The Boy Goes to School

I wonder what would happen if we all gathered up the things we swore we would do one way but ended up doing differently and put them together into one big This Is Your Life slide show illustrating how sadly mistaken most of us are when we predict what our lives will turn into.

I'd like to think I would have a great big laugh and then spend the next week thinking about how glad I am that I didn't dedicate my life to working in the DC Public Defenders Office (that job prospect withered when my interviewer asked how aggressive I was willing to be with the 80-year-old woman accusing my client of rape; um, not very) or to sitting at a beaten old desk somewhere in New England wearing an off-white fisherman's sweater and long permed hair that looks like Andie McDowell's in St. Elmo's Fire writing short stories that are short on everything but precious, tormented descriptions of what it's like to feel depressed (something I'm sure I would have done after college if only I'd had the confidence to apply for the advanced fiction writing class despite learning in the intermediate fiction writing class that my short stories were short on everything but precious, tormented descriptions of what it's like to feel depressed).

The more time has gone by and the more times I've changed course, the more I glory in the unexpected change of plans. There are those who have accused me, in various ways, of being a bit of a dilettante or who view me with the bemused fondness one might feel for a neighbor's small child as having a rather broad flaky streak for someone who has a degree from Columbia Law School and once worked for a big, stuffy DC law firm. (My fondest memory of my 21 months there was when the one openly gay associate told me I had taken over the mantle of the single female associate who tested the boundaries of acceptable lawyer dress. In the early nineties, that meant, most notably, my mini-skirted tangerine DKNY suit paired with black stockings and two-inch black pumps that hurt my feet but looked kind of sexy. I still miss that outfit.)

So I forgive myself for not following my declared intent to post to my blog every day, er, every week, um, well, I had a really big legal project that took me two weeks and it seemed important to finish it even though it meant that the two people who read my blog regularly have given up on me and everyone else has forgotten that I am supposedly writing about our life in Asheville and in fact has perhaps forgotten that I moved to Asheville. I forgive myself for writing three and a half pages of my yoga teacher-sleuth series before being distracted by the aforementioned legal project (hey, a girl's gotta pay the bills) and never managing to have that conversation with the literary agent who happened to be an usher at my wedding and therefore is probably being kinder to me than my meager output justifies. I forgive myself for the dwindling time and attention I have been giving to my yoga practice and for not following all the generous admonitions of friends and former students to start teaching it again. I even forgive myself for not breastfeeding for an entire year, although that turned out to be a bit of an impossibility, a story for another day and another medium in case anyone is really all that interested.

Most of all -- and here, finally, is the point of this post-- I forgive myself for sending The Boy to preschool before he could walk.

That was my very clear plan. I work at home, I like having The Boy at home, and when we were in Long Beach we had the most amazing sitter five hours a day so I could do my work. Which mostly meant the work of washing bottles and doing laundry and shopping for groceries and getting the occasional pedicure. But that wasn't her fault.

How much better would it be, I fantasized, to have the same arrangement in our new Asheville home, where I have a large, sunny office instead of the cramped end of the kitchen table that was my office in Long Beach. Imagine how much more work I'd get done when I no longer had to hide behind my laptop while The Boy was being fed lest he become distracted and abandon the bottle for loudly voiced demands that Mommy come play with him. I believed babysitting rates would be lower in Asheville so I could have more hours closed up in my little sanctuary and I would not only get tons of writing and legal work done but would also have time to read all of the New York Times best novels of 2006 and listen to a daily podcast of Fresh Air.

I was, of course, wrong about every detail of this fantasy, although that's not why The Boy ended up in preschool at the Jewish Community Center.

Here's another one of those moments when I wonder if the person reading this is someone who knows me well enough to cry, "The JCC?! Who cares if she put The Boy in preschool before he can walk? You want to talk shocking, she joined the JCC! Next thing you know, the most non-Jewish Jew I know is going to tell me she's had The Boy circumcised so she can have him Bar Mitzvahed in a bizarre cross-cultural ceremony where every Hebrew prayer is followed by a chant of ohm and The Boy reads from the Torah while sitting in lotus pose1"

Never fear. I remain what The Hubby lovingly calls a "self-hater." I still hide when my friends send out invitations to seders and I never know when Hannukah is and I probably wouldn't fast on Yom Kippur if I didn't already have kind of a self-denial thing where food is concerned. In short, the only reason I joined the JCC was because I am now a mother and mothers do things for their children that they never thought they'd do. Like sending their boy to preschool before he can walk.

It all began innocently enough. The Boy had his nine month check-up with his new pediatrician and Hubby and I were once again congratulating ourselves on how clever we were to move to Asheville, where the pediatricians and young and hip and non-interventionist and, most importantly, charmed by our baby (not, I hasten to add, that Long Beach pediatricians weren't charmed by him as well). Then the subject turned to preschool.

"There are a few really good ones in town," Dr. C. informed me as The Boy clapped his hands wildly and I clapped wildly back. "But there aren't enough for the demand. It's a good idea to get yourself on a waiting list now."

Ah, another milestone of parenthood, one of those moments where you feel a surge of pride and love that your child is growing up while working hard to ignore the nagging voice somewhere in the back of your mind whispering that you will regret this sign of progress when you realize it means that parenthood just got even more difficult. Preschool, after all, means colds and tuition bills and your child preferring his caregivers over you.

But we weren't talking starting preschool. We were just talking about waiting lists. It was a beautiful day, so I decided to take a walk to one of the ones Dr. C. recommended, just to take a look and imagine the distant day when The Boy could walk and I would enroll him in preschool.

This one was in a Episcopal church about a mile from our home. There are many Episcopal churches in Asheville. Billy Graham is Episcopalian. The Billy Graham Training Center is located near Asheville. These are things I did not know before I moved to Asheville. This particular Episcopalian church, however, is not, as far as I know, affiliated with Billy Graham.

The Boy and I casually entered the church office, acting for all we were worth like it was the most natural thing in the world for a transplanted faux Jew and her uncircumcised son to enter the office of an Episcopalian church in Asheville.

"I wanted to learn more about the day care program," I explained to the perfectly welcoming woman there. People in Asheville are very nonjudgmental. "And maybe put him on the waiting list."

"Oh, the child care center is completely separate from the church," she said. I had a fleeting image of her waiting until I left the office and then snorting, "She's obviously not Episcopalian," to her co-workers, but decided she was too nice to do anything of the sort. She proved me right by adding, "I'll take you there."

And so she did, through several doors, across the lobby, and past the group of volunteers bickering about how best to sort donated sweaters for a church sale. She pointed to a pair of doors with bright children's drawings around them.

I walked through them and wandered down the hall clutching the stroller like a golden ticket into Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory. Surely there was no better proof than a stroller -- with a little boy in it, no less -- that I belonged there and was not a bad person like the spy who I vaguely recall being in the Gene Wilder version of the movie. I remember him being very scary and having small glasses with lenses that I took to be the kind that turn dark gray in bright light.

I headed for the one open door and found an office staffed by a woman with the practiced but genuine smile of someone who works in a preschool and explained why we were there. She didn't seem to wonder why this strange woman had wandered unannounced into her preschool to gaze upon the vulnerable sleeping children. If we had been in Long Beach, I'd have been face down on the ground by then with my wrists in handcuffs and my boy in the arms of a Social Services worker.

Luckily, we were in Asheville, and instead of calling the police, the woman took us to the playground, where a few of the kids who apparently take short naps were playing. The Boy was entranced. I was hooked. The woman told me spots usually open up in the spring. Perfect.

Two days later, on one of our Mommy and The Boy Fridays, The Boy and I were playing in City Bakery, one of his favorite places in the world because everyone smiles at him and the floors are clean enough that Mommy lets him crawl around and sometimes Daddy comes to see us in and doesn't even flinch when The Boy slobbers cookie crumbs on his work shirt. We were just getting ready to go when we spotted our neighbor, M.

I told her The Boy was now on a waiting list for preschool. "R.'s school is right up the block," she said, referring to her three-year-old daughter with the huge grin and joyful laugh. "Come on. I'll show it to you."

This preschool, by the way, is also in an Episcopalian church. As I may have mentioned, there are many Episcopalian churches in Asheville. Which means the odds didn't exactly favor The Boy ending up at the one Jewish preschool. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Right now, we are at R.'s school. Jack is surrounded by R. and her classmates, smiling his almost-three-toothed grin as they pat his head and cry, "It's a baby!" I have noticed that three-year-olds are thrilled with babies, as if in their newly found state of consciousness small, nonsentient beings are proof that they are the big boys and girls their parents assure them they are when coaxing them to go to bed or to stop teasing the dog.

Quick as a wink, I was in another office, filling out the forms to put The Boy on another preschool waiting list, thrilling in the delicious and rare combination of motherhood and efficiency. I thought we had an in when the director mentioned that she had once attended Cal State Long Beach, but all she offered was a discussion of our old neighborhood and how much we both missed Trader Joe's. When she told me she had adopted her sons from Vietnam, I eagerly told her about The Boy's forthcoming Chinese sister, but that didn't seem to buy us the right to leapfrog over even one waiting list kid either.

Still, I reminded myself, we were in no hurry. True, the pediatrician reckoned The Boy would be walking by his one year check up in December. But that was still a few months away and surely some parent would leave Asheville in January so my boy could have their child's place in preschool.

To complete the trifecta of best-preschools-in-the-area, I had to visit the JCC. I had heard good things about it. The Boy's cousin once went to some after-school programs there and loved it. It is a lovely half-mile walk from our house. But, as I many have mentioned, I have this weird fear of being associated with people who are like me.

Our first visit didn't help. The JCC lobby was filled with loaf upon loaf of challah bread to be distributed for Sukkhot. My skin began to itch.

We were stopped in the lobby by a sign-in log and a volunteer retired schoolteacher from New Jersey. How was she to know that, while it might thrill her to inform me two of the other mothers in the preschool were lawyers, it made me want to run screaming out the doors and into a nice, safe Episcopalian church?

When the head of the preschool appeared with Blackberry in hand to schedule an appointment when I would be allowed to view this well regarded preschool, I was pretty certain I knew which one was running a distant third to the others.

The scheduled tour didn't help. Along with The Boy and I, a miserable looking pregnant woman trudged after the preschool director as she informed us of the name of each class (Hebrew words that the two-to-five-year-olds in attendance would be far more qualified to define for you than I) and how long the teacher had been at the school. Relevant information, I suppose, but where were the kids crowding around The Boy and convincing both him and me that he had to start school tomorrow if not sooner?

By the time we crossed the street to visit the separate little house where the children under two play, I was merely being polite. The most interesting part of the tour, as far as I could tell, was hearing that the sullen pregnant woman already had three boys, had been on "the Depo Provera" when she got pregnant, and was carrying twins.

Figuring The Boy should at least have some fun at this school, I helped him stand holding onto a toddler-sized table. He grinned at me, and the happiness his smiles spark melted over just a little bit to the preschool.

The director peeled herself away from the discussion of how not thrilled the pregnant woman was to be pregnant and crouched down so as to better coo at The Boy.

"You know," she said with her first smile at me since we had met, "I could get him in here right away if you join the JCC."

Joining the JCC entitles you to jump to the top of the preschool waiting list. Being Jewish does not entitle you to jump to the top of the preschool waiting list, as I learned after writing "Jewish" in big letters on the waiting list form. It was the first time I had written anything on a form asking my religion and will undoubtedly be the last.

We went outside in the yard, where the kids were playing on a small plastic slide and in a colorful playhouse. They waved buckets and action figures at the caregivers. The Boy sat by himself for a while examining pieces of grass while I chatted with one of the caregivers. I liked her, I noted.

"Do the kids who can't walk yet get to come outside too?" I asked. The Boy crawled toward another child and grabbed at his ear.

"Oh, of course," she assured me as I pried The Boy's fingers from his new friend's head. "If they don't like crawling on the grass we'll spread out some blankets for them."

The Boy enthusiastically reached for another child's nose, and I reasoned that he is too social a being to be shut up at home with a marginal babysitter (I didn't have high hopes when I resorted to Craig's List, but I was out of options). He'd be walking within a few months and he can get around pretty darn well crawling and I convinced myself he wouldn't end up sitting in a corner crying while the other kids played and distracted the caregivers. I didn't have my checkbook with me, so I didn't join the JCC until the next day.

The Boy has been going to school for a little over a week now. He still can't walk, but he loves to crawl after one of his classmates who can. He also, they tell me, loves music and playing ball and having his diaper changed by anyone but his parents. And though he was so angry at me when they called me to come pick him up on his first day that he refused to look me in the eye, he plainly loves it now. Every evening on our stroll home, instead of the protruding bottom lip and pointedly turned head I got on that first day, I am treated to a babbled monologue about his day, or at least that's what I believe he's telling me since I don't pretend to understand what, if anything, he's saying. But the tone is unmistakably that of a ten-month-old who is quite thrilled to be going to preschool before he's able to walk.

And, hey, I'm a member of the Asheville JCC. That's got to be worth something.