Big

February, and our land is bleached, torched, scorched. Heatwaves longer and hotter than last year fill our days and nights. Our plans revolve around escaping the heat into air-conditioned buildings, going to the pool, and keeping our skin away from the sun.

In the midst of this, on 3 February the big day arrived. The day when Lara and Rhea started preschool. Not just two mornings a week preschool, but the real school-like preschool: 9 to 3.15pm, five days a week. We’re sending the girls to fulltime institutional care in a progressively French immersion program at the tender age of just over three-and-a-half.

Was I feeling mildly uneasy and guilty? You bet. But also glad that I didn’t have to face the First Day: Steve was doing drop offs and pick-ups two days a week, starting Monday.

We got them dressed, fed, teeth brushed, sunscreen on, lunches made and packed and ushered into the car, all before 8.15am. An impressive achievement right there. And we got ourselves presentable and fed by then as well.

About twenty-five minutes later, Steve walked them in, one in each hand. They found their classroom among the swarms of three and four-year-old children avec parents, deposited their lunchboxes, drinks and bags in the various fridge, pigeon-hole and basket where they belong and met one of their teachers, Marie, who tried to distract them from the impending separation with some textas and paper. They took up the invitation and did some scribbles. Another little girl at their table was drawing too. She drew a few circles then printed her own name down the bottom:

‘Kirsten.’

Meanwhile, Steve tried to extract himself from the room.

Lara and Rhea had other ideas. Rhea clung to one leg and Lara to the other, holding him down like an octopus with its meal. Their faces crumpled up and they cried. The more he tried to leave, the harder they cried. Steve comforted them for a while but it was just delaying the inevitable, so eventually he left them screaming, with a teacher holding each one.

I commiserated with him over the phone afterwards.

‘At least they have each other,’ people say to me. But no other child in their class appeared to have separation anxiety on that first day.

Time is a completely foreign concept for a three-and-a-half year old, so I prepared the girls for preschool by explaining that they would be big girls after we came back from our holiday, and because they would be big girls by then, they would be old enough to go to preschool like big girls.

‘You say that I’m a big girl but I’m not’, Lara said to me more than once after she had started preschool.

Three weeks in, they are mostly able to leave us in the mornings without tears, and when they are picked up in the afternoon, they are the only children to kiss and hug their teacher.

Big girls. And a big milestone.