Five minutes into my boy’s yearly checkup his doctor announced, “This child needs to be in preschool. Immediately.”
Certainly I could understand her point. The child’s fascination with doors knows no bounds, and a brand new room with an unexplored door (not to mention several drawers full of tantalizingly shiny items) proved irresistible to him. As the doctor spoke to me about his development he practiced peeping then slamming, protesting with extreme vigor when I pulled him away.
I’ve used this doctor since my first child was born and she’s never not suggested preschool for one of my little darlings. Steadfastly I kept my own counsel with previous children, but listening to her enumerate the reasons why preschool could help this child finally swayed me. “And you clearly need a break,” she said, nodding toward the bundle of squirming muscles in my arms. “He is a handful.”
Her words, coming near the end of a week that left me weeping from kids, work and stress finally prompted me into action. After checking with their father, the very next day we drove to a local school that several of my friends had used in the past. It took ten minutes of filing out forms while wrangling toddlers more interested in dismantling the brochure display than behaving, then they were both registered for the fall session.
As I walked them out (tethered to my hands yet still finding every mud puddle between door and car), I couldn’t tell if I was floating from elation or guilt. A few precious free hours each week when they’d both be gone! Gone, out of the house, not coloring on the walls or beating on the piano or screaming at each other or disrobing five minutes before leaving. Gone, so that I could work in peace. Gone, to be transmogrified from animal to human under the influence of experienced teachers and the pressure of wee peers. Gone!
And yet I never thought of myself as the sort of mother who would wish her children away. I mourned when my first went to kindergarten after five years at home with no other teacher than myself. I could not imagine passing her off to the care of someone else, someone who could never love her like I did. And now I’m positively gleeful about sending these two little ones out the door in just a few short months.
My friends tell me I’m nuts to feel guilty about so small a thing as preschool, and I almost believe them.
Almost.
