The Mom Who Cried on the First Day of School
By Molly Flinkman
@molly_flinkman
“I just don’t get why it’s so sad,” I said. “I mean, it’s just kindergarten.”
It was the first day of a new school year—back in my former life when I taught Shakespeare and grammar conventions to ninth graders—and I was scrolling Facebook in my friend’s classroom during lunch. Another of our co-workers had just sent her oldest daughter to kindergarten, and she had marked the occasion with a long post full of crying emojis, caps-lock, and so many words. It seemed a bit dramatic to me.
I had one child at the time—a toddler—and a baby on the way. I was a few years from this milestone, and I couldn’t grasp the sadness of sending a kid to school. Wasn’t it supposed to be a happy occasion? Wasn’t it an exciting new phase? Why—honestly why—all the tears?
Cut to my oldest daughter’s first day of kindergarten four years later.
There was a mom in the lobby with a newborn baby in a car seat carrier on the floor next to her. She stood with her back angled toward the front door; she wasn’t facing anything, really—just hiding her face from the backpack-clad kids and other parents who made their way in and out of the building behind her. She tried to be inconspicuous but between her periodic gasps for breath and the shake of her shoulders, she was not succeeding. She was somewhere in between crying and outright hysterical, and, oh, that woman was me.
I had just dropped my own tiny child off in a room with other tiny children, and I kept it together just long enough to ensure my daughter did not see me cry.
As soon as we made it back to the lobby, I sent my husband, Jake, back to her classroom. “Just check on her,” I said. “Make sure she’s okay.”
She was. Okay, that is.
I, on the other hand, was, well, it’s hard to put an exact finger on what I was because “sad” is far from the right word.
And I don’t just cry on the first days of school now. Since that August morning in the elementary school lobby, I have also cried on last days of school as well as at Christmas programs, cheerleading camps, soccer games, and even during one random Tuesday drive when I happened to think about an upcoming piano recital. If one of my kids does a thing, I will, more likely than not, cry during that thing. It’s who I am now—that mom who cries.
Surprisingly, I didn’t cry at the birth of any of our four children. (I mean, except, maybe, for the surprise, unmedicated delivery of the third, but that’s a different kind of crying.) In the span of a little over five years, four babies were placed in my arms fresh from my body and the tears of overwhelming happiness never came. Instead, I always felt a little numb—overwhelmed, yes, but more by uncertainty than joy.
Who were these kids? I didn’t know anything about them in those first moments. They were strangers to me.
So, I didn’t cry. I just sort of stared at each of our kids blindly—hoping I’d figure it all out as the days went by.
And the days have gone by. This fall, I will send my third kid to kindergarten. A few weeks ago, we took our dog for a walk up the bike trail, and I asked my son if he was excited for school to start.
He looked up at me with a smile and nodded.
“What are you most excited about?” I asked.
“All of it!” he said and then, because his body likes to stay in a constant state of fast forward, he ran ahead of me.
Our boy with the long lashes is headed to kindergarten. With this thought, a familiar tightness returned to my throat. I watched him laugh and run down the trail, and, in that moment, I could see everything.
I could see the early morning in the delivery room, 27 minutes after Jake and I had arrived, when the doctor—with urgency in her eyes—told me I needed to get him out fast. He came out silently moments later and was whisked away before I even got a good look at his face. Make sure he’s okay, I said to Jake, as if he had any control over the outcome. He left my side and came back minutes later. He’s fine, he said. He’s going to be fine.
I could see his skinny baby legs wobbling on my mom’s hardwood floors. I’d stand him on his feet, scoot back, and hold my arms out. It took him a full weekend of falling on his padded butt to figure it out, but then he did—three steps forward and into my arms.
I could see him waiting in the preschool car line last winter—a bag of snow pants and boots in his hand. “Are you sure everyone else will have their snow things?” he kept asking. I watched him crane his neck toward other kids walking up to the door. It mattered to him that he wouldn’t be the only one. I had never realized how much that mattered to him before.
I could see him on a hospital bed with an angry, red skin infection on his leg. His doctor had ordered an MRI to try to determine how deep the infection was. I wasn’t allowed inside the room with the giant tube, so I sent his green, stuffed dinosaur, Dynomite, in with him. Hug him tight, I said. They will come and get me as soon as you wake up. And then I stood there in the waiting room and watched the anesthesiologist wheel him away from me.
Maybe I didn’t know each of our four kids when we first met, but I know them now—better even than they know themselves. I have seen each one encounter difficulty, pain, and joy again and again and again. I know their worries. Their strengths. Their scars. I have learned their natural inclinations and worked to understand their inner selves. In all the days and months and years that have passed since their birth days, I have borne witness to their entire lives.
So, it makes sense to me why the emotion is always right at the surface—even that day on the bike trail, weeks before school even began. Who our kids are today is just as vivid a picture to me as who they have been every other day. I see everything, all the time—all the ways our kids have grown and everything they have overcome. The tears aren’t rooted in sadness; they are an outpouring of pride. They are a release of gratitude because somehow I was granted this opportunity to watch these four little souls learn to stand and dance and fly.
I don’t fight the crying anymore. It comes when it comes. And I certainly don’t roll my eyes at the other mothers with tears in their eyes. We stand together now in classrooms and in auditoriums and on sidelines.
Isn’t this incredible? I want to ask them. Can you believe we are this lucky?
Molly Flinkman is a freelance writer from central Iowa where she lives with her husband, Jake, and their four kids. A lover of houseplants, neutral colors, and good books, she loves to write about how her faith intersects the very ordinary aspects of her life and hopes her words will encourage and support other women along the way. You can connect with Molly on Instagram or through her monthly newsletter, Twenty Somethings.