Kindergarten Graduates Take Baby Steps Into an Adult World

Kate was beautiful in her pale-blue mortarboard with its red tassel. It complemented the brightly colored new dress she’d picked out especially for the occasion.

I could tell she was nervous. Walking in the procession with the other graduates, she stepped with exaggerated care, her eyes downcast as if afraid she might trample the heel of the one in front of her. When she reached her assigned spot, she giggled and whispered something to her neighbor.

The principal praised them lavishly for their accomplishments, and after she finished dispensing handshakes and diplomas, each young face was beaming. They were proud. They’d earned this day.

All on cue, the new graduates flipped their tassels from one side of their mortarboards to the other. My wife and I grew teary-eyed. Our baby was growing up.

*

Kate’s kindergarten graduation was unexpectedly affecting, a first, bittersweet celebration of her passage into the world. This was, after all, the first achievement in her life in which we had not been intimately involved.

When she’d taken her first clumsy steps, started to sing her ABC’s or figured out how to tune the TV to “Sesame Street,” we’d been there with our advice and encouragement.

But this was different. She was finishing a year in which she’d begun to read and write and do simple arithmetic. She could name the continents and recite the different classes in the animal kingdom. She’d learned enough about ecology to be genuinely concerned about the destruction of the environment.

As parents we’d been supportive, eager to encourage her love of learning. But the fact remained that Kate had acquired most of her new knowledge in school, with the help of her teachers.

It struck me then that this was only the first of many such passages, each leading her a little farther from home. One day she’d graduate high school and later, college. Marriage suddenly did not seem such a distant prospect.

I suppose it should not have come as such a shock.

Her body had been changing for some time. She’d grown several inches in the last year while gaining scarcely any weight, as the pudginess of babyhood melted away. Her motor skills had improved to the point where she could nonchalantly slice up olives for homemade pizza with a paring knife.

She tended to sassiness when addressing us, a sometimes-irritating sign of her growing self-confidence and sense of independence. Whenever my wife or I discussed family, work or world events, Kate would butt in, anxious to have it all explained.

*

Like any parent, I had watched her development with pride and some amazement, but I never wanted to confront the hard fact that growing up also means growing away. It sometimes takes a ritual or a dramatic event to make us acknowledge a truth we’re reluctant to confront, and Kate knew better than anyone that a turning point was at hand.

For weeks she’d diligently rehearsed a poem to recite at graduation and practiced the slow, measured step of the processional (no mean feat for an energetic 5-year-old accustomed to running everywhere). First grade would mean a transfer from her private Montessori program to the public elementary school, proof in her eyes that she was, at last, a “big kid.”

And then there were the loose teeth.

All the older kids Kate knew had huge gaps in their grins, and now the two middle incisors in her own lower jaw had begun working their way out. Excited beyond measure, Kate wiggled the loosest tooth incessantly, often opening her mouth to let us have a look (insisting that we wash our hands before we touched it).

She took to boosting herself onto the countertop in the bathroom to inspect it in the mirror. It happened so often that my wife gave her a mirror from an old compact, the better to monitor her progress.

Kate, who was speculating about how the Tooth Fairy would know when and where to pay a visit, was frustrated. “Ooh, I wish my tooth would come out!” she’d say. I offered to fetch a pair of pliers to perform oral surgery, and when she declined in mock horror, I assured her, “That tooth will be out of there any day.”

Meanwhile, the doomed tooth daily grew more wobbly in its socket, leaning outward from the row of incisors like a drunk clinging to a lamppost.

Three days after graduating kindergarten, Kate was working the tooth back and forth with a persistence that only children know. It was now anchored by the merest thread of tissue, but I hesitated to pull it because of her sometimes-exaggerated reaction to pain.

*

When her mother got home that afternoon, Kate ran into the front yard to show off her the dangling denticle.

My wife, more decisive than I, toggled the tooth experimentally, then deftly plucked it out. Kate was ecstatic.

“My tooth! My tooth! Look, Dad!” she cried as she ran into the house proudly holding the pearlescent object in her palm. It was tiny, with scarcely any root, and I realized it had been one of the first to erupt when she was a baby. Where the tooth had been there was now a small spot of gore, but Kate was untroubled.

That night she tucked the tooth into a pouch clutched by a small stuffed cat a friend had given us when she was born and placed it beneath her pillow.

The Tooth Fairy was generous. Kate woke up early the next morning to find a crisp new dollar bill. From our bedroom we could hear her waiting patiently at the foot of the stairs, folding it and unfolding it. When she was sure we were awake, she pounded up to our room to show us.

These days, the permanent tooth is showing itself and Kate has confidently gone to work dislodging the neighboring baby tooth. I think she’s calculating what treat she might be able to buy with her loot.

*

Summer is at hand, and she is looking forward to carefree days at the swimming pool with her friends. The new faces and strange rhythms of first grade are still a way off.

Whenever I start to worry that she’s growing up too fast, I need only look across the dinner table.

There she sits in blissful unself-consciousness, eating a bean burrito with her fingers. As she dissects her meal into bite-size bits, her hands and face become smeared with gooey refried beans. She will have to be reminded to wash up before she touches anything.

At moments like this, I’m pretty sure that, despite her nascent awareness of the world and its ills, her innocence, unlike her tooth, is still securely in place.