The Intersection of Hope and Fear

Of all the annual events in the lives of families, probably the one that elicits the biggest release of nervous energy is going back to school day.  I can think of no other event that happens on a yearly basis where hope and fear are so juxtaposed.   The beginning of the school year for a family is something like Columbus casting off from the pier, turning his ships west, and heading out into the great unknown.  What will you find?  What will happen?  Will you find a shortcut to India and the Far East?  Or will you get swallowed up by one of the great sea monsters believed to inhabit the seas beyond the edge of the map? Or will you wind up somewhere else, on some new land that you did not know existed?

    

The start of school is always accompanied by hope.  Education provides the opportunity for success.  Education represents growth and positive change for most of us.  It is the pathway to the bright future.   School is the place where our children meet most of their friends.  In many ways, for families, schools are the central educational and social node for their children for nine months every year.  That school should represent hope and education and should be valued is a mindset that we try to inculcate into our children.

    

The start of school, however, also means fear for families.  Each year is a trip into the unknown.  Each year brings new teachers, new peers, new parents to meet, new educational demands. Will my child successfully navigate these new things or not?  You can hope, but cannot be sure until the days begin to roll by and homework and grades and responses from your children and from the school start to roll in.  Until the new becomes familiar, that fear will stay in place.  The bottom line is that the start of school also represents a huge dose of change into our lives.  Is the year a beginning of an amazing journey, or is it the beginning of a trip into the heart of darkness?  None of us really know that first day.  All we can do is fret about the changes and newness while being hopeful about the potential of what lay ahead.

      

While all of us have experienced this, I believe that no group experiences it more strongly than those families sending their child off to school for the first time.  The arrival of that day is something akin to being hit by one of Zeus’s lightning bolts from Olympus.  As a parent you are now sending that child who you have nurtured and cared for and protected out into the wild on their own.  Further, there is nothing you can do to stop this.  It is an inexorable change, charged to the highest levels with hope and fear for mom and dad.  In many ways, this day can be the most terrifying of all the ‘normal’ days that occur as a parent.   No matter how you prepare for it, the realization is there that you are sending your young child out and into the care of virtual strangers and you are at their mercy.   But you send the child because you must.

      

As the years go by and this annual drama plays itself out again and again, the hope eventually outdistances the fear.  As a family you become comfortable with the schools and realize your child will not suffer through tortures or cruelties that would make Torquemada’s Inquisition look like a circus.  As a family you come to accept that your child is seeing benefits of an education and the folks at the school are, for the most part, really good people who care.  Over time, that hope grows and the fears subside.  Even so, these feelings about the first day never go away completely.   Even when your child is no longer really a child, but is away as a young adult at college, there is still the excitement brought on by hope, coupled with the nervous energy brought on by the fear of the unknown.

      

Embrace the excitement.  Embrace the hope.  Embrace the fear.  The truth is that these feelings reflect much of what makes us human.  These feelings are a large part of what lets us know we are alive.  Hopefully everyone got through that first day successfully.  Hopefully everyone is now back and hard at work, learning, exploring, and growing.  That is school and it is also life.  Welcome back!