I am not quite sure how it happened, since it has been looming on my horizon for months, but somehow it has slunk up on me and <boo!> it's only two days until school starts.
Hardly earth-shattering, but it is for our little world. For this is cupcake's first ever "first day of school" and we both need a very deep breath and a tight hold on each other's hand. It has been an extremely rocky build-up over the past few weeks. With my adoptive-parent-sleuth hat on, I eventually unpicked it all and realised cupcake was convinced that when she started a new school, she would have to start another new family. After all, that's what happened the last time she left a nursery - a week later, she moved from foster care to me. All of her known people, places, smells and routines were gone at a stroke. Of course I had reams of notes to try and re-create laundry smells and daily patterns, but it's just building a handrail over a huge hole, isn't it? Better than not having something to cling to, but hardly the same.
I am stunned at how much she remembers of that as a sequence, given how tiny she was. But it was definitely what she was thinking. When I did a bit of artless wondering out loud, "I'm wondering whether these big feelings inside are because you're worried when you start big school, other things will change too? And I'm wondering whether we need to remember together that this will always be your home, and I will always be your mum?" Her eyes screwed up tight and she asked me whether Miss X, her new teacher, was going to be her new mummy. So much hurt and fear inside such a small, worried head. She has been clinging onto me like those woolly monkeys you see wrapped onto their mums. If she had a tail, that would be holding on to me too.
I think she half-believes me that we're stuck with each other for good. But it's the one and only reason I am looking forward to term starting - then I will be able to prove to her that we come home again. In the meantime, she is too anxious to want to leave the house at all. Or sometimes she wants to try, so we head out for a walk, but the panic kicks in when we get to the bend in the road and she can't look back and see our house any more. No amount of rocking, stroking, soothing and singing can do more than damp down the fears for a bit.
The absolute last thing she wants for these next two days are escapades or special treats. She needs everything the same, no excitement (because that feels too close to fear), and days that are as close to completely predictable as I can manage. And I can do that, and I can soothe her and carry her fifty times a day if she needs it. But it makes me hurt for her, for yet another way that she's showing me her world inside is so different to what you'd wish for any child. I have to believe that every day is another tiny fragment of building her a new foundation, even if I can't see yet how to put them together.
