School Me

On the first day of preschool, I limited myself to putting one temporary tattoo on his hand when what I really wanted to do was affix them to every bit of exposed skin so that every time he looked down he’d think of me. For good measure, I’d make him wear a hat rigged with a mirror placed at an angle such that the wearer would be able to see that his mommy had written “I love you” backward across his forehead in non-washable marker. Sure, it’s a bit unusual for a first-day-of-school outfit, but it’s memorable.

AND SPEAKING OF NON-WASHABLE MARKER, I did this to Wombat the night before picture day:

I’m obviously some kind of super-genius, right? The kid has at least four sets of washable markers, but I defaced him (get it?) with the other kind. After panicking all over Twitter, it took soap, makeup wipes, and nail polish remover to almost de-kitty-fy the poor kid. Dur. I told myself they would either be the worst school pictures ever or the best school pictures ever. Suspense! As it turns out, despite my screw-up, he came out perfectly okay. I can only hope this will become a metaphor for his entire life.

(I also take full responsibility for the pose here, as the picture-taking lady gave me the option to have my strapping young lad arranged in a somewhat more dignified manner, but OH NO, pleeeeease do the precious cheek-on-hand pose for the love of all that is holy and hilarious. What a precious little muffin.)

As for preschool on the whole, he’s doing really, really well. Right up until the morning of his first class, I continued to be nervous about it and therefore continued to punch myself in the face because Wombat thrives in pretty much every situation (i.e., he is as much his father’s son as he is mine). On the social front, this is the boy who played with some random kid at Ikea for three minutes and when we told him it was time to go he said, “Bye, kid! Bye! I have to go now! See you later!” and then skipped over to us proclaiming “Guys! I made a new friend!” He also says this about adult strangers he chats with in line at the grocery store. Last week I quizzed him on the names of his classmates, and he knows about 80 percent of them, which I’m taking as a good sign. He might not be besties with all of them, but at least he’s not hiding in the corner with a book, wishing he were invisible.

As for the academic front, I’ve made a resolution, and it is to resist all natural tendencies to be That Mom, You Know the One, and so instead of telling the preschool teachers what I think Wombat needs, I’m going to back off and let them get to know him and then tell me what they, with their decades of experience, think he needs. I’ve also opened myself to the possibility that Wombat might not be the single smartest child to ever have lived excepting Mozart, and that’s certainly making it easier for me to STFU and CTFO. (Acronyms are the next line of defense now that we can’t spell in front of him and it will only be a matter of months before he decodes Pig Latin. Now would be a good time for Simon and me to pick up Cockney rhyming slang. Do you think there’s a Dummies book for that?)

Overall, I’m just really proud of and excited for him. And trying not to be too nervous about all the parts of school life that can really suck. It’s a big step. For both of us. He’s going to school now, where he has friends I haven’t met and he sings songs I don’t know, and where he says he’s learning all sorts of things even though, when quizzed about them on the drive home, he claims he can’t tell me about them because he forgot. Of the few details I’ve managed to pry from his treasure-chest mind, I know that he’s learned the words “illustrator” and “arugula,” he can recite all the months of the year, he uses all that tell-tale preschool lingo with its “cubby”s and “circle time”s and “criss-cross applesauce”s, and he knows how awful it feels when someone doesn’t want to play with him. “Mom, we played together yesterday, but today she said she didn’t want to be my friend anymore because she wanted to play with someone else, and that made me sad.” Ack.

One of the traits I love so much about him (and want to protect with armor covered with bubble wrap and kept behind a force field) is his open-heartedness. I love how easily and fully he trusts everyone, even if that’s merely a product of his age-appropriate naivete. But damn when he’s rejected. The open heart is the easiest one to break.

It’s preschool, everyone tells me. It’s not about academic skills, it’s about social skills. And oh, that’s so much scarier. He can study for tests. I can make him flash cards and we can invent mnemonics for any subject. I can rely on his natural scholastic aptitude. There’s so much less certainty with relationships. He can be good and friendly and fun, and still the boy he wants to play with might not want to play with him. A pack of kids might make fun of his pink socks. The girl he thinks he loves might crush that feeling as it still burns warm and bright in his chest. I just hope it will all be harder for me than it will be for him.

We let him pick out his very own backpack this year, and I was glad he went with an alternative style rather than a traditional one that zips up and around in an arc because whenever I look at those giant bags strapped on to those tiny preschoolers, all I see is how the packs stand up so tall they frame those little-kid heads like the backs of high chairs. They’re all just babies, you know? They should be inside those packs and worn on their mamas like marsupial young. Everyone knows koala cubs don’t go to school.