There go the school days without even a cup of tea or a curly sandwich

Itook The Small Girl by the hand 19 years ago and led her into her junior infants classroom for the first time. Since then, every day of my life has revolved round the school timetable. Holidays were booked around term time, adult friends invited over only at weekends, or, in the case of the more chaotic company, during mid-term weeks. Every school event, festival and fling was marked on the calendar and every exam was prepared for and enquired after. I never went clothes shopping without checking the inventory of socks, PE tops and runners. I had a path beaten to the door of the School Supply Centre. Three children, three schools – I counted them all in and I counted two of them out again. And now, in a Friday afternoon statement, without a by your leave, it is all over. Never mind the 61,000 Leaving Cert students: will somebody please think of the parents?

I wish I’d taken photographs. But there was no part of any of us, when she came home on March 11, that could have imagined she’d never go back. I think we were all of us, in those early, fearful days of the pandemic, just living in the moment. It didn’t feel like a day for taking photographs. To be honest, I don’t remember much about her homecoming, what we said or how it was. I didn’t even blink a photo of her in her school uniform into my memory.

And there will be no graduation ceremony, no Mass, no chance to email the music teacher to complain about the choice of graduation song. They never even got to pick their song, let alone perform it halfheartedly in front of the parents. I’m guessing The Youngest would have played piano for that. I’m guessing, too, that she might have won a prize at the prize-giving, maybe for her music or her art or for just being altogether sound. I loved those events, the passing out parades of sixth years that gave me a chance to put a proper, proud full stop on the older two’s school years. But with each of those, I got to go back to the unfinished business of being a school mom. September always beckoned. Now, it’s all gone without even a cup of tea and a curly sandwich. I am bereft.

If she has left her childhood behind in that locked up building, then she’s also left part of mine. When Janet and Mr Tubby spilled out from the top of my old wardrobe a few months back, she looked at them on the floor and wondered about how such a battered teddy bear could have lived so long in my affection. Don’t diss Mr Tubby, I warned her, and at the mention of his name, she was sold on my 51-year-old, once blue and now grey (like myself) bear. She liked the cut of Janet after that too, whose eyes blinked the way all baby dolls used to. So she made them the subject of her Leaving Cert art project and now they too are in lockdown, the last remaining inhabitants of that ghost school around the corner.

Obviously, it’s harder for her. I still have blurry photos and clearer memories of my last days in school, when we effectively ran riot before the grim business of the State exams took over our lives. She won’t have those days to look back on from a distance of decades, to recall fondly, to tell her own children. Instead, she is forever marked as being part of the Class of 2020, the ones that got away, the unfinished business of the state education system. She worries that in the future, she will have to explain to people why she has no Leaving Cert. Don’t worry, I tell her, people will remember. Everyone will remember.

I notice that she hasn’t yet put her uniform out for washing, and I wonder if there’s still a small part of her that hopes she’ll wear it again. Maybe the school will have some sort of graduation ceremony in September, she says, and I hope they do – though I can’t imagine them requesting that uniforms be dusted off and worn. But I won’t ask for it to be put out or put away, because I can’t imagine what it’s like to have 14 years of your short life abruptly ended. It is hard enough managing almost 20 years of a much longer one. Because if I’m not the mother of school-going children, then I don’t know what I am. Maybe I’m just like everyone else: in limbo, on protective notice, waiting for life to resume.