Our youngest child is starting school today.
We’ve been at this parenting caper for almost 11 years. It was almost 11 years ago that I went on maternity leave for our first child. For me it has been 11 years of part-time work and full-on parenting.
I remember my eldest child starting school like it was yesterday. It was 2009, and as one of three boys, it was his big day but it was tricky. We were torn between choosing to both go to the first day of school or to divide up and also cover the first day of kinder for our three year old. We had a newborn baby in the pram with us.
That week The Age published a beautiful article by Catherine Deveny on the day her youngest of three boys started school. She spied a mother of three boys whose eldest was starting school that day. It wasn’t me (her kids are at a neighbouring school) but it felt like it as I read her column. I remember thinking she was talking directly to me, about something that seemed a lifetime away. Well, that time has passed so quickly I almost didn’t see it.
By the time Number 1 started school, he had taught himself to read and was great with number patterns. I didn’t fret over it at all. He was also old in his year, having been born just after the school cut-off. He was itching to start. Our Number 2 – by far the most adaptable of our kids, sandwiched between two kids and pretty happy to get any attention he could – couldn’t read or pattern at all. Despite showing no interest in books, he proved to be more than able to handle the cut-throat world of prep, including two hours of Lego play a day. He rolled out of that first year reading beautifully, identifying number patterns and producing some spectacular Lego creations.
So here we are five years later, and Number 3 is about to fly the coop, to follow in his brothers’ footsteps to the school he’s visited almost every school day of his life. There is no one to follow, to keep me at home, to juggle between work appointments or to wile away the time creating monster train tracks, tea parties with imaginary friends, Duplo fire stations or just cuddling on the couch when I couldn’t be bothered doing anything at all.
There is something about a youngest child that is a little different. They inherit all the interests of their older sibling(s), or shun them as the case may be. His eldest brother wants to coach him in basketball when he is old enough. ‘I hate basketball,’ says Number 3 after going to two games each weekend with two basketball-playing brothers. Unlike their older siblings, youngest children get far more quality time with their parents, largely unburdened by a grinding daytime schedule of not-to-be-missed mothers’ group get-togethers, kinder gym and toddler swimming lessons while dragging at least one other child out of the cot and out of routine.
Not youngest children. They have been able, at least for the time they can recall, to hang out with their parents by themselves while their siblings go to school, watch all sorts of age inappropriate television and movies that parents would never have dreamt about for their eldest, and enjoy the more relaxed parenting style of people who have finally worked it out by then. They benefit from all the good toys accrued over the years, particularly so in a household of all the same gendered kids. Their parents are freed of a nappy bill and night waking (if they are lucky) and so are generally happier.
Youngest children know where they are going to school. When the talk at the kinder was all about which primary school to choose, we’d started looking at high schools for our eldest. Number 3 has been busy making friends for the last five years in the playground that he knows like the back of his hand. All in all, they are pretty lucky.
I wonder whether school will change the magical sense of wonder that is Number 3’s just-turned-five brain: ‘I’m just putting baby Jesus back in her cot.’ Me: ‘Baby Jesus is a boy’. Him: ‘What’s he doing with a girl’s name?’ The same kid that wondered why his babysitter Justine sometimes called herself Maggie (her babysitting sister)… We don’t even know whether he can read or write, nor do we care as it will happen eventually.
Will the weight of the school system and life take away that wonder? I doubt it. But what it will take away is our little buddy who has kept us young with his own lovely youth. Without him I have to start thinking about what to do now that I no longer have an excuse to be at home as much. ‘You won’t know what to do with yourself,’ people tell me all the time. But I do.
First I want to lie down and reflect on the last 11 years of something amazing and harrowing and hilarious and relentless that is this parenting caper. Catherine Deveny wrote of raising kids as ‘…some weird sense of achievement of something I didn’t achieve. It’s just a scientific experiment I’ve been observing for what seemed, at the time, to be a hundred years. But what now feels like a blink of an eye’. I’ll catch up with friends for lunch, work on my start-up business that was conceived last year while facing the reality of those precious liberated school hours. I’ll sit back and know that with all the fun and foibles of our parenting we have produced three little boys that we will continue to usher through life with creativity, independence, dependable dependence, a desire to keep wondering and peanut butter sandwiches.
We may not succeed, but it has been a great ride thus far and bound to only get more interesting as they move into new life stages. Watch this space.