I wasn’t sure if we’d see anyone we know - I assumed Bobby’s old friends wouldn’t be there since they’re all junior high schoolers now. But I was pleasantly surprised that most of Bobby’s friends were there, and Theo saw an old friend, and they all ended up hanging out and playing basketball and handball for much of the morning. It was funny watching Bobby slowly walk back and forth across the playground with kids he’d been in kindergarten with, all in their giant pants and all taller than me. He’s at a friend’s house now.
As I sat on a bench in the shade and watched all the hipster parents milling about with their raggedy free-range kids, smelling the familiar eucalyptus, I had a thought. I think it may have been a mistake to pull the kids out of this school.
In hindsight now, I realize Bobby most likely would have been admitted to his current school no matter what, and I’m not sure that one year of being in the highly gifted program did much for him. He says he didn’t like it much, and now he’s just in the regular gifted program that he would have been in anyway. And Theo’s definitely gotten the short end of the stick just being wait listed for the gifted program every year anyway. So…was it worth it? I’m starting to think it probably wasn’t. They could have easily stayed at this school as planned, finished out sixth grade, and gotten the same results.
But I also see how, at the time, it seemed like a great opportunity, and I didn’t want to “hold Bobby back” just for sentimental reasons. I didn’t want to be selfish. And I was very much influenced by the one friend who’s son had moved over in 5th grade - only to have both our and their friendship pretty much vanish once the kids were in the same class again, which I did not predict (the mom got a full time job, so getting together for coffee or hikes became impossible, and the kids drifted apart). I couldn’t have left the kids at this school and not felt guilty. Then in the same year the principal was replaced with one that’s been roundly disliked, and most of the best teachers left. So it seemed like we got out “just in time”. But being back up there today…I had my doubts.
It was heartwarming to watch the boys pointing out all the things they remembered - even certain bushes by certain houses they remembered from when they used to walk home. I told them maybe someday if they have kids they can use my address so their kids can go to this school, and grandma can pick the kids up and they can play at my house until they’re done with work. Of course, all of this assumes a lot - that we’ll even be living normal lives in 20-30 years; it’s hard to picture that, now, that in the 40s or 50s there will even be a country or a planet in which people still have kids, go to work and school, have normal lives. But I digress. Hearing them speak so nostalgically about their old school made me wonder what the harm would have been in leaving them there until they graduated, and realizing that I probably could have done that after all. It made me sad. I think of all the connections I could have fostered there, instead of going to the new school where I know nobody and don’t feel any community at all. Sigh. Well, we all make our decisions, and we have reasons why we make these decisions based on the information we have at the time, and to be fair both kids are happy and thriving either way, so no harm done. I don’t think they care either way. They wouldn’t say it’s been a mistake to move to the new school. And Theo would have only had one year left, anyway, so, as I noted at the time, there was never a scenario in which they would have stayed at that school forever, so the school would have drifted out of our lives by 2026 anyway. Oh, well. Maybe in the 2040s or 50’s that school will return to our lives after all. Nobody knows what the future holds.
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