Within a few days it will be two months since the children entered their classes in the different nurseries and schools in the country. It seems like it was much longer, but it's only eight weeks.
After this time I still remember my son Jon's first day of school as if it were now and I still see myself planted there, watching how he enters his class, from a distance, with tears rising in my eyes and a lump in my stomach of doubt and memory.
"It's only going to be two hours," I thought. It was about adaptation period designed so that children gradually become accustomed to entering a new place, they know the place, the teacher and their new classmates and it is the period, as I have been able to discover in my own skin, that Parents need to get used to the new situation.
How to separate after three years
I have already told you that Jon did not go to daycare. My wife doesn't work, so Jon and she, she and Jon, ass and shit Y Flesh and Bone they separated the day the school started after 3 years and 8 months of sharing every day and every night (except the one we went to give birth to our second child).
I try to understand in my own skin what she felt and I can't. I dont know. I can't feel it, I can't put myself in that situation and I have a hard time trying it, because I had a hard time, very badly, the day Jon came through that door moving his hand and saying "Goodbye dad, goodbye mom".
If I had a hard time, that I went to work every day, that I said goodbye several times a week, how could she have spent it that has always been with him? I can't imagine it (and she tells me: "Armando, you can't imagine it").
How then does a mother separate from a son or a father from a son so that it is not painful? There is no recipe, because the suffering of separation does not come from the head, but is born from within, from one's feelings and feelings don't know words or reasons.
You know that nothing will happen, but you doubt if you have made the right decision, if the school will know how to understand your personality, your way of being and feeling and although you know that they will try to give you an education you feel, deep down, that they are going to treat like one more, because the school is like that, 25 children for one or two teachers and, under these conditions, it is impossible to stop to value the individuality of each child.
The more they resemble each other and the more the mode of action of each of them resembles, the more harmonious the functioning of the class will be. Useful for controlling a group, but sad if we think that each child should be able to be himself, with his concerns and desires.
Remembering the past
Each and every moment that a person lives are written in personal memory. Everyone leaves their mark. Some more and others less. Some affect a lot and others hardly anything, but our character, our way of acting, thinking and relating to others is the sum of what is written in our genes (what we bring as a series) and what we receive from the same moment we are conceived until the day we die.
There are things we will always remember and there are things we have forgotten. Those who remember and dislike us, make us feel bad while we evoke them in the mind, however there are many experiences that we do not remember, which also leave their mark on our being.
The day I saw Jon at school with other children, standing in line, waiting to enter while he looked at us with his huge eyes that said “I don't know where I am going, but I look at your faces, I see you calm and therefore I think I'll be good", The procession was inside. For a moment I saw myself, the four-year-old Armandito who started school in September of 83 and felt a strange sense of helplessness, emptiness, and discomfort.
I felt each and every one of the thorns I keep from that time digging a little deeper into my heart and I felt sorry for not remembering most of them, because maybe I could overcome them.
What happened in 83?
That said it seems that he lived in a boarding school where children would be mistreated. No, it was not like that. Remembering the experiences that follow in my memory I realize that they were not so much. The problem is that they weren't for much now that I look back, but yes they should have been for a four year old (or at least for the four-year-old Armandito).
This makes me think that if I, who separated from my family environment with four years, keep in my conscious and unconscious memory experiences that I have not yet overcome, what will not keep all those children who enter school with three years and what not They will keep all those who before going to school have gone to daycare.
Why does Jon go to school?
And this is where many of you will be wondering why my son goes to school, if it is not mandatory and if I have so many doubts about him.
Well then because he wants to go. We asked him if he would like to go with other boys and girls, without dad and without mom and he said yes. He entered the first day, and the second, and the third, and the fourth, and the ... and every time you ask him he says yes, that he likes and wants to return.
Deep down I feel that I would be better at home and that he is too small to go to school (I feel this and I think about it), however I realize that he is Jon, not Armandito and that if he has chosen this path we should as parents do our adaptation period and get used to this new life.
If he were wrong, if he were not happy, if he cried when entering or leaving, if we saw that the light of his childhood began to go out, we would take him out of school. However, as I say, he is happy and, as I said a long time ago, he does not have to stumble in the same way that I stumbled and he does not have to live the frustrations in the same way that I experienced them.
Photos | Armando Bastida
In Babies and more | Period of adaptation yes or no ?, The period of adaptation to school, Adaptation to school
