Why the last first day of school is the hardest

A few (plus) years back, in a time when my kids went to bed at a reasonable time, I had less of a need for hair appointments and I could carry at least one of my kids, I dropped my son off to his first day of preschool and left to his screams through the fence. I came home with a fractured mumma heart and wrote the following article. Kidspot bought it that day and today, on my son's first day of high school, it feels fitting to share it again ...

Today I dropped my baby to preschool. It was day two after a kind-of-good day one. Which, to the experienced, means The. Worst. Day.

Did he cry? Yes.

Did he hug so tight that he managed to learn he could link his arms around my strangled legs? Yes.

Did he scream so loud that every nerve in my body shrunk? Yes.

Did his face do ‘that face’, the one where it crumples into an 80-year-old man, pulling lines that would usually be foreign on his beautiful smooth skin? Yes.

I made it out the gate in time before he could see me falter. Did I cry all the way home? Absolutely. He may even question why his pillow is damp tonight, because I sobbed a bit on that too.

My baby. He’s growing up.

Just before I got in the car, a lovely mum in the car park, who couldn’t avoid hearing the piercing screams of “Mummy!” assured me, “He’ll be OK”. If I had it in me to joke, I would have laughed and agreed and said, “I know. This isn’t my first rodeo”. The problem is … it’s my last.

I went down to the shops after day one drop-off and I saw the younger mums meeting for coffee with other hopeful mums. I know, and they know, they’ll only get about three interrupted topics covered while they tend to the four kids they’ve brought with them. But my heart hurt. I thought of that time when my friend held my baby for 45 minutes in a café while I hunted down a public toilet and waited for my three-year-old to commentate her pooping efforts. It was not a good day, but I miss those days all the same.

I passed the mum pushing the stroller with her two kids, completely unaware of bell times and school lunches and worrying they’ll be hungry but not being there to help. They have the whole day together ... and my heart hurts.

I buy milk and bread and more muesli bars from the supermarket and look down Aisle 7 -the baby aisle. Once an aisle that was the most dire to visit, the one you’d often ONLY visit. The one you were too busy, tired and frazzled to remember what an honour it was to visit. Now I look down that aisle like it was a million years ago. When I walk down it now, I feel like a fraud and a sentimental fool as I see the cream I rubbed on their dry skin, or the singlets that look so tiny ... and my heart hurts.

You’d never wish the opposite of them growing up, but a friend once sent me a saying about how we spend their years mourning their littleness gone. A quiet grief that we carry every day as we also smile and relish in their achievements. It’s a confusing head space. We see the seven-day-old in a seven-year-old and their hectic newborn arrival while we take their first-day-of-school photos. The first child was hard, but the youngest, the last first day, makes me feel so redundant.

The last is a stark reminder that it is the end of an era.

The silver lining is an obvious one though. As much as my heart hurts, I’ll forever be grateful that I got a turn on this wild ride. The bruises, the falls, the cheers, the boo’s; the days where you land in the dirt. The victories. They will make the stories over my years forever colourful. And that, makes my heart go boom.

(You can find it on Kidspot just here)