Anna on her last day of preschool
…and I’m not too fond of firsts.
Can’t we just hang out here in the middle for a while?
Anna In-Between
Anna will finish at Waldorf next week. We’ve chosen not to continue on there for kindergarten, for a whole host of reasons, none of which are related to the quality of that school. It’s great. She’s happy. She’s thrived. We’re giving public school a shot. It’s more our style, I think, but I’ve learned not to speak in evers and nevers so we’re certainly not ruling out a return to Waldorf.
No, I’m not ruling that out at all.
Anna’s birthday is in late August, which means that she’ll be among the oldest or the youngest in her class, always, never right-in-the-middle. This never struck me as important but lately I’ve become obsessed with the question of whether or not to redshirt her. If she were a boy, yes, no doubt. But she’s a girl, and by all accounts girls aren’t as cut-and-dried.
Anna is tall. She’s socially and physically agile, ahead of every curve. She looks oh, so ready.
But she may not be. That’s the blessing and the curse of the learning disability: it’s not obvious. It doesn’t show. But it’s there, and it can be very subtle, and those subtleties are terribly important. She struggles to pay attention, to control impulses, to sit still. I can see the bewilderment in her eyes when she cannot hold herself still for a minute, cannot follow the story: her eyes betray her confusion at not being able to control her own body. She wants to sit still for a minute. She wants to be quiet. She wants to be good. But she can’t; she just can’t.
Well meaning people say we’re lucky that her delays are so subtle but I am not sure they are right. She gets no slack from the world. To look at her you would never know that at the zoo the other night all the other kids could color their nametags but she could not make her fingers move the crayon where she wanted it to go. Kids a year younger than she is were doing a better job, and she knew it. She didn’t know the specifics, that her fine motor coordination is behind theirs, all she knew is that they could do it and she could not.
It broke my heart.
As kids do, she acted out the frustrations she could not voice. She completely lost control of her body, couldn’t stop herself from breaking ranks and darting off. She interrupted the zookeepers time and time again, only to immediately clap her hand to her mouth and whisper, “I’m sorry.” The zookeepers had asked her to please slow down, I’d talked with her, and her behavior was garnering followers: she was becoming a pint-sized Pied Piper leading a runaway line of little kids. I warned her that she had to follow the rules or we would have to leave, and I had to follow through. We left. She was devastated. She came home and told her father that she didn’t behave and he asked her what she did wrong and she said, so quietly, “Daddy, I really just don’t know.”
I don’t know,either, that the behavior was necessarily related to frustration, but I can say that we’ve seen a pattern. She has zero interest in letters and numbers, and if you know me at all you know this is despite my best efforts, that I read umpty-ump books each day, schedule trips to the library at least once a week, and plastered letters and numbers on everything from our refrigerator to her bedroom wals. But she desists: asked to write any letters but A’s and n’s or to count above 11, she tries once, twice, three times maybe, then breaks her crayons and angrily announces, “I can, but I don’t want to.”
So many parents will recognize that phrase. You know who else gets it? Teachers. I saw it a thousand times over in my junior- and senior-high English classrooms, and it was never not painful. Kids that age don’t break crayons in frustration, as a rule. They skip class. They clown. They daydream. They tell you how bored they are, that they don’t care when they fail because school is stupid. Eventually? They drop out.
We’ve known all along, of course, that Anna was exposed to alcohol in utero, probably cigarettes, too, and possibly worse. She was evaluated for Fetal Alcohol Syndrome as an infant, and judging by all information currently available, she does not suffer from FAS. When she came home she had many delays, but these were as attributable to the other constraints of her early infancy as they were to anything else. Which means that, best case, the alcohol exposure left no impairment. I can go for weeks convincing myself that this is indeed the case, that we’ve gotten lucky. As she ages, and learning becomes more abstract, as her lazy eye continues to flat-out REFUSE to respond to the exercises we do every day, this is a harder fiction to maintain. But I can tell myself, perhaps even truthfully, that she’s just slower and will soon catch up in all ways. This could well be true.
But that’s the thing with a disability you wear on the inside: it can sneak up on you. So I need to be ready to deal even as we move forward as if all is well. It might be. But realistically, I need for her to go to kindergarten in a place where they have folks trained in early childhood special education, just in case. I need teachers who are trained diagnosticians, who can watch and identify, with a practiced eye, what is normal and what, if anything, is not.
So she’s starting kindergarten in the fall, two weeks after she turns five. The principal has assured me that there are many, many available pathways, and I am relieved to have partners in this, partners who know so much more than I do. Experts comfort me. At any sign of frustration, we’ll re-evaluate, every day if necessary.
She’ll be fine.
(Please.)
Kindergarten parents’ night
They had me at hello.
We met in the same room in which we’d watched her name get pulled from the hat. This time I’d remembered her DVD player and headphones so she was deep in the world of the Princess and the Pauper. I, however, fidgeted on the hard chair and stared at the two women in the front of the room who would welcome her to kindergarten.
They were enthusiastic, energetic, and funny, and I loved them immediately. They said that they could face down any number of kids but that a room full of adults terrified them (I understand). Their mutual respect was evident.
One of them’s a mom. When I was a classroom teacher and a parent would ask me if I had kids I’d really get my dander up but now I understand that, too. It’s not that a parent is a better teacher, ipso facto, but it is true that a team including a teacher who is a parent has one more source of information to draw from, one more line of experience, one more resource to check.
They seem so smart. Intuitive. Creative. They love kids — that ‘s clear. They’re tough, too.
They answered questions and they told us about themselves, explaining that they view parents as their partners. They want to know us, to let us know them. All good. All SO good.
But then:
“After all, we’ll be spending more time with your kids than you will.”
Huh?
No. Really?
I had to do the math before I was willing to believe it — then all I wanted to do was grab her and run, yelling over my shoulder: “Keep your mitts off my kid!”
(I have no idea where that came from. My debutante advisor would die.)
The teachers chattered on. Parents listened and smiled. Kids rolled around on the floor.
I panicked as quietly as I could.
One downside of learning to live in the moment, I guess, is that you come to love those moments. And protect them and hoard them and defend them.
So it’s the same old battle, on a new front. I know that her life is hers, not mine. Yeah, yeah. I know she’s ready to, little by little, move away from me and into the world. I know all of this.
I read the fine print on the contract.
But you see: my head does the knowing, while my heart does the accepting, and it’s just not ready to go there.
Not yet.
My heart needs to believe, just for a little longer, that she’ll always be here. That she’ll always be twirling around my kitchen in her purple bathing suit with the butterflies, dancing, filling the house with song. That she’ll forever be giving puppet shows in her bedroom, sharing a world she’s conceived, a world filled with princesses and kitties and talking pandas.
All of this jumbled through my head as these two lovely women talked, and it’s still stuck up there. They’ll take good care of her. I know.
It’s just so hard, so unexpectedly, so ridiculously hard.
But it’s the way of things.
…And then she got in
We were one of the lucky ones. Anna’s name was called sooner, rather than later, and there was a LOT more later than there was sooner. As the lottery ended, the officials moved swiftly to face us, ready for questions. Shoulder to shoulder , they unintentionally gave the impression of closing ranks, protecting the posters on which they’d just affixed a few thousand names.
Most of the names were on various waiting lists, and most of those parents slid out of the room, whispering into cell phones. From my unofficial count, it seemed that a total of five parents in the whole room had selected in this round. We all bore similar expressions: excited, sure, but also a little bit … shy? Like, we were all smiling, but no one was whooping or fist-pumping.
It felt strangely alien to win our slot, especially because we hadn’t done anything all those other parents didn’t do. As randomly and truly as it could be, this was pure, unadulterated luck. I can’t say I felt touched by fate or chosen, just … lucky.
Which isn’t to say I didn’t treat us to yet another tour of the school grounds, watching Anna’s reaction (“Three playgrounds! I LOVE this school!”), eyeing the few kids who were still around that late in the day, trying to picture her there. That night I studied their website with such fervor you’d think I was facing a test. I had silly fun going to the LandsEnd website to gaze longingly at the uniforms. Equal parts geek and just plain strange, I guess.
But now the real work begins. Tours and info sessions and meeting the teachers, and yesterday we finally got our acceptance letter in the mail (which is why I felt I couldn’t safely post this ’til today). That will all be fun. What won’t be fun is deciding, signing on the dotted line. As much weight as that lottery day carried, school choice is not a simple game; matching a kid with a charter shouldn’t ever be automatic.
By all of the published indicators, the teaching is strong. The population of kids is ethnically and socioeconomically mixed. What you can usually anticipate with accuracy is strong parental involvement, and that seems to be the case here, too. International Baccalaureate, bi-lingual (in German, which is different). Grade levels K – 8. UNIFORMS.
This is a great school, in all the general ways I know about at the moment. It’s a charter, which always requires a close look (they are given a lot of latitude, so nothing, from the way they spend their money to their school day schedule, is necessarily a given). Charters are notorious for unreliability and, in times of strife, high teacher turnover; they can often hire outside the boundaries that limit the personnel decisions traditional schools have. But this school has been around a while, which is a good sign, and its staff turnover has been low, which is a better sign.
So for now, we’ll be glad for our luck and hope the decision proves a good one, whatever it is.
The Lottery
“I imagine you’ve all seen Waiting for Superman,” the school official said to the anxious parents squashed into the dusty cafeteria for the public school lottery. She wasted no time preparing us for the disappointment we surely faced, her speech heavy with descriptors like “discouraged,” “despondent,” and “crushed.”
“Hang in there,” she concluded, and hurried out of the room.
This was the day we’d know, with varying degrees of certainty, our children’s kindergarten fate. The tours, the applications, the visits, the reams of reading material about test scores and rates of teacher-turnover and discipline reports and budgets… it came down to now.
You wouldn’t know it from the way we avoided each other that day, but through all this the parents had become a tribe of sorts, meeting at school tours and information nights, trading information and opinions. It was an uneasy alliance, certainly — any slot scored by someone else’s child meant a slot not grabbed by mine — but there was a synergy. I knew that Clarissa was interested in services for her hard-of-hearing son. Rafael was willing to drive 30 miles. Noelle, the mom of energetic twins, would invariably ask about recess and physical activity. The group knew I would ask about reading strategies.We even had a feng shui expert among us, Larissa, who read the energy of the classrooms we toured.
On Lottery Day, though, we barely acknowledged each other, eyes glued to the officials, ears tuned to hear the only name each of us cared about. I will stop short of comparing it too closely to the emotionally loaded Superman, but I’ll concede that the experience fit on that spectrum.
I think I can safely speak for all of us in admitting that what we sought, consciously or unconsciously, was the private school experience at a public school price. And with public school cache.
Yes, cache. I’ve said it before and I’ll repeat it here: the core of the public vs. private debate isn’t driven by academics so much as by culture. You want your kid to spend her days in a Catholic environment. You want your kid to get invited to the mayor’s daughter’s birthday parties. You want your kid to be bilingual. You want to name-drop “Country Day.” You subscribe to the child-development philosophies of Rudolf Steiner. Whatever it is, it’s not ABCs.
Me? I want small class sizes, a clearly identified curricular focus, happy and well qualified staff, and loads of opportunities for parent involvement. Anna is a compassionate, active, imaginative, and willful child. She’s easily distracted, even compared to other kids her age, and potentially has up-close vision issues because of her exotropia. I suspect she may need extra help learning to read and I want her to have access to any help she might need.
So here we all were.
There were posters across the front of the room, each bearing names of kids already slotted into this grade or that — siblings, teachers’ kids — and dozens of blank lines. Hundreds of them. The school had outside consultants read each name drawn, twice; each was checked by a second official and then the admissions director carefully pasted each name on a slot as a parent ran forward to snap a photo with a camera phone. It was as simple as that.
It took the officials three hours to read and double check the names. Of course, the people in the room who would be most affected, the kids, could not have cared less. The mom-of-the-moment award went to the woman who remembered to bring a DVD player and two sets of headphones for her kids. Anna and I spent much of our time outside on the playground.
As any good mob member would, I grew more invested in the whole thing the longer it went on. I imagined Anna first at one school, then at another. One school, a charter, is housed next to Balboa Park and uses its museums liberally. Cool. Another, a magnet, highlights the city’s urban offerings. A few are language immersion. One has uniforms. There might be bus transportation to this one. That one just won a “California Distinguished School” award. Still another has three kinder teachers who are Board certified. I could picture her here, there, and everywhere, on this school’s huge play structure, in that one’s reading nook, tending to the garden at another.
The sun sank low. The room grew cool. I texted Allan each time I heard Anna’s name: “She’s #31 on the waiting list”. She was #135 on another, #56 on a third…
And then…
Mommy, PhD 