This Umbilical Cord Is Getting Heavy

It’s happening. Mia’s student-ship is being courted by the local preschools. When the first open-house invitation arrived a few weeks ago, it took me a minute to understand what they were implying. Mia?! But she’s too young for preschool - a few more years, maybe, and we’ll start thinking about this stuff.


Wait…we don’t have a few more years anymore. A few years from now, she’ll be ready for kindergarten. She’ll be walking around in a big building without me by her side. She’ll be dealing with kids and adults who don’t know her fears or frustrations. She’ll be…alone…tiny…subject to the actions of her peers. I won’t know what is going on every minute of her day, and this frightens me more than it should.


I’m just hoping there will be other mothers present on the first day of kindergarten with the same haunted and weepy look that I will certainly be sporting.


I refused to seriously look at the first open-house invitation, and Justin could barely coax a coherent reason from me. I promise I didn’t cry. Much. I just wasn’t ready to see those little school-house logos and alphabet banners in relation to my baby.


But the invitations have kept coming. All three of them. We’re being inundated - the nerve of those places. We’re being forced to start considering our options.


Mia’s current ‘school’ isn’t preschool at all - not for her age group anyway. She attends a Kid’s Day Out program 2 mornings a week at a local church, and it’s really more of a large play group. I’ve been really impressed with it because they seem to be getting the kids ready for preschool classes (which they offer in the same building).


But still, she’s too little for a full blown preschool, because if she’s in real preschool, that means she’s almost old enough for kindergarten. And if she’s old enough for kindergarten, she’s almost old enough to start leaving me. And if she’s old enough to leave me, I must find a way to keep her forever my baby and not let the world spin one moment more in its terrorizing path of mother/baby separation before I break down into an unmanageable heap of lonely-mommy mess.



I’m too attached to her right now to face this. Talk to me later when a tantrum has gotten the best of me. I’ll nail down her preschool plans then.