FROM THE HOME FRONT
Susan Martin: A familiar feeling every September
Updated: 09/05/08 11:47 AM
My most memorable first day of school was when I was 11. We had just moved into a new house, in a new town.
When my clock radio clicked on, I woke to the song – Yummy Yummy Yummy I got love in my tummy …
If there was any love in my tummy, it was getting knocked around by all the butterflies flitting around in there.
Talk about First Day Jitters.
Those butterflies returned in varying degrees every September after that. Even long after graduation and before having a child of my own, I still experienced that first day mix of excitement and nerves.
I often drove a longer route to work that first day of school, just so I could see the neighborhood children waiting at bus stops with their parents clutching coffee mugs –or their 5-year-old’s hand.
Our daughter is entering fourth grade this year, and the butterflies came back –for both of us.
She woke up once during the night and said she couldn’t sleep.
I, too, had a restless night –the kind you have when you have an early-morning flight and you’re afraid you’re going to sleep through the alarm.
Come morning, she ate too little breakfast. I drank too much caffeine.
“I can’t eat,” she told me. “It’s normal to be nervous,” I reassured her, giving her a hug.
Her friend called. “Are you dressed yet?” I heard our daughter ask her.
Back downstairs, I remained calm on the outside, but inside I wondered how she was going to carry a heavy backpack stuffed with school supplies, gym clothes and a lunch.
I listened to the weather and wondered if the classroom was going to be stifling on this 80-something-degree day.
When it was time to head to the bus stop I took along her hairbrush and proceeded to brush her hair until she finally said: “Mom, you have to stop.”
And then, with a final wave, she was gone. Later, too, were the butterflies.
I was there when she returned home that afternoon –her face full of smiles and her backpack unloaded of all those supplies.
“I loved it!” she said, bending down to hug the dog.
Then came Day 2. The appetite returned. A brief wardrobe crisis was quickly resolved. I opened the backpack only once to make sure her packed lunch was in there. I did not carry the hairbrush to the bus stop.
In fact, I even left for work before the bus arrived, resuming our normal routine of having her dad see her off.
I know several parents whose children started middle school this year. Several other friends have sent a child off to college for the first time.
We’re at the same school again this year, and we even have the same bus drivers as last year.
But as I was driving to work, I remembered our daughter’s first day of kindergarten. The older neighborhood kids on her bus had promised me they would look after her.
On Tuesday night, she promised the mom down the street that she would look after her daughter, who was boarding the bus for kindergarten the next morning.
Yes, things quickly are falling into a routine, and I’m not yet thinking about how a year from now she will be heading off to middle school for the first time.
Just as I was that morning when I was 11. Yummy Yummy Yummy I got love in my tummy …
