anoth­er fab­u­lous school choice

In my quest to accept the fact that Avery will not be in prepara­to­ry school for­ev­er, and that this devel­op­ment is in fact a good thing, I arranged our vis­it last evening to The Godol­phin and Latymer School in Ham­mer­smith, and it was real­ly quite thrilling. Beau­ti­ful build­ing, nice live­ly girls, a very sound and sen­si­ble head­mistress. I looked at Avery sit­ting between us, lis­ten­ing to the head­mistress’s address about test­ing, inter­views, first term, all those intim­i­dat­ing things, and there she sat, in her “pony face” atti­tude, com­plete­ly ele­gant and com­posed and much more in charge of her­self than I was. John, too, looked hap­py and com­fort­able. It’s only I who would rather every­thing stayed the same.

Tomor­row is the Big Day. She final­ly has two num­bers in her age! I am think­ing, with­out real­ly even want­i­ng to, of ten years ago, wait­ing for her arrival, sick and tired of wait­ing, half again my nor­mal size of 100 pounds! Walk­ing through drifts of fall­en autumn leaves on the New York side­walks, try­ing to imag­ine what it would be like to have some­one in our house. Bring­ing home the last bou­quet of pre-baby flow­ers, I remem­ber white glad­i­oli all over the house, and look­ing and look­ing at her lit­tle set of shelves with piles of white cloth­ing since we did­n’t know she would be a girl. Rush­ing final­ly to the hos­pi­tal after walk­ing miles and miles in labor, to the flea mar­ket, out to brunch (the last meal!), call­ing our par­ents, John giv­ing me a pedi­cure since I could not reach my feet! Pack­ing the fun­ny antique leather suit­case with things we end­ed up not even using because twelve hours after she was born, we were back home, with guests for din­ner. What? Yes, guests for din­ner. Every­one pass­ing the baby back and forth, her tiny starfish hands wav­ing from the white blan­ket and her enor­mous red lips tak­ing up all her face. And all three cats, now dead and in their places new cats, wait­ing for her to come. Ten years. How did that hap­pen? Four apart­ments, three schools, two coun­tries lat­er, we’ve arrived at the big 10-year-old birth­day. Wish me luck sur­viv­ing the influx of both 21 chil­dren, and lots of emo­tion, tomor­row afternoon.