Bringing up Boys – when they don’t want to kiss you at the school gate

The First Day At School

It has finally come to pass the day when my eldest squirms out of my embrace hastily muttering: “Mummm! Not here.”

And then scampers off to class on his own.

I should have seen it coming; I’ve spent all Summer banging on at him to grow up and get with the programme. It shouldn’t have come as a big surprise.

But it did.

And off he went to his new class, a school new year and I wasn’t with him. As I look after him walking away on his own, school bag slung across his back, hands in pockets, feet already scuffing the ground, I remember so vividly that first day at school.

Everything was so stiff and shiny, new and invariably way too large. I recall my enforced jolliness as I tried not to cry lest I start him off, not that he seemed that bothered then if I remember rightly. He was just too excited. I took photos of all of his class that day. And looking now at the photograph they seem so small and young and yet at the time I thought the exact opposite. I thought gone is my toddler and in front of me a fresh faced schoolboy already years older than I remembered him from only the day before.

And now six years later a big part of me wants to hurtle after him and grab his hand so we can march in together but it’s not a very cool (sorry he hates me using that word as it’s SO last year) good thing to do is it?

The whole point of my mithering him all over the holidays was just so he could be like this – independent, confident, grown-up.

A separate entity.

Someone who can stand up for himself without needing an adult by him in order to get on with his life.

I have succeeded in my goal. All that hard work over the Summer has paid off.

So why do I feel so bereft?