The girls had their preschool orientation yesterday, and start preschool for real tomorrow. The orientation was, well, a little harrowing. For starters, I wasn't in the greatest state of mind. My moods have been playing havoc with me of late, and I was feeling a bit unhinged and over-emotional. Granted, it's an emotional thing to grasp the fact that your babies are old enough to start preschool. But in my un-depressed state, I'm not one to tear up repeatedly in the midst of this kind of thing, as I did yesterday. Meanwhile, the fact that I was feeling foggy and depressed on this significant occasion made me feel even worse. (Depressed about being depressed -- who needs that?)
Fortunately, Alastair was there with me, and able to play the role of sane and stable parent. And Elsa, not surprisingly, was totally in her element. When we arrived at their classroom, she was off to the races, immediately checking out all the new toys. (We even witnessed our first interaction between her and a classmate! She yelled "mine!" when he tried to take a play teacup from her. Ah, our feral, un-socialized children.) Clio, though, clung to me and didn't want to let go. After a few minutes, we managed to get her to go over and play with a tea set on the play table that she'd been eyeing, and she soon seemed quite happy, pouring imaginary tea and serving up plates of plastic waffles.
But a few minutes later, when it was time for the parents to go down the hall for coffee, mingling, and a word from the directors, Clio totally lost her shit. It was awful. When we told her we had to leave for a few minutes, the lower lip immediately curled down (an expression which, I'm convinced, is genetically programmed to trigger maternal tear ducts, depression or no) the face turned red, and she started wailing that she wanted to come with us / she wanted us to stay / mama, mama, mama, etc. Oh, dear God, I'm getting teary just writing about it.
But I swallowed it back, bucked up, and walked out of there and down the hall with Alastair, trying to ignore the fact that my daughter was wailing. The only one wailing, I might add. Down the hall, as we got our coffee, we could still hear her. I felt like someone had punched me in the heart. And I fully expected one of the teachers to come in any minute and summon us back to the classroom, whispering, "maybe she's not quite ready for this yet..." It didn't happen. But when we finally did go back, about fifteen minutes later, Clio was still crying. And then it was the same thing all over again: clinging and wanting to be picked up for a few minutes, then gradual willingness to be released, and then, before you know it, she's dishing out plastic waffles and serving tea.
I know she can do this; we've left her before -- at church childcare a handful of times, and at the childcare at the gym -- and while she's cried a lot the first couple of times, she's eventually gotten used to it, and gotten comfortable. I think this will be the case with preschool, too. But she is going through a clingy-with-mama phase. And I'm going through a sad phase (to put it in preschool terms). Which is why I think it's a very good thing that it will be Alastair, not me, dropping the girls off at their *real* first day of preschool, tomorrow.
Photo (in which I don't quite look like myself, but my arms look skinny so I'm not complaining) by Heidi Miller
