The World's Girl

My daughter started kindergarten this week. I have been in her school before, but aside from a few pictures of her classroom and her teacher, I have no idea what her school experience has been like so far. This is mostly because for the last few weeks, I've been working nine hours a day and adding a forty-five-to-sixty-minute commute on either end.

As many of you know, I've been out of work pretty much constantly since Borders closed its last shutter in the fall of 2011. Since just after Lily turned three, I've been home with her and my wife nearly all the time. Now she's five, and all of a sudden I'm struck with the reality of going from experiencing thirteen of her waking hours a day, to only being around for the last three. It's a pretty big adjustment, and honestly it's hitting me harder than I thought it would.

I like to think that I'm a pretty adaptable person. My philosophy is that if you can look at a situation and say, "okay, good or bad, this is what's happening now", then it usually turns out to be easier to deal with than it seems. But this whole situation is weird. Amy, Lily and I have spent the last five years as this tightly-knit group, this indivisible little family unit, and now in the span of a little over two weeks, I'm off to work far away and Lily's off to school. It feels, well, wrong somehow.

Of course I worry about my little girl. That's a parent's job. I know that she's going to go to school, and when she gets there not everyone is going to "get" her the way we do at home. Not many of the kids are going to know about (or certainly want to talk as much about) Lalaloopsies, or Minecraft, and no one's going to be amused by our family inside jokes. And what's worse, she's going to come home with a whole new set of influences and references and jokes that I'm not going to understand. Maybe that's the part that worries me most.

Ever since I knew I was going to be a dad, I've told myself -- very pragmatically, or so I thought -- "Okay, the parents have the first five years of their kids’ lives to help establish the foundation of their personality and beliefs, and from there on out they become more and more their own person, building off of what you gave them." What I didn't think about was that typically the people who build the foundation usually get the chance to build the rest of structure as well. Not only that, but it's making me realize that maybe we didn't have quite as much influence in that foundation as we thought we did.

It's not that Amy and I won't have any influence anymore, it's just that there's going to be a lot of other stuff coming at Lily. It's going to be stuff from kids who were raised by parents with ideas that I might think are all wrong, or from kids who have older siblings who, in time-honored tradition, introduce their younger brothers and sisters to stuff that they have no business knowing about yet. That environment is where Lily is going to be spending over half of her waking hours. It's almost totally out of our control, and will be mostly unseen by me or by her mother. That's what bothers me.

Of course, there’s a world of difference between thinking lofty thoughts about establishing foundations, and what it's like to actually reach the points where the fundamental changes happen. I kind of take solace in the fact that when I come home, Lily acts as if I haven't really been away that long. I actually like that better than to have her running toward me when I come in the door. I want her to know that even when I'm not there, I'm still there, and when she casually looks up from what I'm doing and just says "Hi" when I walk in the door, that's how it makes me feel. I prefer that the situation is harder on me than it is on her.

I know I'm far from the first parent to feel this way. And I also know that, in a way, my recent unemployment has been a blessing in disguise. I mean, not a lot of fathers get the chance to spend virtually every day with their kids between the ages of three and five, which has got to be one of the most crucial times in their mental development. Although the financial aspect of it was at times excruciating -- and I have to profusely thank our friends and especially our families for their continued, ongoing, and sometimes totally unexpected, generosity -- I'm always going to look back on it as a golden time, and I hope she carries at least a little bit of that feeling into the rest of her childhood, and maybe even adulthood.

Of course, my and her mother's work is nowhere near to being done. In fact, I'm sure it will even get harder, because of all these outside influences that Lily is going to find herself up against in the coming years. We're making that leap from being mostly in control of what she sees and hears, into the area of unknowns, things that we can't know about unless Lily tells us. And I hope that we've instilled in her that that's what she should do. Our days of keeping her utterly safe and insulated in our world is coming to an end, and now we have to share her with the rest of you. She's starting her transition from being simply "our girl", to becoming the world's girl. And just like every other parent, I can only hope we've given her all the tools she needs.