I have come to dread Tuesdays the way conventional working humans dread Mondays. Just to be different, I wear a bright smile on Monday mornings but grumpy-bear my way through the following day.
My terrible Tuesday secret is that I made my daycare decision hastily, just about a year ago, and now I am suffering the consequences. Like dating someone you know you’re going to break up with before long, but you’re lonely, I settled. Except I can’t break up with my daycare provider because I need approximately one more month of care from her.
Because I made my daycare decision hastily and settled for someone I knew wasn’t right for me (and, as has become apparent, wasn’t right for Trombone) and because Tuesday is the first of three consecutive daycare days in the week, I suffer every Tuesday from The Drop Off.
We prep Trombone all morning with talk of his daycare provider, of her daughter, of the cool toys at their house, of the dog that lives there. He seems comfortable with it. We get in the car and drive the several blocks to a key intersection. On Mondays and Fridays, we turn right at this intersection to go to my parents’ house. On Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, we turn left. When it becomes apparent I am turning left, I hear from the back seat:
“Noooooooo.”
I pretend I don’t know what he means. I am an Excellent Ac-tor, truly.
“Hmm? What’s up?”
“No no no no no no no no!”
“Don’t you want to go to daycare?”
“NO!”
And then he cries.
He cries while I’m parking the car. He cries when I point out the moon. He cries while I wrestle him out of his seat and toss his backpack to the curb and make sure all the car doors are locked. When we walk through the gate to the house, he buries his face in my neck and mutters, “Nonononononononono.” When I open the door to the basement suite, he digs his hands into my flesh like when he was an infant, like when he didn’t trust me yet or when I was the only thing he trusted.
When he sees his daycare provider, he howls.
If I hold him for a while, he settles down but when I try to take off his coat or put him down or distract him with the toys in the playroom, he revs back up. And eventually there is nothing to do but peel him off, hand him to the daycare provider, listen at the door as his wailing stops because I am out of the room and walk to the bus.
On Wednesdays and Thursdays, the drama is less but I know it is thus because he has given up, not because he is adjusted.
I know he is not in danger. I know he is not going to be accidentally beheaded (or any other heinous abuse) at daycare. The woman who looks after him is competent and compassionate, she has training in childcare. But I have never really liked her. And Trombone has never really liked her either. And because I spend the day with a lot of people that I don’t really like, I know how he feels, except he feels it Super25-fold because he can’t even go to the bathroom by himself.
So I don’t base my opinion of how he’s doing at daycare on the drop-off, because I know that kids fuss when you drop them off, I know that kids sense your apprehension (just like sharks!) and play on it. I know that the real test is how he is when I’m not there and when I pick him up.
When I pick him up, he is happy to see me, but very quiet. He is usually playing by himself or near the other quiet kid while the loud kid runs around them. His daycare provider tells me what they did all day and he just watches her. She usually comments on how quiet and well-behaved he is, how he ate all his lunch and had a good nap. In other words, how he is when I’m not there: Not himself.
He doesn’t talk when I’m holding him and we’re saying goodbye. He doesn’t talk until the basement door is shut behind us and then he smiles huge and points at the sky and says, “moon,” points at the car and says, “Car! Home! Cat! Taa, Dee, Ed! Watch!”
He saves his words all day for me. And that is the part that hurts the most. Whatever else he feels at daycare, and I’ll never know, he doesn’t feel emotionally safe enough, there, to express himself.
Every week I think it will be better and every week it is not better at
all.
Every week as I walk away from the basement door where I know he is not
crying anymore because I’m gone, but I am just starting to cry, also because I’m gone, I wonder if I have made the right
decision. I wonder if it is the Right Thing. I wonder how it can be the
Right Thing when it feels really Wrong. But what can I do?
Every week.
Every week I second-guess myself. I think forward to arriving at work and
the monotony, idiocy and sheer irrelevance of it.
Every week I remember the day I first met our daycare provider and how I
knew I didn’t like her, but I was desperate so I
justified hiring her.
So what, I thought, if she doesn’t share my values, doesn’t talk to her kid the way I
talk to mine, doesn’t talk to mine the way I would. She’s not me. And
that’s OK. It is OK for her not to be his mother because I am not looking
for a replacement for me.
But this sinking feeling at the back of my throat, every Tuesday
comes from the ugly realization that I made a bad decision, ignored
that I was making it and hoped it would go away. It hasn’t. And with my already heightened emotional state it very nearly breaks me completely. Every Tuesday.
(In the words of the crisis counselor I was for a while, I ask myself, “How are you going to take care of yourself?” And Saint Aardvark will be taking Tuesdays starting our next Tuesday (in 2 weeks), which will hopefully help. It will certainly help me – or else make my Wednesdays much, much worse. Which would suck, because I really like Wednesdays.)
