News just in: apparently Bertie is going to Big School in September. Hardly a shock, I’ve known about it for the best part of 5 years. I’ve even known for a while that today was the day I would find out which school he’d go to. It’s hardly ‘hold the front page stuff’ is it but, somehow, just seeing it in black and white makes it all feel rather real, it’s really going to happen. He really IS a big boy and he really IS going to go to school in the Autumn. And now I know which school he’s going to I can now picture it in my head…the school run…the uniform…the classrooms where he’ll spend his days…and some of the children who will be in his class. It’s all taken on a very ‘real’ format, almost cinematic in fact.
Of course I’m excited for him, because he is excited and he’s so ready for school now. He looks huge compared with most of the children at his nursery school now when, for so long, he was seemed so small and so young. It’s a big step to make, to take that first step on the path of formal eduction with all the thrills, surprises, challenges and opportunities that it brings. And, of course, it’s a significant step along that never ending path of independence…that leads away from me, MrSpud and Diggy and to wherever he wants his life to take him. That’s the way it should be.
But, oh dear, there’s a little voice lurking on a distant shore in my mind that is silently screaming, “DON’T TAKE MY BABY!”. Therein lies the rub: he is ready for school, but am I ready to let him go? Believe me, I’m not an earth mother type – far from it. And he’s spent a couple of days at nursery every week since he was 10 months old, so I’m hardly fretting at being parted from him. I can’t quite puzzle it out what’s brought on this quiet sadness, but it’s definitely lurking.
I told a friend earlier in the week that I wasn’t sure I was ready to give him up to ‘the system’ and for our lives to be so rigidly governed by the pattern of term times, school holidays, the school day, after school activities and all that stuff. She mentioned that starting school also means losing more control over your child’s sphere of influence, and I think there’s a little of that mixed in to it all. But, then, that’s just how it goes and increasing the sphere of influence is a good thing. Right?
I just can’t put my finger on what it is, not at all. Perhaps it’s because having a school aged child means the baby days are well and truly over, but I don’t want another baby and frankly I’m glad to see that back of the early baby days. Shudder. It’s certainly tinged with huge regret that my boys will be split up for the first time, I know they’ll be fine but I’ll miss their loving, glue-like relationship with each other. And I’ll definitely miss our Mondays and Fridays together, just pottering about doing this and that, everything and nothing, visiting people and places and just hanging out…just us three. I wonder what it will be like to potter about with just Diggy, lovely and lonely all at the same time I suppose. It’s not even that I have any misgivings about the school, because we are very fortunate that he’s going to a wonderful school. I wish I could write about it and the style of learning they follow, but it makes his school too easily identifiable.
So, it’s not because I don’t want to be parted from him, or that I don’t think he’s ready for school and nor is it the school itself that’s the problem. So what is it? I’m sure part of it is a little bit of fear that I’m going to have to give him up to playground politics and all the angst and upset that comes as part of the parcel of children making and breaking relationships.
I just can’t put my finger on it, and writing this post isn’t getting me any nearer to it. Perhaps it’s just the fact that him being ready for school is tangible evidence of the relentless passing of time. I must be getting old because time seems to be slipping through my hands like sand these days, taunting me and teasing me with every grain that trickles away.
Or perhaps I just don’t want him to grow up. Perhaps it’s just that simple, and if it is then I’m scuppered because no amount of ‘blogging it out’ can resolve that one.
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