No More Elementary School

My youngest daughter recently graduated from elementary school, and as the kids say, I’m having all the feels. If you’ve been following my blog, you know how big a deal elementary school was for me, and I even wrote a book about the awkward, painful transition from elementary to junior high. But it didn’t really hit me until the last week of her schoolyear. For most of her time there, I’ve been picking my daughter up from school, and then in the last week, I thought to myself: This is the last Monday I’m picking her up. This is the last Tuesday I’m picking her up…

On the very last day, when I picked her up for the final time, I escorted her past the gate on schoolgrounds and read the sign posted on it: “NO TRESPASSING.” After this, if she tries to enter the school again, a security guard will kick her out. That actually happened to me after I graduated elementary school. In Seventh Grade, I tried going back to visit my old teachers, and I was told I couldn’t come into the school anymore because I graduated. I remember thinking how weird that was because it was literally my second home for seven long years: Kindergarten through Sixth Grade. Then it became just another government building I didn’t have access to. Let’s put it this way: Let’s say you were living somewhere for seven years, and then one day when you tried to enter, someone showed up at the front door and said, “You can’t come in here anymore.” That’s how it felt to me.

My wife says I’m upset about my daughter’s last day more for my sake than for hers, which I guess is true, though my daughter also said she’s nervous about leaving and going to junior high. I basically lied and said, “Don’t worry. It’ll be alright!” And who knows? It may be. I hope it’s different for her than it was for me. (Again, it was so traumatic for me, I wrote a novel about it.) But unlike me, she makes friends easily, and there will be more people to make friends with next year.

Another reason why this hurts is because my brother died his first year in junior high—and it wasn’t just the same junior high I attended; it was the same junior high my younger daughter is going to and that my older daughter is currently attending. In a weird way, I feel like the junior high killed him. Subconsciously, I associate junior high with death.

For me personally, life started getting hard after elementary school. Junior high was harder than elementary school. High school was harder than junior high. College was harder than high school (though I had much more fun there). And the Real World is harder than college. This truly is the beginning of the end. It’s not just the end of elementary school. It’s the end of her childhood.

But it’s actually more than that, because this event has triggered the sensation of three deaths in my mind: the death of my daughter’s childhood, the death of my own childhood when I graduated elementary school, and the literal death of my brother when he entered junior high.

I realize there is no better alternative for my daughter. If she didn’t graduate elementary school, she’d be left back with the younger grades, and all her friends would move on without her. And can you imagine some bizarre, Twilight Zone scenario where she’s permanently stuck in preadolescence, having to perpetually retake Fifth Grade over and over again until she’s in her 20s or 30s? And, of course, there’s the most horrific alternative. She could die. Then I’d be mourning a literal death, not a symbolic one.

Still, they warn you that it goes fast, but what they don’t warn you of is just HOW fast it goes and, more importantly, how you’ll feel when it’s all over. My youngest daughter was always the sweet, innocent one with a big, playful smile on her face. Now, in many ways, I feel I’ve lost my last little girl.

No more Show and Tell.

No more costumed parade on Halloween.

No more Trunk or Treat in the parking lot.

No more Scholastic Book Fair.

No more ice-cream social.

No more arts and crafts in the classroom.

No more writing letters to Santa.

No more happy, congratulatory stickers on top of well-done work assignments.

No more Bingo Night at the firehouse.

No more Field Day.

No more recess.

No more playground.

No more elementary school. Well, at least until I have grandkids.

MTP

P.S.: Next week’s blog: Top 5 Toys

P.P.S.: The Danger Peak audiobook is now available!

P.P.P.S.: The new edition of The Electric God and Other Shorts is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble: