School of Dad, Part 1: The First Day

Ellie started school in September. I had been told, by everyone who had been through this, that it would be a big day. I received this information with the nodding comprehension of a person who has been told something and not yet understood it.

I did not understand what big meant until we were standing at the gate of the primary school at 8:45am and she turned and looked at me with an expression that contained, simultaneously: excitement, assessment, and a kind of resolve that I had not previously seen on her face and that I recognised, with a small shock, as entirely her own.

She said: "Okay. Bye, Dad."

And walked in.

The forty-five minutes that followed

I walked back to the car. I sat in it for a moment that became several moments. I sent Claire a voice message that I intended to be factual — she had had to go to work, it was a Tuesday, she could not be there — and that turned out to contain more feeling than I had prepared for.

Then I drove home and sat in the home office for forty-five minutes without opening the laptop, which is not a thing I do. I looked at the space on the floor where the small shoes usually are.

I am 44. I have lived long enough to understand, in advance, that stages end. I know the trick the mind plays when you try to hold onto a present moment — it slips slightly, becomes a memory before it is finished, acquires a retrospective quality while you are still in it. I have been doing this with the specific weight of a sleeping child on my chest. I thought I was prepared to do it with the first day of school.

I was not fully prepared.

What I was actually feeling

Not grief exactly. Nothing had been lost. Ellie was happy — genuinely, visibly happy to be going somewhere new, which is a temperamental trait she has had since birth and that I find remarkable and also slightly impossible to identify with, being a person who has always needed time to warm up to new situations.

What I was feeling was more like the awareness of hinge. Some periods of your child's life have a shape — a beginning, a texture, an end — that you can see as a shape only once the end is in sight. The nursery years had a shape. The shape ended at 8:45am on a Tuesday in September. What followed was a different shape, not yet visible.

I am an older father. I have written about the maths and about the mortality calculations and the heightened awareness of time that comes with doing this later. What I want to say about the first day of school is that the heightened awareness cuts in both directions.

Yes: I felt the passage of time more acutely than I might have at 34, because I have more context for how quickly things move.

But also: I was there. Fully, completely there. I was not managing a work thing on my phone at the gate. I was not half-present while running a background process. I was there for all of it, including the five seconds of that expression — excitement, assessment, resolve — that I will be able to reconstruct in detail for the rest of my life.

What she said when I picked her up

She was, by 3:15pm, entirely fine. More than fine — she had a best friend already (a girl called Priya, about whom I have since heard a great deal), and a detailed account of what they had done and in what order, and some opinions about the school dinners.

I had spent the day in a state of low-grade awareness of her absence. She had spent the day in a complete, absorbed, fully-inhabited new world. These are the correct states for both parties to be in.

I asked her if she had missed me. She considered this for a moment with the seriousness she brings to questions that deserve consideration.

"Not really," she said. "I was busy."

I told her that was exactly right.

In the car, driving home, she told me about Priya, and the dinners, and a game they had played, and I listened with the full attention of someone who knows what the small shoes absence feels like and intends not to waste the return of the small shoes.

It was, on balance, a very good day.