Previous Challenge Entry (Level 1 – Beginner)
Topic: Great Expectations (not about the book) (08/25/11)
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TITLE: Her Chance Has Come | Previous Challenge Entry
By Margaret McKinney
08/27/11 -
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She has been waiting for this day, sometimes patiently, sometimes not.
For two years she has watched her backpack laden siblings go before her, enticing lunchboxes tucked under their arms. Her post by the front window is worn by her little knees, watching them leave in the mornings, awaiting their return in the afternoons.
“Why can’t I go to school?” She has asked me countless times, always with crossed arms and a resentful stamp of the foot. “Why can the big girls go, but not me?” The brown curls shake with indignation.
I tell her she is too young, but she doesn’t understand, because she is too young. We wish our children to grow old enough not to need us so much, and yet we hope they will always need us just a little. It is the mother’s curse, somehow inherited along with all the rest due to Eve and her wayward ways.
For the past several months she anticipates it. The fifth birthday comes and goes, and she expects to go the next day. I explain that she can’t start school in the middle; that she must wait until Kindergarten starts all over again in the fall. She manages to temper her impatience, but just barely. To think that five more months of waiting is required, well, that’s a blow; but she would see it through with fortitude.
We drive past the school. She memorizes the street that leads there, wonders aloud what it looks like on the inside. The phrase “when I start Kindergarten” precedes every question, and her entire world is built around the day it will be her turn. I believe in her mind, Kindergarten is something akin to ‘The Big Rock Candy Mountain,’ a place where kids go to escape their mothers and have oodles of fun all day. The bright yellow bus only enhances this vision of what Kindergarten will hold, for surely a vehicle painted so vividly can only bear its passengers to places of wonder.
The day arrives. We choose her prettiest dress and pack her lunchbox, and with expressions of delight she steps onto her golden coach and is borne forth to school.
I am pleased to find that Kindergarten exceeds her highest expectations. There was the slightest complaint of the hours a Kindergartener must keep, but an adjustment to her bedtime alleviated that minor difficulty.
My youngest baby is gone. The post by the window is now kept by me.
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