The World Is A Children's Book

We're all just living in it.

My eldest child started kindergarten this past Monday. If you’ve ever opened Instagram during the month of August, you already know that the first day of kindergarten is a widely recognized milestone, generally observed by making one’s child hold a tiny chalkboard announcing their kinder status, their favorite color, and the fact that they want to be a fire fighter when they grow up. It will take years for these innocent souls to realize that being a fire fighter is a job so shitty, we often make prisoners do it. Anyway, I do not own a tiny chalkboard. I honestly don’t know where you even get one. Probably the same place you buy kinetic sand and canned mocktails. All to say, a place that I don’t shop.

I failed to clock the enormity of the first day of kindergarten, partly because my child attended pre-k the year before at the same school. The day seemed more like the extension of an experience that had already begun than the beginning of a new one. In my mind, the date loomed mostly as a marker of amnesty for myself and my husband, who’d been white-knuckling it with no camp and no childcare for the last two weeks of summer. But the truth is, a lot of changes have been happening in my little boy’s life. Two weeks ago, he turned five, and suddenly all the four-year-olds he knows are total fucking losers and anyone younger than four doesn’t even exist. (Yesterday we walked by a little girl who lives on our block and my son asked me how old she was. “I think she’s five, like you.” “No, she looks more like four…” he replied with disdain.) This week, his best friend on the block moved away, and his best friend from school got put in a different class. His new favorite book is Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. He’s also started saying he “hates” a lot of things, including but not limited to, me. He seems only mildly remorseful when I tell him it hurts my feelings.

The point is, my little boy has been sailing some turbulent waters. I’ve observed the individual waves, but wasn’t putting them together for the stormy seas they were. So his response to going back to school took me by surprise. The first day, my husband and I, along with our youngest child, walked him to school as a family. He seemed fine, happy even, peacocking around in his new dinosaur backpack with actual spikes. The second day, my husband took him to school, and later described the experience as “a little rough.” But the third day, when I alone was on drop off duty, shit really hit the fan.

My son’s school is so close that we can all roll out of bed twenty minutes before the bell rings and get him through the gates with time to spare. This usually means that while I don’t take him to school in actual pajamas, I wear whatever I can grab that walks the pajama line without crossing it. This particular day, I threw on an old maternity dress, hoping it could pass for boho chic, though not particularly caring if it didn’t, and off we went. We hadn’t even made it down the front steps when he sat down with arms crossed to declare he wasn’t going. Any parent of a student in the LAUSD system knows that, thanks to draconian laws enacted by a former California attorney general who shall not be named but her step kids call her Mamala, you do NOT want your kid to be late to school. I’m not 100% sure they’ll cuff you right there in front of a hundred wailing kindergartners, but I don’t want to find out. ( If California re-instated the death penalty for the sole purpose of punishing unpunctual parents, I wouldn’t be surprised.) Anyway, the ensuing journey to school was mostly me carrying a flailing child who tried to make a break for home every time I put him down to rest my arms. It was awful for me, and he didn’t seem to be enjoying it much either.

Once in front of the school, I was at a loss. None of my parenting tools seemed to work. Not shame, when I told him he didn’t want to look like a baby in front of his classmates. Not fear, when I told him I’d take away his tablet if he didn’t behave. Not sympathy, when I told him new things are hard for me too. Not kindness, when I held him and said nothing at all. Eventually, I carried him through the gates and pried him off of me in a sea of parents and kindergarteners. He started to cling to my dress, then crawled under it, flashing my underwear for children and grownups alike to see. And don’t get me wrong, I know plenty of underwear gets flashed in that concrete courtyard, but usually not ratty-ass underwear that’s older than most children present. I was furious that my son was being an asshole. I was humiliated that he was showing the world my save-for-laundry-days underwear. I was ashamed that I was wearing a glorified nightgown for a pregnant lady while most other parents were dressed for work because they have real jobs and I just go home and write for no one in particular. I was flooded with anger and embarrassment that my son’s behavior was making me look like a shitty parent, and that my behavior was only confirming it. Then the bell rang, children began to file into their classrooms, and my son began to sob big, genuine, anguished sobs. He looked so sad, my beautiful little guy who I’d been treating more like a problem than a person, and feeling helpless to do anything else, I began to cry too.

Contrary to the totally cool, laid-back, effortless vibe I project (right? RIGHT?) I worry a lot. I worry about money, I worry about my career, I worry about my appearance, I worry I don’t have any friends, I worry I actually do have friends and by worrying I don’t I’m treating them badly, I worry I’m a woefully lacking wife and mother. But honestly, apart from several months when I was possessed by the demons of postpartum anxiety, I don’t worry a lot about my kids. At their tender ages, they’ve never given me much reason to. They’re healthy, bright, sweet, funny, wild within reason, social. They seem genuinely happy. But seeing my son so inconsolably sad frightened me. Many of the most unhappy, struggling, addicted, mentally ill adults were once happy little kids. Before she died last year, my sister was one of them. I know that freaking out your first week of kindergarten is normal, that it doesn’t mean your going to grow into a psychotic, self-medicating adult. But that moment at drop off felt like a window into a long future of total impotence, compounded by my own incompetence. Part of growing up is figuring out how navigate these moments on his own, my husband reminds me. They say that babies only realize they’re separate beings from their mothers at around six months. How did it take five whole years for the fact to dawn on me?

When I picked him up from school that day, my son bounded to me giddily. He squirmed as I planted a big sloppy kiss on him then complained that I clogged up his ear by doing it. He was exuberant to see his little brother, who he, since turning five, has been describing as a “baby” who he (you guessed it) “hates.” When we got home, the whole family swam in the pool, because the weather is still perfect in California, and ordered Thai food for dinner so no one had to worry about cooking. My son threw rings and little toy torpedos into the deep end and I dove for them because I’m like really fucking good at it. I have to remind myself that these moments are not normal. They are extraordinary. That, as my husband often declares because he likes to be a total downer, no one said the point to life was being happy, so when I am, when we all are, I might as well take notice. The truth is, it hadn’t even been a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. Just a bad morning. And some mornings are like that. Even in Australia.