Penelope waiting for the school bus on her first day of kindergarten.
(It’s the 50th blog post for “Growing Up With Penelope,” and I thought I’d celebrate by turning the page over to Bernadette. Since she’s written this post, there are two things I can guarantee. One, it’s a terrific read, and I’m sure you’ll love it. Second, this is a helluva lot longer than any post I would ever write!)
It’s the morning of the second day of Kindergarten, and the school bus has just pulled away. I’m mid-way into walking the beagles when it hits me, “Oh my God, she’s on the bus alone.”
Even though she’s not, of course, because all the neighborhood kids are on it with her.
And I have this panic attack – Will she get off the bus OK? Will she find her classroom OK? – even though I know perfectly well that the answer to both questions is yes.
I can’t call my husband for reassurance because he’s on his way to work sans broken cell phone. I can’t call my neighbor from across the street because I know she’s busy getting ready for an all-day PTA meeting. I can’t call my other two mom neighbors because they’re both at work.
So I do the only thing I can do: I take a deep breath, finish the walk, start a load of laundry, and sit down to write this story. But not before I post my freak out on Facebook, and learn from friends – not just acquaintances, but people who truly were friends in high school or college – that what I’m feeling is absolutely, positively, perfectly normal. (A newer friend, the mom of my daughter’s classmate and BFF, is on her third kid. She posts to reassure me that “the school is great. They will not lose her!”)
Rationally, I know all of this, but still I worry.
I worry that my daughter will have trouble making friends, though I know she has far more grace and confidence and self assurance than I ever did at her age.
I worry that my daughter won’t be kind to new kids who are afraid, though I know she understands what it is to be scared and different and in a place that is new and overwhelming.
And I worry that my daughter might get hurt, even though she survived two years of pre-K with only a few bumps and bruises, and I know there’s no reason to expect any differently now.
My husband emails me from work to tell me he’s found the folder he was looking for – one he thought our daughter had removed from his briefcase and placed in her backpack – and for a moment I’m disappointed that he’s found it because it means I no longer have an excuse to run up to the school, check our daughter’s backpack, and see with my own eyes that Penelope is truly OK.
An hour and a half after the bus pulls away, my mind is calmer. Writing, I know, helps; focusing on the screen as one word after another appears on it has, for me, always been a tonic.
And as I grow calmer, I find myself reflecting on the journey that brought us to this day. If you had asked me five years ago – before we began the adoption process that would ultimately lead us halfway around the world, to southern China and the most beautiful two-year-old you could imagine – I would have answered with the cockiness that only someone who has never experienced the agony of parenthood could.
“If I’m ever blessed to be a mother,” my childless self would have said, “I won’t be one of those overprotective ones who worries all the time.”
Ha!
I didn’t have to carry this child in my body for nine months to become a card-carrying, worrywart of a mom. I simply had to look at her, once, and to hold her, once. That’s all it took for me to be a goner.
I have calmed down in the three years since Penelope joined our family, but I do still worry. And I’ve learned from many friends, even before today’s Facebook post, that the worrying will never truly end. Not even, as my sister and sister-in-law are happy to tell me, when she’s grown and married and off on her own. They would know, having married off four daughters between them.
Yesterday, I was fine as I watched our daughter step onto the school bus for the first time, and without even a backward glance, find a seat and start chatting to her seatmate.
Now, 26 ½ hours later, I’m wondering exactly what sort of mother I am. Yesterday I was calm and collected; I didn’t worry a bit. Today I was, quite nearly, a hyperventilating basket case.
I’m blaming it on the adrenaline that’s no longer in my system.
The morning of the first day of Kindergarten was a whirlwind: getting showered and dressed, getting breakfast on the table, feeding the dogs, stuffing packed lunch and snack bags into the backpack, and asking Penelope if she’s nervous about Kindergarten. “No, Mama,” she answers. “I’m OK.”
Then we’re speed-walking down the driveway, video camera in hand, to wait for the bus with the boy across the street.
After a few minutes of picture taking and chatting with the boy’s parents, the bus arrives and, just like that, Penelope is on it and the doors are closing and I know with absolute certainty that if I’d allowed myself the time to think about how the years between now and college will pass in a blur of Daisy Troop meetings, sleepovers and first dates, I know I would have stood there crying as the bus carrying our little girl faded into the distance.
As it was, though, my husband and I had plans. We jumped into the car, drove to the school and parked, and sprinted across the parking lot and playground to the school’s front walkway so we could shoot photos and video of our daughter as she got off the bus for the very first time.
Mercifully for her, we weren’t the only parents who had this idea.
I stretched my neck and stood tippy-toed, watching for her cute little face to appear in the open doorway of the bus when suddenly, there she was: animatedly talking to the little boy walking alongside her, her fingers wrapped firmly around the straps of her bouncing owl backpack, not an ounce of fear or uncertainty anyplace on her face.
She was beaming, I was not crying, and my husband stood there smiling, part misty-eyed, part heart in his throat.
I knew, as we watched her walk down the long hallway to her Kindergarten classroom chatting to another little boy, that David was thinking exactly what I was thinking: how lucky he is, how lucky we are, to have this miracle of a child in our lives.
Growing Up With Penelope 