Landscape of a Kindergarten

Life was everywhere. And I approached Life and asked it if I could write about it. I bowled right up to it on this occasion. Life had often looked at me, up and down, assessing me mentally, weighing its options, and in the end deciding it liked to embrace the new. It was yet to turn me down. Of course, only human beings ever said, ‘no!’ In one sense, they were the worst. So, half the staff had turned my portrait down already, whether they knew what it even meant or not, but I wrote about the kindergarten because words put down in an imaginative order were love, they were freedom, they were hope for the children and the future. They were pied pipers, telling children to think for themselves and not do and be what everyone else was, not to follow blindly, to calculate for themselves. So, nobody could stop me believing in nor sharing that lyrical freedom, that desire to write, to share, to be. They could not deny me that. The kindergarten was complex, emotional, a new world. The place was a hive of busy little bodies. The adults watched over, but the children stole the show.

Kindergarten was a paella of sorts, a little bit of everything chucked in, and it worked. So much flavour, almost too much to handle. In all its gorgeous chaos, this perennial play hub was home from home for my stunning little girl. Life was in some form.

The senses were flourishing. There was all this colour, lots of smells, both wonderful and typical as well as the not such great and naturally anticipated ones, and noise, that commander of pollution, always followed by silence, although mostly noise, before the curtain fell each day and it imminently started all over again. Parents came and went. Children bawled and brimmed with joy, they bled and blossomed there. They fell and got back up – and had no idea that life (Life) would look like that until the very end. They were oblivious, luckily, to the world beyond the bubble. At least, most kids, hopefully, were protected to the degree that the hardships and brutality of the wider world was kept from their doors until the latest possible moment. Ideally, until early adulthood.

Often, a Danish kid had stared at me speaking English to my daughter – a classmate to some of them, a playmate to others, or someone other little ones just noticed. They were mesmerised by our language and the interactions we shared. It was all Life; you could feel it spilling over and out the gates and mounting the fences to try to escape at times. Find what lay beyond their bubble, discover something else.

Inside, the place was vibrant, a hustle and bustle as if a micro-city were in motion. Kids could be heard shouting excitedly, playing, crying, asking questions, running, sometimes tripping, parents corralling their kids to get ready, to go in, to come out, to listen. Ah! To listen. That which children seemed to choose not to do. Regularly. It was total and utter, glorious chaos.

Their artworks hung from the ceilings, adorned the walls, were taken home, little shards of their time and development, their childish souls and early skills revealed, visible snippets of how they passed the hours, splashes of colour everywhere.

This was the exact location, the nucleus of my little girl’s transition from an English-speaking bubble to Danish life. She had encountered more other adults, kids, non-native language than ever before. She had her own little life now. Life Jr. I missed her more than I could imagine. The summer holidays came, and I rejoiced, even if it meant making my own days, temporarily, much harder. There could be no doubt about that whatsoever. Missing her. Or how complex it would be.

Often, when I picked her up, Kid O was muddied, covered from head to toe in soil, sand, even mud, the effects of the forest where the kids spend so much of their time all over her. They were out in all weather, embracing the days we were delivered and not pining for something other. As she had grown more confident at the kindergarten, she had become increasingly dirty, her playtime involving burying herself in the sand pit and the earth’s natural materials. It was a sign of her getting involved more actively in the group’s play activities, in diving into that world, a symbol of her development and the riches she was clearly finding there.

I had observed her increasingly active in the little ones’ playground at the back – or was it the front? – of the kindergarten. She was being pushed on the swings by some other kids after months of remaining in the shadows, timid, even afraid, lost in her entirely new space, and she had finally started to interact, to communicate, to embrace. Always her being pushed, oddly, and never the other way round. In fact, the transformation had been spectacular, sudden, and extremely satisfying. The swings were soon her favourite activity upon which I found her every time I went to pick her up. She would soon be standing on it – no longer needing another child to push her – chest proudly, defiantly pushed out, as she punished the air as she burst it going forwards and retreated over and over… it was spellbinding. The change, the scene. Unforgettable. The teachers who had facilitated the shift, the vessels of early learning, of nurturing, of linguistic, physical, emotional, mental development, were worthy of our acknowledgement and praise for their parts in all of this. After all, without them our children would be at home, running rings around us, sending us to all manner of chaotic days and back. Just ask the weekends of Life, for they knew only too well.