What I wish I'd known when I was a teacher

So my oldest started Kindergarten and the second started preschool (for the second year).

No, I didn't cry. They were so excited to finally be going to school that if I had started to get emotional it would have made things hard on them. And I remember from when I was a teacher how hard a parent can make separation on a child - by making them think there is something to be afraid of, or something wrong. So I just smiled and waved.

But it was a little wrenching to just walk away and leave those two boys at the school. It physically hurt a little. I've thought this before: missing your kids is not like missing another person, it is more like missing a limb. They were a part of me. Literally of my flesh and it feels slightly unnatural to just walk away and leave that behind. But healthy. And good.

It reminded me of a short story I read in one of my English classes. "I Stand Here Ironing" by Tillie Olsen. The narrator is a mother whose daughter's teacher has asked for a meeting to help the teacher understand her.

What good would that do? Wonders the mother, "There is all that life that has happened outside of me, beyond me."

I feel that way with my kids sometimes. It wasn't that long ago that they couldn't even move without alerting me. And then they were born and they could experience things that I didn't even know about. Thankfully, it is a gradual separation - but it is still very strange.

In the story, the mother thinks back on when her daughter was a baby, " She was a beautiful baby. . . She loved motion, loved light. . . She was a miracle to me, but when she was eight months old I had to leave her daytimes with the woman downstairs to whom she was no miracle at all,"

As I watched the young kindergarten teacher (holy cow, when did I get so old?) lead the line of students into the classroom I wondered if there was any way she could understand that behind her were twenty miracles. "Just know," I wanted to tell her, "you are walking away with my treasure."