Easing into Kindergarten in Stages

Sadie Levitt McPherson

Today marks the first day of kindergarten camp for my oldest daughter Sadie. One week half days, a dry run for what is coming in September. I tried to explain to Sadie how different the world was when I started kindergarten, in 1986. My mom cried when I went to kindergarten and I didn’t understand why. I assumed she would be happy I would be gone more. And that wasn’t pure hyperbole, my mom brought a lot of negative energy into that era of my childhood. It would stand to reason that less of me would be good news for her. But little stands to reason about how a parent feels when their children make a life transition. I think my mother cried cause her youngest was getting older, no matter how much I bothered her I was growing up and there’s something worth crying about there. And now my oldest is getting older. She’s relating to the world different. She has that inspiring combination of curiosity and courage that is stretching its arms as wide as possible to cover up some justified fear. That fear that comes from your world changing. But more than the fear she’s bringing in that opportunity to take on the trappings of the older kids. The backpack, the lunchpack, her own markers, her own things, her own projects. It scares me, it stuns me. She has this authority to engineer a moment. In the picture above you see her standing proudly next to a fire. It was her idea, her sweat equity, her multiple marshmallow snacks.

Childhood is turbulent. Childhood is transitions. Childhood is tears. Childhood is false starts. Childhood is fake friends. But childhood is yours and contrary to what my heart feels sometimes, the world is not going to squeeze out your fascination, your willingness to love hard, to care, to cry, to propose a fire party. The world didn’t squeeze it out of me, out of your mother, out of my mother. Adulthood will change us all, it changed me. But the way the world looks to you right now is often how it still looks to me; like a huge mystery, with things that I understand playing in harmony with things that completely elude me. There is a magic in holding hands with my daughter as she navigates what’s next, as she also completely exists in what is right now. I have no deep desire to protect her from anything but danger. I will protect her from things she needs no protection, I will send her headlong into things she should be shielded from, but she will crash into the walls, break the rules, build something and roast a perpetually-about-to-fall-into-the-fucking-fire marshmallow above the embers and ask her daddy if she can have another and I will say yes.