Apparently This is Normal

My son started school this week.

Well, school and a new daycare. Which sounds very exciting when you say it like that. New teachers, new kids, a new routine and a lot for a three-and-a-half-year-old to suddenly figure out.

He seemed mostly fine.

We were a disaster.

Not an actual disaster. Nobody forgot a child somewhere or sent him to school without pants. But there was definitely a lot of worry packed into our house for something that thousands of families apparently manage to do every September.

We worried about all of it. Would he know where he was supposed to go? Would he eat? Would he make friends? What would happen if he got upset or needed something and didn’t know how to ask? Would he remember to tell someone when he needed to use the bathroom, or were we going to be getting that phone call?

And, of course, we wondered if he’d miss us.

We’d somehow forgotten to worry about the other possibility.

What if he doesn’t?

You spend years being the centre of this tiny person’s universe. You know what he eats, what makes him laugh, what makes him mad, what he means when he says something that would be complete nonsense to anyone else. Then one morning you pack his things, hand him over to someone else and walk away.

Apparently this is considered normal.

The first week was chaos in all the ordinary ways. There were schedules to figure out, things to remember, places to be and a small child to get out the door with everything he was supposed to have. Getting any useful information out of him afterward was another challenge.

“How was school?”

“Good.”

“What did you do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you play with anyone?”

“Yeah.”

“Who?”

Silence.

Excellent. Very helpful. Glad we had this talk.

And, to be fair, he didn’t exactly glide through the week without incident.

There were a few reports.

He was still figuring out how to interact with some of the other kids. He didn’t always listen to his teachers. And there may have been an incident involving another child and a pool noodle.

We don’t need to get into the details.

The point is, he was learning.

Of course, knowing that didn’t stop us from treating every report like evidence in an ongoing investigation. We’d talk about what happened, whether it was normal, whether he was overwhelmed, whether there was something we should be doing differently. With him, it was simpler. Listen to your teachers. Be nice to your friends. Try not to hit anyone with a pool noodle.

He was three and a half, after all, and had just been dropped into a place where he was expected to figure out the rules and how to get along with a bunch of other little people. Sometimes he got it right. Sometimes he didn’t.

The thing was, he was excited to go every single day. One afternoon he came home with his face painted, although he’d managed to smear most of it around not long after it was done. He was still incredibly proud of it. Another day he told us about story time and the book they’d read. I tried to figure out which book it was. I never did.

I think that’s when it started to hit me. He’s been going to daycare for years, so having parts of his day without us isn’t new. But somehow we’d always felt a little closer to those parts before. We knew more about what he’d done, who he’d played with, how his day had gone. This felt different. Now he was coming home with a painted face we hadn’t watched him get and telling us about a book we’d never seen. We were still asking all the questions, but we were starting to get only the pieces he could—or wanted to—give us.

Tiny experiences that belong only to him.

That’s wonderful. It’s also incredibly rude.

I know this is how it’s supposed to work. We’re raising him to go out into the world and have experiences without us. Not all at once, thankfully. Just a few at a time.

This week happened to have quite a few.

He seems to be figuring it out. His parents … are getting there.