The Week Before School Starts
Monday Genevieve and I survived the language assessment,
obviously Genevieve worked harder than I did, but it was nerve-wracking for me
too! Later that same day Genevieve had a
tutoring session. At this
session, they perfected the sentences that Genevieve would write on her
postcards to give her classmates, and she started working on them. Her sentence was, “My name is Lingling and
I’m from Portland, Oregon, USA.” It was
all in traditional characters, which were still new and difficult for her and she had 30 postcards to write before
Friday!
Halfway through the hour with her tutor, Genevieve
dissolved in tears and began to hyperventilate.
My happy-go-lucky child who takes everything in stride was in the throes
of a meltdown in a way I have never seen before.
It took almost 15 minutes to calm her down, and then all her
fears came pouring out between the sobs and hiccups. Trying to write the postcards had made
everything real. She was scared to go to
school, she was scared she wouldn’t be able to do the work, she was scared she
would get lost, she was scared her teacher wouldn’t like her, she was scared
she wouldn’t have any friends. She was
scared about everything. And it broke my
heart. Because the truth is she had every
right to be scared, she was embarking on a big scary endeavor.
The best I could do was acknowledge that it would be scary, but reminded her how smart and capable she is, and that we’ll get her as much help as she needs. (And I kept telling myself, there is always Plan B of the American school if we need it!) So we got through the meltdown, one assurance at a time until she was able to look at the postcards again without crying. We put them aside for another day.
Genevieve tackled those postcards again on Tuesday, and on
Wednesday, and by Thursday she had them done. Thursday was our “last day of summer”
celebration day and she got to choose what to do the entire day. Her choice? Visiting the parks we had seen around town and then going
shopping. (Shopping? Whose child is this? Not mine!)
Last day of summer
After dropping off both her sisters to school, we went in
pursuit of her PE uniform, which was supposed to be at the bookstore on Shidong
Road. We walked down the road realizing
our mistake immediately. No shops in
Taiwan open before 10am, most don’t open until 11am. So we went to Starbucks, had hot chocolate (on a 90 degree day) and a scone and chatted for a while.
Then we walked to the park, where the sky opened up and we
experienced typhoon-like rains and wind. By the time we made it to the shopping mall we were soaked, but she had
a grand time visiting all the different floors of the mall. Then we ate lunch at her favorite restaurant,
Din Tai Fung, where she ate an appetizer of spicy cucumber, an entire tray of xiao long bao (dumplings), and
entire plate of Taiwanese lettuce (think cooked spinach) and half our
order of green beans. The girl can put
away the Chinese food!
Our evening consisted of the same routine that I imagine
happens world-wide the night before school starts. Genevieve selected and set out her clothes
and her backpack and supplies. She was tucked into bed with
hugs and kisses, and she even produced a smile at the prospect of starting school
the next day.
Three hours later at 11pm she arrived in our room with big
eyes and trembling voice, “Mama, I can’t sleep.
I’m scared about school tomorrow.”
She was tucked back into bed with more hugs and kisses and a little
backrub, but the killer about nerves like this: there is nothing to
alleviate the anxiety until the first day of school actually happens and you
know what you’re dealing with!
First day of school
Her first day of
school was on a Friday, and the public school system in Taipei has half day of
school on Wednesdays and Fridays for all children below grade 4. I felt like this was the best possible
beginning, she should be able to survive four hours of school! And then we would see what was what.
After dropping Olivia off at school, Joe, Genevieve, Amelia
and I walked Genevieve to her school.
(Olivia gets dropped off at 7:30, Genevieve at 7:40, and Amelia at 8:30.) As we approached her school and I asked G to
pause for a picture, she could not quite summon a smile, just the ghost of a
smile. We walked through the entrance of
the school, joining the stream of other children on their way in. There were only about 20% of the students
with parents accompanying them in, all the other kids were on their own.
We found her classroom, went inside and discovered her
teacher. Ding Laoshi was standing in the
middle of a gaggle of children, laughing and giving various directions. It was a bit chaotic, but he noticed
Genevieve almost immediately. He welcomed
her with a big smile, showed her where to put her backpack and water bottle,
and what desk to sit in. He did this
with only about 10 interruptions from other students and parents…it was
Genevieve’s first glimpse into being part of a 26-student classroom. (We’re not in Kansas anymore Toto…) It was also our first real look at her classroom.
There were about 30 desks, lined up in neat rows all facing
forward. An old-school chalkboard
covered most of the wall at the front of the class. There are windows down both sides of the
classroom, one set facing out to the open-air hallway and courtyard in the
middle of the school, the other set facing the outside. There are four fans on the ceiling, and no
air conditioning. It was about 90
degrees the first day of school.
Genevieve’s desk was the last one in the last row…the one
place we didn’t want her to sit. With
her focus issues, sitting in the front of the classroom makes a huge difference
in her not getting distracted. In her
first test of advocating for herself, we told Genevieve to tell Ding Laoshi
that she needed to sit up front. She was
able to communicate with him, he understood what she was asking, but told her
these were only temporary seats. Fair
enough, we would wait and see.
While other kids roamed around the room and talked to each
other and talked to parents and put their stuff away, Genevieve sat in her
desk. She was as quiet and still as I’d
ever seen her. Eyes huge in her face,
freckles standing out on her pale skin, she looked terrified. Even when we asked her questions and gently
joked with her, we got one word responses in a tiny voice. We tried to talk about what we saw in the
classroom, and pointed out that there was at least one other foreign student in
her class. She asked how we knew, and
when we said “because he’s black and there aren’t any black Taiwanese people,”
she just nodded. (Turns out that student is from Gambia!) The whole thing was so unnatural; not at all our positive, sunny, and spirited Gigi.
I don’t know what was going through her head during the 15
minutes from the time we arrived in her classroom till the time we left, but I
can tell you what was going on for us.
Every doubt we’ve ever had about putting her in a local school reared
its ugly head and ran through our minds.
But then we told ourselves she would figure it out, she would be
OK. Butterflies flew violently around
our stomachs, our palms were clammy, and there was panic in our eyes. We wondered if we could actually leave her
there in that small desk at the back of the huge classroom. But the bell rang, and we recognized it
was time for parents to leave. We hugged
and kissed our strangely silent child, told ourselves that it was only four
hours that first day, and walked out the door of the classroom, down the long
hall, and out the front of the school. Someone seeing us on the sidewalk that morning
might have thought we’d just heard that someone died…we were as panicked and
scared as Genevieve was.
And she's on her own
Joe headed off to work via public bus, so worried about
Genevieve that he was literally nauseous and called me twice to make sure we
had done the right thing. For me, the
farther away from that classroom I got, the more I remembered how smart and
adaptable Genevieve is. It helped that
I was dropping Amelia off at school, where two weeks previously she had also
been scared and anxious, and now she was well-adjusted and happy to go to
school.
The hours until pick-up time passed slowly, and then finally I
was standing in front of the school waiting for Genevieve to come out, fingers and toes crossed that it had been a good day. They usually come out together as a class, but
that first day everyone seemed to rush out at once. Luckily, it’s easy to spot G with her red
hair in a sea of black hair. She made
her way slowly over to me, looking completely shell-shocked. After a big hug I asked, “how was your first
day?” In our family we often give a
thumbs up or thumbs down when giving a quick verdict about something. Her thumb was somewhere between the neutral
position and down…
The other little boy who had done the language assessment
with Genevieve came out of school just then and his parents were standing next
to me. We all headed to Subway for a
“survived first day of school” lunch.
Jet, the little boy, seemed happy and talkative, so I assumed his first
day had gone a little better than Genevieve’s.
But over the course of lunch, with a little food and drink in her
system, Genevieve came out of her trance and began to talk and play with
Jet. At one point I asked G if she
understood her teacher and she said, “No Mom, I didn’t understand anything he
said all day today.” Oh no. Then Jet’s mom asked him the same
question and he ALSO said he had no idea was his teacher said all day. That made me feel a little better…after all
this is a child who speaks Mandarin and has a Taiwanese mother!
By the end of lunch, Genevieve resembled the happy, smiley
child I’m used to, and we celebrated together the fact that she had a whole weekend
to enjoy before she had to tackle school again.
She had officially survived her first day of school. And so had her parents.
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