In a few weeks my younger daughter will finish her fifth grade year and move to middle school. It will end nine years of our family’s involvement at Poinsettia Elementary School.
I remember a co-worker telling me how it seemed like her children’s time in elementary school lasted forever. I tend to agree.
But the era of elementary school for my family is almost over.
Thank God.
What was so bad about Poinsettia Elementary School that I will be happy never to see the place again?
Well, the crowded parking lot in the mornings. That was horrible; it was a madhouse. If I arrived at 7:42 am to drop my daughters off, I was good. If I arrived at 7:46 am, I was in deep trouble. I had to be at work supposedly by 7:55 am for my first class at 8:00 am.
Actually, I think I was supposed to be there by 7:45 am. But I almost never was, obviously. The timing was tight.
There were so many cars all trying to enter the Poinsettia Elementary School parking lot off the busy Victoria Avenue. Cars could get backed up towards Telegraph Road:
There were just too many cars in too little space in that parking lot. The principal was out there trying to direct traffic and doing her best, but it wasn’t good enough. You had all these parents in line waiting for their turn to drop off their children, and then you had that parent who couldn’t find a backpack or had trouble getting their kid out of the car — and everyone is waiting for them, and the line is growing longer, and tempers are rising. Occasionally someone honks their car horn in frustration.
The line of parents in cars waiting to drop off their children.
You get the picture.
It was an explosive situation. Almost every morning. Tense. Angry. Stressed parents looking at their watches in an over-crowded parking lot.
I did that for nine years.
But in a few weeks it will be for the last time.
Good riddance!
I look at new parents with young children, and I feel sorry for them. My mind tells me that there are joys and pains to every stage of parenting. New parents are in love with their tiny bundle of joy. But it is so exhausting. One has to have a certain amount of blind courage to launch into it.
Pregnancy and childbirth. Day care and its exorbitant costs. Pre-school and elementary school. Your children are so young and needy they demand your entire attention so much of the time. Exhausting. If you take your eye off them for a minute, they might wander off into traffic or drown in a jacuzzi.
They make it through the long elementary school years and arrive to the next stage. But middle school can be so raw and brutal that I will ignore it.
High school and then college, in contrast, is the golden era. Or so I will hope. I have taught high school for decades, and so I know something about all this.
For me it begins to look like a long exhausting parenting journey is approaching the beginning of its end. My daughters are 11 and 14-years old. They are increasingly self-directed.
The good news?
My wife and I have been on top of it since the beginning, and my two daughters are healthy, squared-away kids. They have had their needs met, and then some, and they are curious, literate, numerate, athletic, polite, loved, and ready to thrive in adolescence and later. At least most of the time they are. Older adults have confided in me, “You have done an excellent job with your daughters, Richard.”
Well, my wife and I did our best. As a parent you are never sure. Are you making the right decisions? Or not? It can be very murky. One makes so many decisions, and what to do is so often unclear.
But I have numerous buddies who adopted children who had been damaged by negligent (in the best interpretation) parents who abused drugs in utero and afterwards. They had no business becoming parents. Their children bear the marks of it, and the adoptive parents struggle to help them. Damaged kids who were damaged in their earliest years; and the damage appears almost irremediable. I wish I could put a more positive spin on an unfortunate situation, but I can’t. This is what I see.
I am so fortunate, in contrast.
My wife and I paid the bills, in terms of the hard work — the money, time, and energy spent on our two daughters.
But so much of the heavy lifting is behind us as my daughters enter adolescence. It is a consoling thought.
I begin to transition from doing almost everything for my daughters to standing a bit off and being a “guide on the side.” It is their lives, not mine, after all. I will help them increasingly to make their own decisions. I hope to give them agency to take ownership and learn to accept responsibility for their own decisions.
The last thing I want is that my daughters leave for college unable to make their own way in the world because I ran their affairs in high school. Such a person has next to no ability to exercise freedom and control in adult life, because their parents gave them next to no freedom or control when they were growing up.
No, no. no. I will not be a “helicopter parent.”
The early part of parenting is the most time-intensive and important. The early years is where the investment pays off later. It might have been expensive and exhausting, but in parenting what is well begun is half done. All those youth soccer and tennis teams I coached for my daughters. The fact that I read books to get them to fall asleep for the first six or seven years of their lives. Every night. Hour after hour. Year after year. A whole cavalcade of children’s literature. The Magic Treehouse series and Harry Potter and Albus Dumbledore and Judy Blume. There were the kid’s books about dying pets — Where the Red Fern Grows, Old Yeller, The Yearling, or My Side of the Mountain. All the youth coaching and children’s literature — and everything else, the feedings, diapers, naps, tantrums, playdates — it was a lot. In aggregate it added up to the “hard yards” of parenting.
But I believe in the “hard yards.” There are no shortcuts. Nothing is for free. One way or another you must pay for everything in this world. If you want your children to obey and listen to you, you must earn their respect and attention. The steel gauntlet of parental authority with younger children must always be surrounded by a velvet covering. Your touch should be so light, that the power behind it is hardly felt: I learned this from my own father. You bind your children to you with love. You care for them. You pay attention.
Or you don’t.
At any rate, I am more than ready as a parent to leave elementary school behind.
On to bigger and better things!
Each year passes more quickly than the previous.
But I will be very happy never to be in the Poinsettia Elementary School parking lot at 7:45 am again.
Good luck, parents of the future!
You will need it.
