It is the time of late spring when nursery schools everywhere are discharging their diminutive clientele with farewell parties and ceremonies.
Birds are chirping, sunlight is filtering down through the trees, and in tiny tot playgrounds and colorful classrooms across Washington, the mothers of nursery-age children are suddenly gulping and weeping.
“I was fine until they started playing that music,” one whispered to me as we quietly sobbed into the tissues that someone hastily began passing around the minute we heard the first acoustic strains of Cat Stevens’ “If you want to sing out, sing out.”
It was the third line of the song, “There’s a million things to be, you know that there are,” that did me in. As it played, we were watching a slide show that showed our happy children moving through the seasons: We saw them frisking in autumn leaves, laughing in the snow, and enjoying the buds and leaves of spring — visibly more mature than they had been in September.
Oh, the pathos! The rushing river of time! The end of Eden! When the slide show finished, pretty much every mother was in tears and every father was coughing and blinking.
The children seemed to find our emotion rather puzzling. As they rose from their circle-time rug and came to join us, they looked at our splotchy faces with curiosity.
“Why are you crying?” one little girl asked her mother.
“Sometimes we cry when we are happy,” the woman replied. “Seeing those pictures of you made me so happy that I cried.”
“Oh. Are you done now?”
The mother laughed. “Yes.”
The adults standing around her laughed, too, but in a rueful way that suggested a shared understanding. They knew that the mother had to lie, and that the child could not in any case begin to understand why she wept.
Small children know in a vague way that they’re growing up, but they can’t fully comprehend it.
They can’t know that everything changes, that nothing stays the same, or that the mother and father they adore as deities today will develop embarrassing character flaws at almost the exact time they enter adolescence.
They do not know that when their parents’ car pulls out of the nursery school parking lot today, after all the photos have been taken, all the teachers’ gifts bestowed and all the best wishes exchanged, that they can never go back.
As each year passes, their teachers will get progressively less cuddly. One day, a teacher may even yell at them. Today they’re happily strapped into cushioned car seats. In little more than a decade, they’ll be chafing at our pleading to drive safely, slow down, to please be careful, for God’s sake.
The children don’t know any of this — they can’t. For them, the last day of nursery school will come and go and pass from memory.
But we parents, we know what’s coming, we know what’s ending, and for us it is a poignant day, indeed.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
