing that she’s a very social child who has never had a hard time making friends. She’s also a very, very, very emotional child, and the thought of someone saying something negative to her that hurts her feelings makes my inner Mama Bear flare up instantly. But I know that all I can do is raise my own child to be kind to others and hope those children she is around each day are being raised similarly.

I can’t make it about me.

It’s OK to feel all the feels about her starting school, but at the end of the day, it doesn’t actually matter how I feel because while I’m a part of this experience, it’s her experience. This is not the beginning of who I am, but it is the beginning of the shaping of who she is. The experiences she will have over the next 13 years will help mold the human she will be for the rest of her life.

Early parenthood is a lot like concentrated orange juice. So much flavor and intensity are packed into a super small tube of time. For the first five or so years, there is a lot of sweetness, but there are an especially notable handful of moments of such extreme and paralyzing love, starting with the day your baby is born. These moments are the pulp of the experience. You can’t control so much of what happens in between them, but when the moments strike you, you somehow know, above all else, that you actually are a good parent to be feeling something so sharp, so painfully beautiful, inside.

I may not be able to keep her from going to kindergarten tomorrow, but I can appreciate the way my heart aches over it, sit back, grab a glass and pour myself a cup of fresh-squeezed OJ to drink while I prepare her backpack.