note:the pics of YaYa's first day of school featured in this post are of dubious quality as they were taken with an old, borrowed digital camera. Sorry about that - Dan
This is my daughter’s final week of school before summer vacation.
I should be grateful. It means no more twice daily trips across town, no more school board meetings, and no more worries about whether or not her uniform is washed and ready to go each morning.
I should be grateful, but in fact I’m a little down in the dumps.
When the school year began she was two months shy of her third birthday. When I told people we were putting her in a full-day, year long K3 program the reaction was somewhere between pity for my daughter and disgust with us for ‘shipping her away’.
Much as I hate to admit it, I sort of agreed with them.
But my wife thought it was a great idea and my daughter, truth be told, had been asking to go to school since she learned to talk.
So I sucked it up and agreed to it.
I’m glad I did.
Of course that didn’t stop me from nearly crying when I learned she was required to eat breakfast at school, ending the daily routine I’d shared with her since her birth.
And it didn’t stop the actual waterworks that came every time I wrote out a tuition check.
It sure didn’t start on a great note We’d been sold on the promise of an ethnically diverse Catholic school with a strong tradition and even stronger academics.
What we got was a school where not only was my daughter one of only a handful of Catholics, she was the only white child in an otherwise all African-American school.
No one had mentioned that we were the reason they could henceforth use the word ‘diversity’ in their sales pitch.
When we showed up for orientation I think they were expecting us to walk back out again. It certainly would have been reasonable; no matter how open you are on the subject of race, no child should be put in a position where they are so easily singled out as ‘different’.
Thankfully, with the rare speed bump the issue quickly became moot.
Within weeks YaYa became the most widely recognized kid in the history of the school. When I dropped her off everyone from eighth graders on down would call out to her by name and say hello.
As a side effect, I stopped being an individual and simply became known as “YaYa’s dad“.
[I suppose I should have demanded some more respect, but it’s hard to be taken seriously when you’re seen doing the ‘Tootytot” dance with a class of three year olds.]
They were spot on about their academic promises, though.
As of this writing YaYa, now age three and a half, can identify and write the letters of the alphabet. She can count to 40 (if you don’t mind her constantly forgetting ‘17’). She can write her name and the word ‘the’. She knows her prayers and the meaning of each holiday. She’s learned to brush her teeth after every meal ,wash her dishes after snack time, and just shy of a thousand ways to create art with macaroni and a glue stick.
Smart as we are, with two other kids to take care of, I can’t imagine her learning all that at home.
She’ll miss the routine, the interaction, and the challenges over the summer. No amount of swim and play classes can take the place of that.
But there’s a far more insane reason the end of the year brings a tear to my eye. Miniscule as it may be in the long-term, she’s done with K3.
Her first year of school is over, forever.
To me, it seems like the days of driver’s ed and prom dates are just on the horizon.
I’m not ready for that yet. If it was up to me, I’d like her to stay in K3 for, oh, another decade or so.
Which is why, I‘d imagine, father‘s don‘t have much say in the matter.
Beautiful post! If it were up to me, my daughter would have stayed little forever and ever. Alas, we are just beyond proms and high school and have somehow managed to get through the first year away at college!
ReplyDeleteI think it is great that you kept your daughter enrolled in an all African-American school. That shows you and your wife are comfortable with your daughter as a human being. My daughter has always been the only black girl in a class of all white students, so I know the feeling. Pull them out of school because of that? No way.
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