Snowflakes

I know that my children are special snowflakes. (You probably know that too, because you're so nice and here you are reading about them.) I know that it's because they're highly intelligent and extremely sensitive and also because they have a very healthy attachment to me that they scream and cry when first introduced to a new setting like, say, school. But I can't help feeling that their teachers probably have only a finite amount of patience with these very special darlings, of whom there must be a few in every class, and yet somehow this year it seems like mine are the very most specialest of all.

(I also know that the teachers have a ton more patience with the children than we parents do. Because your child knows how to push your buttons, innately and by their very being which contains your exact DNA and therefore is often just a tiny bit too much like you, yourself, for your comfort. When faced with the scenario of the small child who's been hitting the other small child and goes back to do it again, I suspect it's much easier to remain calm when neither of these children are your own. Also, when you're a consummate professional who's been doing this, dealing with this, for twenty years now, like Mabel's teacher, who I saw gently and kindly remove a troublemaker from the scene of the crime and help him sit and wait beside her for his mother yesterday morning. I was impressed.)

But then, there's Monkey having been the one child who needed to be peeled off his parent for the first week, walked to his classroom for the second, and walked into the school (but not all the way down the hall) by his dad for the third, while everyone else just got with the program and nutted up and did what all the other kids were doing by day three or so. I wonder, does his teacher think "Ah, Monkey. Such a happy, well-adjusted child, with caring parents," or does she think "When will this child and his mollycoddling parents stop disrupting my class?"

And now Mabel, being That Kid, the one who cries all morning at nursery school. We've all seen them. At least, all of us who have had the pleasure of helping out in the two-year-olds' class. There's always one. Maybe two. They stop after a few weeks, but for those weeks, while you're sorry for the child, thoughts like "How can her mother do this?" and "It's upsetting the other kids, you know" and "Gosh, it's awfully stressful being cried at all morning," do tend to make their way into your head.

That's the sort of way I felt yesterday about both of them. That this year, I was That Parent, with Those Kids.

On the other hand. (As Mabel would say. I can't wait for her to say it to her teacher.) Monkey told me yesterday that one of the boys in his class still cries some mornings. His other friend is terrified when there's a thunderstorm. Monkey, in contrast, seems to be loving school already and has recently been seen carrying around a notebook and asking me how to spell things. I'd seen other people's kids doing that, but never believed mine would. I love it.

Mabel, too, may be upset in these early days, but I'm confident (don't hold this against me, please karma) that she won't be one of those children I used to see crying their eyes out when saying goodbye in the morning even in their second and third year of nursery school. We'll work through it, gradually stretching out the time of exposure to People Who Are Not Mummy Without Mummy Present, and she'll be fine in a few weeks. Somebody's always the last, or the saddest, or the naughty one in the class, and if it's not yours today, it might be tomorrow.

I read something recently, somewhere on the Internet, about how if everyone  could drop their problems into a pile and choose new ones, you'd take back your own pretty happily as soon as you saw everyone else's. I think it's like that with kids too. No matter what their idiosyncrasies (let's say), no matter how bad they are at sleeping or eating or being denied the boob even when everyone else is long weaned (say), or being separated from you, their beloved; they're your kids, and thus better, by definition, than anyone else's. That's how it works. That's why we keep 'em.