Valuable Lessons About Living, Learned In Mom’S Kitchen

It’s a good thing we learn everything we need to know in kindergarten and not preschool, because if this were the case, I’d be a lost soul.

Like many children my age, I never skipped happily to a preschool class full of anxious 4-year-olds. I never built a house of cardboard bricks and I never chose an airplane or other symbol to represent me before I knew how to spell my name.

In fact, I never even sat in the tiny, tiny - even smaller than kindergarten - chairs. Nope. It was straight to the big league for me - kindergarten, watch out.

I understand the importance of preschool for some children and I believe there are many wonderful programs that are crucial in shaping today’s kids. But I think my pre-kindergarten program was something even better - my own private school, with my own private teacher.

Those blissful days started at the kitchen table and ended with me asleep on my teacher’s lap. Her name was Mom.

There are few memories before the age of 6 I can recall but I have always seemed to harbor a strong remembrance of my early days with my mother.

We painted the kitchen with red and white checkers and we drew on the sidewalk with chalk. We’d go to the library or to the park and sometimes, to the grocery store. We’d bathe the dog, plant corn and run through the sprinkler.

While I doubt I learned much about addition or subtraction, I discovered more about love, patience and true teaching that year than I may have during any subsequent one.

My “preschool” days usually didn’t entail anything special but they were some of the most special times of my life. And they have forever shaped the way I view parents as our greatest teachers.

It was inevitable, though, that eventually Mom and I would realize it was time for me to enter the real world.

One fall day, I put on my favorite Rainbow Bright dress and stepped out into the dizzying world. I was 5 and that meant one thing: kindergarten.

I knew Mom couldn’t come with me but my school-less days of 1984 have never been forgotten.

I think I just may have been lucky enough to learn everything I needed to know before kindergarten.