Three mornings a week my oldest goes to pre-school and I just have my little one at home. On these mornings life is so easy. He is so glad to have the toys to himself that I barely have to entertain him, so pleased is he to be able to have Thomas the Tank Engine running around the track without big brother bossing him about and telling him how to play: “No William, you do it like THIS.”
One morning a week both boys are at pre-school. On these mornings I have two and a half hours to do whatever I want. Whatever. I. Want. Sometimes this means doing the cleaning, which is near-impossible when the boys are at home and hell-bent on killing each other or when the little one goes into paroxysms of sobbing when he hears the vacuum cleaner start up. Most of the time it means lying on the sofa with my feet up, a cup of coffee and a book – at least until the novelty of all this free time wears off, or until the next baby comes along, which is much sooner than I would like.
The downside of all this freedom is that both boys absolutely hate going to school. The older one likes it once he is there but every morning the tone is set by my answer to his burning question: “Mummy, is it a school day today?” Sometimes this question strikes him at 1 o’clock in the morning and sometimes again at 5 o’clock in the morning and he has to get out of bed and wake me up to answer the question.
I drag both boys into the school entrance sobbing (them, not me) and deposit one or both of them in their respective classrooms and then heave a sigh of relief as I leave, for they don’t endear themselves to me with all their theatrics. I may take the little one out of school because if he is unhappy while he is there then he is probably too young to be going. But Harry is nearly four, he likes it once he is there, he is clearly learning a great deal and the tears stop within about five seconds of me leaving (after anywhere between one and ten hours of getting psyched up, teary and anxious about going. Ten hours of his moaning and whining is like a form of torture.)
His anxiety about going has got so bad that I have actually started to ignore any reference he makes about school and the fact that he doesn’t want to go. I honestly don’t know how else to deal with it. Reasoning with him just seems to make his tears worse so I have found ways to distract him from thinking about school and when the inevitable arrives, such as the question “Is it a school day today Mummy?” or the school bag comes out, I can’t/won’t lie so I have adopted a Mary Poppins no-nonsense attitude to nursery. I haven’t quite broken out into song about it but clearly it may not be long before I do.
On the upside, I have made many new friends among the mothers because we make quite a spectacle going into school – the heavily pregnant woman with two sobbing toddlers – and several have used the fact that their children too were the same by way of introduction (although curiously none of their children seem to cry now in their stories) and so my children’s unhappiness has brought me many friends. See, I can see the light at the end of any dark tunnel…
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