Gettin' Schooled

When I was little, I really didn't like school. Not at all. It wasn't the teacher. It wasn't the homework. It wasn't the lunch (although, in retrospect, it should have been). It wasn't the unwieldy number of books to read (which I loved and found rather diverting) or the front and back pages of multiplication. It wasn't even that the kid next to me ate my paste (hi, Lee). It was that... well... I was shy. I was terribly, horribly, no-good, verily shy. It was "someone come get this kid NOW" bad. I also wore glasses and cried a lot, and since I have really long eyelashes (which I consider my stand-alone good physical characteristic), those glasses were always streaked with tears. I was That Kid. I never wanted to go.

My acute social anxiety (which was then just called "being a baby") followed me into middle school, where it turned into straight-up Antisocial Behavior, and then I really didn't want to go to school. Ever. And of course, absences count against you. You miss work, you miss lessons, you miss too many days and they start calling your mom, who maybe didn't know you had missed so many days, then it's all downhill. So far and fast downhill that my daughter's spoon-bending genius of a mother almost failed every single grade. All of them. Because I was shy.

The Girl has been in school for a week now, and I can tell you with confidence that there is no way this kid is going to want to stay home. Ever. At School is her favorite place to be, nosing out Under My Feet and In the Tub in an unprecedented takeover that I sort of expected but not really. She is absolutely, positively, "take it down a notch, we're in WalMart" not shy. You probably have some idea what kind of relief this is. It's like when your kid is born and you realize it's an actual, tiny human, and not the unspeakable alien creature you anticipated. Or when you open the mailbox and it's not a portal to another world where everyone looks just like you. That kind of relief.

She regales us with tales of her friends Jasmine and Jenny, the boy who wouldn't let her use the brown marker even though it matched her shirt and not his, and the progress of her as-yet-unpublished memoir, "Today I Played with Play-Doh and You Didn't (don't you wish you were four?)." We're in talks with a major publishing house. One day she'll buy me a mansion atop a hill and an attractive manservant, all because I wanted a two-hour nap every afternoon. I'm glad she likes it, and that she wants to go. And that someday I'll be able to live on her massive book-selling income. Kids are awesome.