The End of an Era for me too.....

  It’s been the most emotional summer I can remember. My son is going to ‘big school’ in September. Although he’s all grown up now and raises his eyebrows when I call it that. He’ll strut off on his first day with his uniform sparkling and his shoes polished to army standard and I’ll be the nervous wreck worrying that he’ll be okay and wondering where all the years went. One minute I was taking pictures of him on his first day in his tiny Shawlands uniform, the next I’m buying jumpers for him for Kingstone which both the dog and I could fit into.

  But I’m not just sad that his days of being a big goldfish in the garden pond are over and soon he’ll be a mere shrimp in the Pacific Ocean. It’s more selfish than that, because it’s an end of an era for me too. For seven years I’ve waited outside the school gates with the other parents of kids in his class. We started out with polite good mornings, conferred with each other when the kids brought home conflicting messages. Then we started bonding during birthday parties as we hovered like hawks over our little ones, willing them to leave us a sausage roll. We’ve passed around tissues when they’ve acted in their first nativities and sang ‘Little Donkey’ in terrible tune. We’ve blown off steam together when the kids have driven us to breaking point and kept each other sane. We’ve invited each other around for dinner, cracked open the red wine, broken bread and shared our lives. Friendships developed between us parents which are just as strong as those which grew between our offspring. In our little parent- community, marriages have broken up, two parents have died, more children have been born, jobs have been lost – we’ve laughed and we’ve cried together and given each other support when those niggly little frictions arose. I’ve had more instances of writing inspiration at those gates than I can count.

  Even the teachers have become friends in a way that never happened in my parent’s generation. In fact, I’ve had a longer relationship with the school than I did with my husband. We’ve become a large, extended family in which children and parents will Mexican wave in as babies and out as twice the size, the teachers being the constant that holds everything together. And I just know that I couldn’t have picked a nicer school for my lads. The lasses in the office were first on the scene when my dog went missing and I presumed he’d followed his usual school run routine (he had!) and the teachers of Shawlands have helped me form two great kids with an interest in everything. As I know only too well, a good or a bad teacher has a long reaching effect on a child’s life. I don’t know what I’d be doing now if I didn’t have the fabulous Miss Kate Taylor injecting magic into all those books I’d pigeon-holed as ‘bo-ring’ – the stories which are now my greatest influences.  And as an ex-trainee accountant – the nadir of my job experiences - any teacher that can get my lads interested in math, is up there on a plinth with ‘Genius’ written on it.

  I have one year of walking to Shawlands left as the dog and I drop off my younger son, who will be in year 6 this time - his turn at being the big goldfish in the pond. Then my life will change in a way I’m not looking forward to. My little ritual will be gone forever. We bring our children into this world knowing our job is to prepare them for leaving us. But part of me wants to freeze some time where I am forever tying their shoelaces and leading them by the hand down to this most wonderful primary school, then standing by those school gates, dishing the dirt, gossiping, laughing with my fellow parent-friends as we wave off our little ones for the day. I was as cosy and secure in that world as they were.