Dad's Voice: Letter To My Daughter Israel today

On the first day of school, everything will seem threatening and scary to you, because I myself fell apart when you said goodbye to me with the bag on your back • Dad's voice

• Illustration: Zeev Engelmeier

My Girl,

This week you put the bag on your back and went to first grade for the first time.

I did not think it would do me much good, I assumed that at most I too could finally provide Facebook with a picture of a frightened girl with a two-size-tall satchel.

I was wrong.

Once you stood in the doorway with that slightly embarrassed look of yours, I realized the size of the class.

I went back in the time machine and remembered how I had said goodbye to my mother for the first time at the school gate, how I stared at the gray building and the children who all seemed so full of confidence, pausing as much as I could into my threatening and unfamiliar world.

Today things are different, so to speak.

We went with you for two days of adjustment, you already knew the educator and your classmates, and everything should go more smoothly.

But nothing has really changed.

Maybe your school building looks a little more colorful than mine, but on the first day everything will look foreign to you too, the commotion will be threatening, and all the other kids will look confident to you.

I know you, you have no way to avoid it.

Maybe it's in the gardens, maybe it's my fault.

***

So how can I still help you?

Let me tell you a secret.

You're going towards a marathon, and maybe actually towards a marathon that is both a roller coaster and a few other things.

The first day will be hard, and the second day too, and the third day may be a little easier, but then much harder days will come.

And you will go through them, mainly because you have no choice.

Because this is the life outside the world we built for you.

Welcome to our side, my girl.

So far we have done everything to create a bubble of good for you, which nothing negative can penetrate.

We've done a little too much with it, I understand it now, when I send you to a school that has more than a thousand students I do not know, and your smile seems a little scared.

You believe in magic, in the tooth fairy, and that in the end the good always win, and I do not intend to teach you otherwise.

I love you like that and want to preserve every moment of such innocence.

When you find that the picture is completely different, I will be there to comfort you.

I'm pretty good at it, I

collected

today without anyone noticing, seconds after the yellow council bus picked you up for school (for some reason he played me at the top of the song "you're in the army now", as he walked away and into it).

It's true that you seem to be smiling all the time while waiting, but this is overall my well-known method of fighting tears that want to burst.

I can not afford to be the only father who falls apart there next to everyone.

It's too early, I have at least another six years to move with these people.

But maybe we should not slip into melancholy at all.

It's a happy day, overall, and when I think about it, the most logical advice I can give you is to enjoy this period of life as much as possible.

I'm sorry I did not enjoy my school days enough.

In the end, we have no better time in life than this.

So go ahead Mami, learn from Dad's mistakes, it's allowed.

***

I admit I'm

a little jealous too.

As we wrapped your books and notebooks, I saw the passion you have to learn.

I've long since lost it, I'm just learning what I really owe.

But suddenly it seemed that even the great nightmare of childhood — the math books and the embedded notebooks — winked at me, as if implying that they knew I would like a fresh start with them, but that it was a little late now.

Well, maybe in the next incarnation.

Now is your time.

You may not be able to appreciate it, but I'll try to help.

It is said, and rightly so, that youth is wasted on the young, but I will see that you understand.

You're smarter than I was, and there's no way it's not going to happen.

When I was in first grade, I was mainly impressed by the child who managed to spit on a pillar, and you ask me the night before the big day if in China too all the children go to school for the first time tomorrow, and if from space can also see that it is a special day.

By the way, of course you can also see from space that this is a special day.

After all, the first day of school is the official opening shot for the opening of the largest sandwich factory in the cosmos.

When I asked you the night before, you told me you were not excited, but I know you lied.

You may be smarter than me, but you still have a lot to learn.

I saw you flipping back and forth in the empty notebooks, I saw you practicing raising and lowering the handle of the bag when you thought no one saw you (I also have a hard time manipulating this thing!), And I saw you walking back and forth with it in front of the mirror.

You probably think

tomorrow all eyes will be on you, but believe me, everyone looks apprehensively at their own tail.

It's not just you.

It's a kind of world where everyone is constantly on the test.

No one completely understands why it has to be this way, and everyone invents their own way of coping.

One day you too will invent for yourself.

***

On Tuesday

it seemed to me that something inside your face was different.

As in the story from the legends, as soon as the clock changed, something changed in you too.

Suddenly you look so serious, you spoke in a less childlike tone, and when I made our sign with your finger, you gave me a look of "Well, Dad, I don't have time for this nonsense of yours right now."

At noon I was waiting for you.

I knew you were coming back real soon, and I was tense as if she had been away from home for two years.

When you asked me the night before when you would come home and I told you "at twelve-thirty," you said it sounded really far.

I laughed, because I thought your time estimate was still lacking, and that you did not understand that it was a short day.

Now I feel you were right.

This day has been really long for me.

And difficult.

Maybe it's true what a friend once told me, that the first day of school is the most unnecessary day of the year, and that it's better to take advantage of it to spend time with the kids in the desolate parks.

And maybe that's not true.

I do not know everything, this too is something you will soon learn.

Good luck, my little one.

father.

shmulikn@israelhayom.co.il