Preschool

My mother used to pull us to nursery school in a red wagon, a rope tied to the handle to give her more leverage. Our school was three flat blocks away. Sunset Co-Operative Nursery School, it was and is a play-based school with a huge amount of parent involvement and regular parent education meetings to help teach the adults how to be parents.

There was and is a tall red tower in the backyard--I don't think we could see the beach from the very top. I don't actually remember climbing it as a kid, though I know I did. I remember having to climb up a couple times during the months I worked there in my early 20s. Sometimes a little one would have a hard time getting back down and would bellow from on high until I came to talk them through it. What I remember from my own childhood is lying on my belly in the net hammocks, swinging and swinging and swinging and swinging, around and around and around. Both ends of the hammocks were tied up to a hook on the ceiling, creating a little pocket you could snuggle into. The two hammocks hung down from the ceiling above the middle of the rug where circle time would be held and according to my mom it was the first thing I did every day when I arrived.

I remember being called by a parent to the pay phone hanging on the wall in the room where we ate at little round tables a snack prepared by a parent. My little sister stood next to me and the voice on the other end of the phone was my dad telling me our baby brother Ira had been born. I was five, my sister three. I remember feeling important and far away and safe and forever changed.

I remember there were animals that sometimes ran around in the backyard where the tower and the sand and the climbing tree were. Bunnies and guinea pigs I think.

It's hard to separate my own childhood memories from the memories of visiting. My mom has told stories there for decades and I can't count the number of times I've unlatched the back fence to walk inside. It was and is a magical place. My nephews go there now and I am so glad for them even as I feel sad that my own kids aren't there.

How many people remember preschool? Credit it for who they turned out to be? Sunset has been part of my family's lexicon for more than thirty years--my dad was the president for a while, my mom still goes as a professional storyteller two or three times a week and teaches a parent ed class every year. My younger brother worked there for a while, so did I. We still know some kids, now parents themselves, from when we were students there. It's part of us.

It shows up in us in other ways too. Like the way I won't lift any of my children up to a place they can't climb themselves--we learned that there. If a kid can't climb up to that branch in the tree, she isn't ready to be there yet and is more likely to fall off and get hurt if you put her there. Or the way I think of my teacher Dorothy Ingram telling my mom that kids feel all their emotions at once, rather than adults who have learned how to focus on one and put the others away for a time. So when I was getting ready to fly to Maryland alone at age 5 to visit my grandparents and my mom worried that I didn't want to go because I was alternately freaked out and excited, Dorothy told her I was both of those things. I tell myself that as an adult--you can feel more than one thing at a time, Megan. That doesn't make you crazy or uncertain, it makes you a person.

My sister, brother and I are not all the same. We have as many differences as we do similarities. Maybe. Though now that I write that I'm not even sure how to quantify that. We are definitely not unalike. One of the biggest things we all share is a certain ease in the world. I credit a large part of that to being allowed to be full out, fully appreciated kids. We were surrounded by adults who were committed to learning how to respectfully care for and raise children. People were interested in how we were learning. We were allowed to choose our own adventures at school--not all the time and not without guidelines but we were very free. It was a co-cop and we were a community, growing together. I'm so grateful that I got to go there.

As a parent I have a lot of beliefs about how things should or shouldn't be done. Not too much TV, not too much sugar, sharing meals as a family seated together at the table, rules and boundaries are important. Not too many toys, not too many presents, not staying up too late, being respectful to others. A co-op preschool. Being raised in a multi-cultural city. . .
Here is where I feel obliged to share that my kids watch more TV than I'd like, eat way more sugar and junk food than I'd like. . .and well, most of these are guidelines that I aim for and often miss. It's humbling. It's also been an exercise in exploring why I feel attached to certain ideas. Often I face that it's because that's how I was raised so I'm attached to it as "they way" but it doesn't necessary need to stay the way. Still more often I have to face that with four children so close in age, some things I/we do in an effort to stay somewhat sane. Probably most parents do.

Our children all attend a co-op, though they're not in the same one right now. They each attend school two mornings a week for two to two and a half hours at a time. The Bigs go to one school, the Littles go to another. I have Tuesdays and Thursdays off work and I am always working at one of the schools, doing my co-op shift. There's a per kid requirement and we have a lot of kids. It's hectic and neither school matches my memory of what Sunset was, which makes me sad. But.

I like them more than the other schools I've visited.
They are more affordable than some of the schools I've chosen not to visit.
There are so many adults who care about my kids and care about me because of these schools.
Three of our four children are always excited to go to school. The other one is always not excited but almost always very smiley at pick up.
They are strong. They are capable. They do art. They climb and run and play dress up and eat healthy snacks and ride bikes and build. They sing songs and know their colors and use scissors.

Looking ahead to next year gets tricky and for this reason we haven't settled on a plan for how and where and when they will attend school. If they all attend the co-op (either of them) it would mean school five mornings a week, but not for all the kid on all the days. Our childcare situation doesn't lend itself to having someone else drive and pick up regularly. My work schedule doesn't lend itself so much co-oping. And so. . .we are in figure-it-out mode. Combined with ignore-it-mode, hoping that it will resolve itself.

This is not a terrible problem to have and we will find a resolution. I find myself often weighing values in my head--consistency vs. community vs. parent involvement vs. kindergarten readiness (emotional and developmental). It's a lot. We will get it figured out and the kids will be alright. But/and it's an opportunity to really sit with what matters. What we're hoping for and what we're willing to do or change to make it happen.