Kim's blog: Time to start letting go

My firstborn started secondary school last week.  The transition from primary loomed over like a dark cloud from the beginning of Year 6. Then one gets bogged down in the spectre that is SATs and you forget about secondary until you realise at May half term that they only have 6 weeks of their primary school education left and you wonder where did all that time go?

 

I agonised over the move to secondary school as I did for all the big nursery/school moves; the start of 5 days a week in nursery, leaving nursery starting at primary school and then quite suddenly, secondary school out of the blue is there, staring at you right in the face and you have to start all over again. Only this time it’s very different you have to let them do most of the decision making themselves. 

 

Firstly, there’s the phone and with it all of the Social Media issues - Instagram - staying safe online knowing only to connect with people you know. Explaining no one has the ‘Instagrammable lifestyle’ and they are just nice pictures, that it doesn’t matter how many followers you have and how you don’t measure your worth in ‘likes’.

 

Then there are school dinners, you hope that they will remember their good food choices and not just have a chocolate milkshake and a bowl of chips for lunch every day – because they can.

 

So many decisions they now make on their own that we used to guide them with, which friend to invite for tea, (steering a friendship let’s call it – we all do it) ‘shall I get on the school bus or wait for my friend’ (and inevitably miss the bus) ‘which Mum shall we call to pick us up? They’ll be mad’ - we weren’t. So much goes on in those young minds and so many decisions get made that we as parents no longer have any way of managing.

 

I worried so much about secondary but once she started it was quite a relief and actually, you know what, they are pretty resilient and they cope and they do manage to do all that decision making that you did for them. She’s taken to it like a duck to water; I asked her what the best thing about secondary school was and she said ‘having a timetable’. I feel I can relax a bit now.

 

Then there is the child that is left behind, the lovely younger sibling who has always had his big sister at school with him. I hadn’t spent any time worrying about that as it just caught me unawares. Luckily, he has dealt with it in the stoic manner that he always does. But it’s such a change in dynamic and of course he wants to grow up quicker and now wants the mobile phone and the access to the internet that his sister so freely now gets with the status upgrade of Secondary.

 

I also miss my friends. There are no more chats at the gates with the other mums and the juggle of pick-ups and childcare. It’s very much ‘pick me up from down the road with a paper bag over your head so no one knows you are my mum’.  Thankfully we have two more years of Primary left before I have to let go completely but I know it’s coming.

 

So, we are taking it one day at a time and I have learnt that actually they are pretty good at being let go and can actually look after themselves.  Generally, the right decisions are being made - we will never ever stop worrying, but we can begin to let go and have faith in them as they spread their wings and make it into the big wide world.