Chapter Ten: Pre-school

“But whatever the era, whatever the times, one thing will never change: Fathers and mothers, if you have children, they must come first. You must read to your children and you must hug your children and you must love your children. Your success as a family, our success as a society, depends not on what happens in the White House but on what happens inside your house.”
-Barbara Bush

Up to this point in the book, there has been an inordinate amount of blubbering going on. Please understand that this is far from the normal happenings at the Hancock house. When I told a friend that I was writing a book based on my experiences as a mother, he laughed and asked, “Did you include the time I came over and the wall was painted with yogurt?” I found that really funny, but not because I remembered the incident with a humor that had been missing when it occurred. I was amused because I didn’t even remember that. Cleaning yogurt, and anything else you can imagine, off the walls is extremely routine.

If I were to write based on anything funny, gross, idiotic, maddening, adorable or just plain amazing that my kids have done, it would be a never-ending recital of everything that occurs in my life. I’m sure any mother’s story would be the same. I decided that this book would be about the experiences that shape my parenting philosophy. Therefore, I am only including those things that are significant enough that they made me really reevaluate my life.

There are a few transitional times in life where everything changes. For me, one of those times was in the fall after Ryan had turned three. I decided, with a lot of reservations, to put him in preschool for 16 hours a week. It was very hard to know that my little boy, who I had previously been with for nearly every moment since his birth, would be away from me for so long. I would no longer have complete control over what he was exposed to, and I had my doubts about that. But, I believe very passionately in giving my children every educational opportunity. I did my homework and all the research seemed to point to pre-school as a significant head start. I couldn’t hold on to my baby forever.

At first, I thought it would be best to take him to school myself everyday. It wasn’t very far from where we lived. But I came to the conclusion that hauling all three of my kids to and from that school everyday simply wasn’t worth it. He was in the afternoon session and the bus would pick him up at our house at about quarter-after noon.

The first day was a parent orientation. I went to his classroom, with Ryan, Sean and Chloe, and met his teacher. She struck me as very matter-of-fact and to-the-point. I wondered how well someone like that would relate to a bunch of three-year-olds, but didn’t think too much about it. She seemed nice enough. Besides, if Ryan hated it, I would pull him out.

She gave me another piece of information. Ryan would be required to have a backpack the next day. As soon as Nathan got home from school, I went shopping. After three stores, I was pretty discouraged. Nobody seemed to have anything for younger kids. Many of the backpacks were on wheels, meant to be dragged. Certainly my little boy didn’t need that.

Finally, I stopped at Target, determined to buy whatever they had even if it wasn’t what I wanted. It was quite a search. They had backpacks in with their accessories, toys, seasonal and sports gear. But even the ones in the toy section were too big for Ryan. I finally found one in a clearance bin with the camping gear. It was shaped like a big, round bug, complete with plastic eyes, antenna, and two little legs dangling down. It wasn’t what I’d hoped for, but it was cheap.

Halfway home, I realized I was about to walk into the house with a backpack for Ryan and nothing for Sean. I am not someone who thinks it’s wrong to tell my kids “no.” But this whole school thing was already shaping up to be a major heartache for poor little Sean. He had never spent more than an hour without his brother. I pulled into the parking lot of a drug store and bought a coloring book, so Sean and I would have something to work on after Ryan left the next day.
As soon as I walked into the house, two boys ran over to me. I presented them each with their gifts. Ryan was delighted. Sean glanced down at his coloring book and then said, in a rather pathetic voice, “I want a backpack.” My heart sank. I ushered them both upstairs for the belated bed time that had been ignored until mommy came home.

Ryan took his backpack to bed with him. Sean didn’t cry, but he made the saddest face and held out one hand to his brother. He said, “Share with me, please.” Ryan reached over and handed Sean the backpack. Sean cuddled it and they both went to sleep. Despite Nate’s objections that Sean wouldn’t even remember the incident in the morning, I walked right back outside and went to Target, hoping there was another backpack.

My time and money weren’t wasted. Ryan woke up first the next day and came into my room holding his backpack. Sean walked in a few minutes later. His face fell at the sight of his brother and he reached out one imploring hand as he said, “It’s my backpack.” All of you mother’s know how sad it is to see your child disappointed. And you also know the happiness that it brought me to pull out the other backpack and watch Sean’s face light up. I got a marker and we wrote their names on their backpacks. Sean wore his everywhere we went for weeks.

I had Ryan ready for school hours ahead of time. I had been prepping him for days about what would happen when the school bus came. He was ready. He was excited. The bus arrived a half-hour before the time I had been told at parent orientation. I jumped up and threw Ryan’s coat and backpack on him. The assistant came up to our door and took his hand. He glanced back at me, but his helper pulled him forward. As they were walking to where the bus waited, the driver shouted at me to please have him ready and outside beforehand. I tried to explain that I had been given the wrong time.

Sean ran out of my front door. He tried to get past me to the bus. I grabbed him and carried him to the house while the bus drove off. He kicked and screamed the whole time. Once in the house, with the door locked, I put Sean down. He immediately ran to the door and tried to open it. He kicked and he screamed. He cried and shouted for his brother. Through the whole ordeal he kept clutching that silly backpack. I knew how he felt. My first baby was gone. I didn’t get to kiss him and wish him luck. I didn’t even wave. It was really sad.

That first day, I stared at the clock the whole time. It seemed like the minutes were creeping by. Sean didn’t help matters much. He kept running to the front door and looking hopefully at me with comments like, “Let’s go find Ryan.” Whenever he heard a car pass in front of our house, he would look up, with as gasp, and say, “Ryan’s Home!” I worried about whether Ryan was okay with his first experience away from home. I worried about whether he felt sad that I hadn’t hugged him goodbye. I worried that he would never want to go back.

The one big thing I learned from this whole experience is how difficult it is to get information out of a three-year old. When Ryan came home he told me about the food they had eaten at school, but that was all. I started to ask direct questions. “Did you meet new friends?” He said, “Girls.” But that was the most telling answer I got. When I asked if he liked school, he replied, “Food and snacks and come home.”

That first week we started to settle into our new life. Sean did a little better each day. The hours between when Ryan left and when he came home began to seem less daunting. On the last day of his first week I received a phone call from Ryan’s teacher minutes before his class as scheduled to end. She launched into this huge story about Ryan playing on the playground. My heart leapt into my throat. What had happened to my sweet little boy? Why had I ever let him out of my sight? It seemed like an eternity before she got to the point. He had bumped his head. I laughed out of relief. Of course he had bumped his head. He always did. He had survived that first week of school.

Over the weekend, we went over to visit Brandon and Serena, some friends from our ward. The original plan was for Nate and Brandon to go golfing while Serena and I stayed home to watch the kids. But the men got distracted by a football game and so Serena and I decided we would go shopping while they vegetated.

While I was gone, Ryan went out into the back yard and started to swing on a freestanding hammock. He fell and smacked the side of his face on the metal frame. I came back to find him cowering in his dad’s lap, while Nate tried, unsuccessfully, to ice the large lump beside his eye. He was also developing a spectacular black eye. We kissed him better and took pictures to send to his grandparents.

Monday Ryan went back to school, black eye and all. Tuesday I was getting him ready when I received a phone call from DCFS. I was told not to let Ryan get on the bus because the social worker was on her way to talk to him. His school teacher had seen the black eye and called the child abuse hotline. I was being investigated for child abuse. I launched into a desperate attempt to clean my house before the government representative arrived.

The social worker was a mid-sixties, very sweet woman. She took Ryan aside and asked what had happened. He told her he had fallen off a chair at Serena’s house. Then, she interviewed me. She wrote down phone numbers for our doctor, my parents, Brandon and Serena and promised to call and interview Nate later. That was the worst part of all. My husband was not going to take this very well.

After the social worker left, I loaded the kids into the car and took Ryan to school. The teacher, who had made her accusation anonymously, seemed very surprised to see me. I told her that someone had called DCFS about Ryan’s black eye and that’s why he didn’t come on the bus. She made a noncommittal noise. I sighed and asked how Ryan was doing in class. She told me he was doing okay, except that he would push adults away when they tried to touch him. He would tell them they were hurting him. I left the school, absolutely certain who reported me for child abuse, but very insecure about how to handle the situation.

Most of my family and friends told me to tell the teacher off. If there are truly only two types of people in the world, I think they can be divided into the teller offers and the non-teller offers. Some people like to confront the situation directly and “talk it out.” These are the same people that often ask to speak to supervisors and demand better service. They are the ones that feel those not like them are keeping their feelings bottled up. The non-teller offers feel like there are ways to deal with conflict other than confronting it directly. They don’t think they have any less closure by their methods.

I don’t tell people off. I can’t. You see, making someone else defensive or else miserable doesn’t make me feel better. Not that I think the teller offers are bad people. I am certain their methods work for them. They just wouldn’t work for me. I feel like a relationship rarely survives a telling off in tact. You’ll always have that between you. While I didn’t really care about my relationship with this woman, I recognized that she would, consciously or subconsciously, treat Ryan different if we had an altercation.

I thought about asking if he could be transferred to a different class. I considered just pulling him out of school. What I came up with was a little different. She had been teaching Ryan for exactly four days. At some point during the year she would realize that he was an amazing, well-loved little boy. At some point after knowing me a bit better, she’d realize that she had acted rashly. I would facilitate the coming of that day.

The next morning, when the bus came, Ryan refused to get on it. The bus driver, who seemed to have largely escaped the insanity of everyone else at the school, told me to just put him on the bus. She said her son had the same problem after she had personally driven him to school. She seemed very intelligent and level headed. I would come to appreciate the down to Earth quality of that bus driver, through all the bureaucracy I dealt with the rest of the year.

As soon as I went into the house though, I was overcome with the fact that I had just forced my three-year-old, kicking and screaming, back to the woman who thought I was a child abuser. I stared at the clock the rest of the day. I decided that Ryan didn’t have to go to school that year. It could wait.

That evening when I put him in the bath, I asked Ryan about school. He said, “They hurt and hurt me.” I knew exactly where this was coming from. Sean had gotten in the habit of hanging on my back, with his arms looped around my neck. It cut of my windpipe and I always said, “Sean, stop it. You’re hurting mommy.” Ryan had started saying it as well. It wasn’t surprising. When I was pregnant with Chloe, he went around for nine months telling anyone who would listen that his back hurt.

Despite knowing that he wasn’t really being hurt, I told him that he didn’t ever have to go to school again. He got really quiet. I said, “Ryan, do you want to go to school?”
He said, in a sad little whine, “Yes. I love my teacher.” I repeated it, just to be sure I’d heard correctly. He said, “I love him. I love Miss Ishell.” So, instead of telling Ms. Michelle exactly how angry and humiliated I was by her idiotic actions, I wrote her a note. I told her that the first week of school had been difficult and that I had thought about pulling Ryan out. Then I told her what Ryan had said about her. I told her I hoped the story made her smile. That was it. I didn’t mention DCFS.

A couple weeks later she called me to tell me that Ryan had wet his pants. At the end of the phone call she said, “And, I just wanted to tell you that he’s doing really well. He laughs all the time and really enjoys class. I’m glad you let him stay.” I thanked her and told her to let us know if we could ever help with anything. It wasn’t an apology, but it was close enough. Closure came before the child abuse case was closed.

In the end, we had many more happy times than sad. There was the day Sean ran out to the bus to meet Ryan. Sean started unzipping his brother’s coat. Ryan threw his arms around Sean and said, “I missed you.” Sean patted his brother’s back and muttered, “Missed you, too.”

There was the day Ryan came home with a piece of candy clutched tightly in one fist. He held it out to me and asked me to open it. I was perfectly clear that he’d been told he couldn’t have it on the bus, so he had simply held the precious morsel until he arrived home. Sean picked that moment to wander over. I had just handed the open candy to Ryan. He looked at it and then at his brother, who had noticed it and was starting to whine. Ryan extended his hand and Sean grabbed the candy and ran off. My sweet Ryan looked sadly at his empty hand for one instant and then smiled and said, “Sean likes it.”

There was the time Ryan pulled away from a frustrated lady who was trying to push him onto the bus. He shouted, “I have to say goodbye to my best friend.” He waved one little had and said, “Bye, Sean. I’ll be right back.” Then he let himself be put on the bus.

Oh sure, there are plenty of bites, scratches and screams. I get frustrated about the endless housework and the seemingly wasted days. But, when people smile condescendingly and tell me how full my hands are, I am absolutely certain that Heavenly Father has made my hands just the size they need to be to handle all of the blessings I’m carrying home to him. I am grateful everyday for that.