Politics, schmolotics, I’ve been thinking mostly about kindergarten

(A quick word about this post. The volunteer support work which goes into running schools and kindergartens is almost exclusively done by women. It is more of the invisible, under-valued work of women. From my experience stay-at-home-mothers take up more of this work than working-outside-the-home mothers for obvious reasons. This post does not intend to contribute to the under-valuing of that work by stay-at-home-mothers and I hope it doesn’t).

Kindergarten, which has absorbed disproportionately large segments of my thoughts has finally found some peace. Last week Lauca managed to complete her first full day at Kindergarten. I’ve lost count but I think we’re in week 6 now. We weren’t the only ones excited for her, the teachers were looking disconcertingly relieved, and many of the mothers waiting to collect their children at the end of the day were congratulating Lauca too. Or so I’m told, this ain’t Kansas now (or daycare) Dorothy, and among the many changes I’m noting the Kindergarten day finishes long before I leave work. Work doesn’t seem to exist in this world. The place is a utopian wonderland where children have never experienced daycare and mothers have a boundless enthusiasm for volunteer work at the Kindergarten. In fact Lauca is the only one without a mother to pick her up, she has her grandmothers instead. Her week of adjustment coincided with the one and only week this year that her father will likely drop her off to Kindergarten. I think the unfortunate theory was forming among observers that her father handles drop-offs better than her mother and that is why her milestone was attained that week.

Lauca is making friends at Kindergarten in a very dedicated fashion. A couple of weeks ago I spoke to her about the importance of friends, particularly at times like this, times when you are freaking the hell out. She looked to be ignoring us took it all in and then came back to us over the next few days with questions of practicality like how exactly do you make friends, and what should you do to keep a friendship going. I learnt that her methods for starting and sustaining friendships are endearingly simple after I overheard her telling the cat how to make friends (it had got itself into a catfight). Somehow things came together, either she made a conceptual leap and became a sociable three year old at just the right time or this is more of what we are increasingly coming to know as her weird bright child behaviour where as soon as she decides something is a valued skill she performs it over and over again for points. Either way she comes running home daily with “Today I made ANOTHER new friend”. Shallow, very shallow. But it is working for her.

I’ve got to say that this Montessori Kindergarten has a strong focus on friend-making, they’re all about actively encouraging friendships, even if it is in a vaguely social engineering kind of way. The children are led via the placement of their lunchboxes to sit at mealtimes with those children deemed most compatible with them. And the mothers, they’re very friendly too. Quick to introduce themselves and quicker still to call a meeting of the Parents Association. (Any fathers on that committee I asked, nuh-uh I was told, they’re busy). It is a whole new world for me and were I not fortunate enough to have been taken under the wing of a very sweet Queen Bee I might be struggling a little. We have already attended our first Kindergarten social dinner and I found myself a little daunted, it all seemed so adult for our Saturday night. Us? The parents of someone? Doing the parental duties of creating good impressions with teachers, and making small talk with the parents of children Lauca was busy collecting for her self-assigned exercise in friendships.

Alas I find myself occasionally missing daycare from the perspective of keeping all that company (in a very rushed kind of way) with other working mothers. There, I wasn’t the slackest, far from it. But here the benchmark is higher. The mothers seem to be almost exclusively the working-inside-the-home variety and this makes me the grumpiest, most harried, most disorganised, least contributing to fundraising activities, most inappropriately dressed for handling own child’s craft work, least chatty mother in the whole damn place. And yet I can confess to enjoying a certain sense of liberation with Lauca at Kindergarten, a freedom from worrying about whether I’m providing her with sufficient new developmental activities. I can be as slack as I like, we don’t pay these fees for nothing, this is a Montessori Kindergarten and it is jam-packed with self-directed learning opportunities.