Smarts/smites
/So I just had to go and broadcast to the entire Interwebs about how Isaac was trotting off so happily to junior kindergarten and preschool. Just had to, didn’t I? And now God has smited me. Smote me? Watever. God is punishing me in the form of a four-year-old who has reverted to weeping and leg-clinging each school-day morning. (My friend Vikki —whom, not coincidentally, I met on the Internet — says that God ignores the Internet, but we all know that that’s simply not true. God watches the Internet, all zillion pages of it, intensely, looking for reasons to smite people. Because, of course, the Internet is pure evil. If you’re on the Internet right now, GET OFF. Your eternal salvation depends on it.)
(Still here? Don’t come crying to me when you get smoted.)
We don’t know why – my punitive God theory aside, of course – Isaac has so suddenly reverted, but it may also have to do with the fact that Rachel, hideously, had the nerve to go to a conference in Toronto the week before last, in the process utterly derailing Isaac’s life. Of course, we made the tactical error of telling him about her departure in the morning IMMEDIATELY BEFORE PRESCHOOL, thereby creating (or, perhaps, reactivating) a negative preschool association. Next time, assuming Rachel is ever allowed to leave town again, we’ll time that one a bit better.
The only upside to the situation is that Isaac has become slightly more enamoured of me. It’ll fade fast (GOD: See? I know.), but for the moment I’m soaking it up: the little boy who bounces, meowing, into the bedroom in the morning to climb in next to me: “Mama, can we still play the game where you’re the princess and I’m the kitten who hurt his foot? Because an evil wizard did a magic spell on your knife and it cut me? And then it cut off all my fur so I’m cold?” The little boy who nestles into my lap while I write early in the morning, my arm snaking around him to reach the page, not minding the inconvenience, the loss of a few minutes’ sleep.
The teachers smile and gently take his hands as we peel him off us in the mornings. They’ve seen it before. He’s not the only one. (“Ah, JK mornings,” one of the teachers remarked to Rachel as she stood, surrounded by wailing kindergartners in the courtyard, “all those tears.”) We’ve seen it before. But still, it smarts.