My children’s school is a back yard with straw bales and an herb garden and a sandbox and a couple trees and a ladder and a tunnel and a yellow bumpy slide. There are about eight to ten kids on any given day, and two exceptionally experienced caregivers/teachers on duty at any given time.
Last year I was a hot mess bringing them for drop-offs. I was perpetually braced for terrible news on my return— that my daughter had been bereft the whole time, isolated and trembling like a clinging leaf in November; that my son had flung all the lawn furniture over the fence and set the Happy Store on fire, and that everyone would be SO GLAD to see me through the rising smoke of the disaster my family is just so I could lift the mantle of misery and stress I’d dropped on their lives that morning and put it back in its rightful place—my own exhausted shoulders.
Actual reality, of course, was neither here nor there, since I’d already decided, lugubriously, how awful the truth was.
Then a funny thing happened. The year ended, and the “big boys” went off to kindergarten, and in the fall, a new crop of 3-year-old chickie-fluffs filed in, all female, some still puffy and crinkling in the soft insulation of diapers, all wide-eyed and gentle and inquisitive behind their curls (come to think of it, they all actually have some form of cartoon-curls and glinting doe-eyes. I mean come on).
Now my son was the only male, and my daughter the oldest female. Now my little screeching train-wrecks were the fearless leaders of a be-downed and still-partly-waddling crew of younger, gentler creatures. I feared for the duck-train, thought they’d be scattered like bowling pins when I got back, abraded and traumatized by the urgent and extremely strong needs & capabilities of my wee tyrants.