We Dropped Our Son Off At Playgroup For The First Time 😢

It’s been an emotional week. I saw a piece in the New York Times about the high cost of childcare in the city. It’s true. It’s high. But my wife and I have found a nice, affordable cooperative playgroup in the West Village. It’s called Downing Street. Our 2.5-year-old son Freddy started there last Friday, and I’ve signed up to be the co-chair. He’ll be going two days a week for the next school year. 

Yesterday morning I dropped Freddy off and left him. It was, I suppose, his first day at what you might call “school.” Even though it’s a playgroup. And I only left him for an hour. It still feels like we’ve gone through a rite of passage as a family. 

We’ve been gearing up for this. I take him to a nursery at church on Sunday mornings. We drop him with the ladies who care for little children. At first, he cried a lot when I left him behind and was close to inconsolable. Now when I drop him, he still says “daddy, daddy” and cries a bit. But it doesn’t take long until he moves along and after a few minutes he’s playing in a happy way. 

This morning was the same. The playgroup teacher, Nancy, texted me two minutes after I left to say he’d moved on. She sent a picture of him putting magnets on an easel. I now realize my “rip the Band-Aid off” approach to separating from him has worked. I’ve never enjoyed it, but I haven’t lingered too long with him. I always leave when I’m supposed to, even though it takes a lot of strength to do it. But there’s an odd quality to the grief that comes with it later. He’ll never need me as much as he has until now. Not in the same way. And those first days are over. We’re into the next phase. Writing that paragraph brings it home, how I’m feeling, now. 

It’s a lot. 

I read a nice phrase recently in a diary called The Folded Clock by Heidi Julavits. She said when you fall in love, it’s not like you’re aware of falling. It’s more like a rugby tackle. One minute you’re running on the pitch, the next you’re on your back. You don’t fall in love. You get smashed by it. Grief in parenting is like that. Grief, in general, I’ve found, is like that. One day you realize you’re in a different state than you were before, and that’s that. It’s sudden. It smashes you. Then you must pick up the pieces if you can. 

It’s wonderful that something so massive can still happen to a person, even one as jaded as I am. I would also prefer to be having smaller feelings about all this. The big thing I’m happy about is that I listened to everybody’s advice. They said make the most of the early years because they don’t come twice. I’m lucky that I’ve been able to work from home since starting my business. While I’ve spent a lot of time in my home office, I’ve rarely been more than ten feet from Freddy as he’s grown. That is a rare privilege. I do wish that sometimes I’d worked less and spent more time with Freddy, but you can’t be perfect in life. You do the best you can and try to avoid being too hard on yourself. And I don’t know if I mentioned it, but childcare in New York is expensive. We’ve had to pay for it somehow. Thanks to my wonderful clients!

From here I’m sure the rites of passage will come thick and fast. I’m conscious, as an older adult, of how time speeds up as you age. The way they used to tell me it would when I was a little boy. I remember a real smugness to being a youngster. I used to think it was super being so young and so full of potential. I felt bad for old people because I realized they would die soon, and I still had so many years in front of me. I was an odd little lad, I suppose, to think so much in such a morbid way about life. But children have much more sophisticated philosophical thoughts than we tend to give them credit for. They have incredible imaginations.

I was also self-centered as a child, because if you had told me such monumental moments were waiting for me along the way, I would have had more respect for the aged. Indeed, I might even have been impatient to get on with the whole process. Youth is best enjoyed by the young, I guess. And middle age, by the middle-aged. I’m so happy for our boy that he gets his life to look forward to. Best of luck, lad. I know you’re going to do so well and I’m proud of you. Everybody thinks you’re fantastic, even though we both know you can be a complete nightmare after a packet of M&Ms. I still love you. It’s unconditional. Like being tackled on a rugby pitch.