Well, here I was all ready to write a column about how mind-blowingly amazing it is that there is a place where you can send your wild stallion children for hours at a time, nearly every day, and people other than you have to take care of them.
It’s called “school.” And it’s free!
My oldest son has done preschool before but this year is different. He started all-day kindergarten last week, following a summer spent with his younger brother plotting new ways to drive his parents insane, each scheme a little louder and creepier than the last.
“I control you!” my son shouted at his younger brother the other day, pointing a remote controller at him. “Bash your head into the wall!”
That’s creative, buddy, but when we’re in our Imagination Space can we draw the line at stealing your brother’s free will?
There’s a natural progression to these things. When your first child is born your life changes and you wonder how you’ll ever get through it. When your second child is born you look back with disdain at your old, one-child self, wondering how you ever thought it was difficult to take care of just one baby who doesn’t even walk or talk or tell you that the healthy, not-too-spicy, covered-in-gooey-cheese fusilli and red pepper pasta masterpiece that you just spent an hour and a half crafting tastes like “poop.”
And as for those families with three or more young children – well, let’s just leave them alone right now because they’re obviously busy decorating the suite they’ve got reserved at the emergency room.
All-day kindergarten seemingly couldn’t come fast enough. The first day that my oldest son went to kindergarten I happened to have the morning off and I spent a delightful time with my youngest son, neither one of us worrying about taking an impromptu football to the face.
There was breathing room. It was wonderful.
I couldn’t help but let my mind wander to when they both will be at school. So much quiet! What a treat.
And just a couple of decades from now they’ll both be off to moon college or whatever and my wife and I will have our solar-powered eco-pod all to ourselves. Sure we’ll need to keep the radiation shields up on days when the temperature hits 75 C, but it’ll be so peaceful in there!
I was all ready to write that column but then on the very next day all that gleeful planning got blown away by the sight of my son getting on a school bus for the first time in his life.
The bus pulled up and he didn’t hesitate a second, striding up the stairs and sitting down in the second row like it was no big deal.
That’s that, I thought. He’s ready, I’m ready, we’re all ready. Then the bus pulled away and that was when everything changed. There was my little boy, gripping the seat hard and searching for us with a look that I’d never seen before. The best translation I can come up with is that it was a look that said, “Is this really happening? I guess this is happening. Goodbye.”
The look hit me hard. It hit my wife even harder – I had to scrape her off the sidewalk, roll her up and put her in my backpack to be re-inflated at home. It even hit my two-year-old hard.
“I want to go on the bus too,” he said. “I miss him.”
Of course my wife couldn’t quite let him go that easy. She did what I’m sure 90 per cent of parents do: she jumped in our car, raced to the school, parked a discreet distance from the bus stop and waited.
The bus pulled up, my son got off and calmly walked to his class, talking and laughing with his friends the whole way. No big deal.
I’ll never forget that look out the window, and I’ll never forget what it felt like to watch that big, yellow bus get smaller and smaller, taking my baby away on a new adventure.
This isn’t the column I thought I would be writing this week. Sometimes now the peace and quiet at home feels a little too quiet. It almost makes me want to grab the old football and whip it into my own face. Just for old-time’s sake.
Andy Prest is the sports editor for the North Shore News and writes a biweekly humour/lifestyle column. He can be reached via email at [email protected].
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