Spending day after day with anyone for 8 hours at a time, with only infrequent contact with other people, leads to a wealth of identity issues. Even if the other person is your little one, maybe especially then, you lose a sense of where ‘you’ end and ‘we’ start. On a rough day, I may forget to eat lunch for a bit after I serve Max his food: he’s fed, so we’re fed, right? I noticed this behaviour a while ago and I make sure to keep my own needs on the list of stuff to do.
There are times where I slip into talking about ‘us’ when I’m really talking for myself, and I admit I have done this intentionally once or twice to get out of an awful situation. Sometimes you need to get out of there, and no one can fault you if it’s your kid who needs to go. And hey, if your kids can’t act as your alibi, then who can?
The first day of preschool went fantastically, with a lack of tears at both the beginning and the end. I didn’t do very much with my free time, since I was still in the grip of an irritating cold, but it was still a welcome break. There was a little temptation to sit and worry the whole time. Historically, I refuse to celebrate how well something is going until I’m absolutely sure it can’t go wrong, but I decided to be a normal person and have some confidence that everything was going okay. The ear to ear smile that covered his face when he saw me waiting in the doorway was the best thing I’ve seen in a long time.
Tomorrow is day two of preschool, and it’s bound to have a surprise or two. The surprises might start early, since he fell asleep an hour and a half before his bedtime tonight. I’m glad he fell asleep, because he was in the very dangerous state of high energy but no impulse control or physical dexterity. His throttle was stuck on ‘injury speed’ and it was a battle to keep him from hurtling into one thing or another.
Chris Loblaw, Author 