A wide-brim red hat swamps her head. From underneath, I can see that her face is set, a sort of grimace on her lips. I wonder what she could be thinking. Is she excited? Does she feel sick? Will she miss me?
Last night as I said goodnight, she told me, “Before I cleaned my teeth, I went and hid so I could tell myself to be brave tomorrow.”
My heart clenched and I told her that it was good to be brave, but if she didn’t want to, she didn’t have to be. I told her it was okay to feel whatever feelings were inside. That no matter what she felt in the morning: scared, nervous, shy, happy, excited… it didn’t matter, because she was going to have a wonderful first day of Kindy.
I hugged her and hoped I was saying the right thing.
At the school hall a teacher ticked her name off the list. “You’re in Kindy Yellow,” she told us, and she called over Maddie’s Year 5 buddy. Steve and I exchanged looks, Kindy Yellow? We thought she was going to be in Red – the same as orientation. She’s been talking for days about being in Kindy Red. Will this bother her?
Of course though, it’s just a colour.
Her buddy has changed since orientation as well. I ask the teacher what happened to Jessie, her first buddy. She looks at me blankly for a moment and then says, “Oh Jessie? She’s left the school.”
The new buddy shakes our hands as she introduces herself. I’m touched by her formality, but as we head to the classroom, Maddie looks up at me and asks in a small voice, “Mummy, where’s Jessie?”
Later, while I’m at my mum’s house, watching the clock, waiting for the moment I can drive back to the school and pick her up again, Mum tells me about her own first day.
She thinks she walked to school with a boy called Kevin from across the road. She figures she must have because there is a photo of her and Kevin out the front of Grandma’s old weatherboard home in Hornsby. Her younger sister Elizabeth is peeking out from behind a corner of the house, watching them.
At school she remembers that her cousin Gary was also starting Kindy, but he was crying as they sat cross-legged on the floor. “It’s okay, he’ll stop crying in a minute,” my mother told the teacher. But Mrs Knowles just shushed her crossly.
At lunch time, Mum decided it must be the end of the school day. She took Gary by the hand and walked him all the way home, crossing busy roads together. But when she arrived, she sensed that she had done something wrong, realised that it must have been too early, perhaps it was the look of surprise on Grandma’s face when they turned up at the back door. So she told her mother that Mrs Knowles had to go home to do her washing.
Mum’s not sure if Grandma was cross with her. She thinks not. The next day, two big kids came up to her in the playground, “We have to watch you and make sure you don’t leave again.”
I can’t imagine my tiny daughter walking all the way home without me. Crossing roads, trying to find her way. I know it was a different time back then – but the image of my Mum trying so hard to be grown up, to do the right thing, all blonde curls and neat plain dress – the way I know she looked from the old black and white photos – makes me catch my breath in my throat.
In the afternoon when I pick Maddie up, she flies into my arms and hugs me. “I missed you!” I exclaim. “I missed you too,” she replies. She takes me for a walk through the gardens, shows me the school chickens, points out the wooden bridge that crosses the flowers, shows me how she uses the bubbler, how she can turn on the bathroom tap on her own, explains that she has saved her packet of Tiny Teddies to eat now, that she ate all of her grapes at lunch but not her sandwich, because it had lettuce on it.
“Tomorrow, I want the sandwich to be JUST ham and cheese. And I want it to be in triangles. Then I will eat it.”
I suspect she has settled into Kindy just fine.
