If you’re a woman moving through the world, it doesn’t take long to develop the feeling that someone, somewhere, is grading you. Your body. Your lined or unlined face. Your career or lack thereof. Your marriage. Your parenting.
Sometimes the judges are real. More often, you’ve internalized them so completely that you start handing yourself report cards.
You’re either too ambitious or not ambitious enough. Too invested in your appearance or letting yourself go. Too anxious. Too relaxed. Too much. Not enough.
These days, I do a decent job ignoring the noise. I’ve never been interested in policing other people’s choices, and I tend to gravitate toward people who march to the beat of their own drum. Unless you’re being unnecessarily rude or cruel, I say, go off queen.
Still, it’s hard to grow up in a society that constantly hands out grades and not internalize the idea that you’re being scored. And when you become a parent, the feeling multiplies.
If your kid throws a tantrum in a restaurant, you wonder whether people think you’re too permissive. If they’re shy, you worry they aren’t confident enough. If they’re struggling, you wonder what you missed.
You can know, intellectually, that children are their own people. That they arrive with their own personalities, preferences, strengths, and quirks. And yet, if you’re not correcting against it, it’s remarkably easy to treat their every success or struggle as data about yourself.
Read: 15 Things I’ve Learned in the First Year of Motherhood
Which is how I found myself spiraling about my daughter Bella’s kindergarten screening.
Bella is a sparkplug. She’s imaginative and theatrical, with an empath’s heart. She never misses a chance to compliment someone’s outfit, lead a dance party, paint a rainbow, or build an elaborate set-up for her dolls and figurines, complete with complex, overlapping family relationships. For my fellow astrology nerds, she exemplifies her Pisces Sun, Leo Moon, & Leo Rising.
LOOK AT ME, LOOK AT MY FEELINGS!
She’s a happy, vibrant kid. Still, even though her preschool teachers assured me she was more than ready for kindergarten, I started spinning out in the days leading up to her screening.
Is it weird she can’t identify all 26 letters? Should I have pushed phonics sooner? Did I do her a disservice by choosing a nature-focused, play-based program? Is she already behind? Am I the reason she’s behind? Is “behind” even a real thing at five? What the fuck is wrong with me?
Chill vibes like that. 🤪
It’s worth mentioning these kindergarten screenings don’t even include scoring––the parents don’t get a recap. This wasn’t a public-facing test with any kind of stakes. Which made my spiral even more unnecessary, and thus, more potent.
The call was coming from inside the house.
My husband was unmoved by my concerns. My sister—a preschool teacher with graduate degrees from Bank Street and Columbia, a person who has dedicated her professional life to exactly this question—scoffed. “She has all the time in the world to focus on academics. Let her be a kid!”
I knew they were right. Intellectually.
Emotionally, I was on a slightly different page.
On the day of the screening, Bella walked through the doors without a trace of anxiety, disappearing into a classroom with a few other kids from her grade without so much as a backward glance. Forty-five minutes later she came skipping out, grinning.
“They loved me!”
Fingers crossed there was a self-esteem metric.
As we held hands on the way out, she didn’t tell me much, but confirmed that the teachers were nice and she had a great time. But, more importantly, could we please take a picture with the lion statue outside? The mascot had already captured her heart.
I stopped the inquisition, pulled out my phone, and snapped a few smiling photos of her with the stone lion.
All of this is to say that I have no idea how she performed––I don’t know which letters she named or how high she counted, and of course I realize how little it matters.
In reflecting on all of this, it’s clear I wasn’t actually worried about whether Bella was ready for kindergarten at all.
I was worried about myself.
Or, more specifically, what the screening might reveal about me.
Parenting young children is an extraordinary exercise in uncertainty. Every day you’re making dozens of tiny decisions with almost no objective feedback. Which preschool? How much structure? How much freedom? How many extracurriculars? Should I be drilling letters in our spare time? Was I giving her enough? Too much?
Then suddenly there was a kindergarten screening—an expert sitting across from my child with a clipboard.
Some deeply conditioned part of my brain wanted a verdict. I wanted someone to finally tell me if I’m doing this right. If I’d somehow missed something important. If I’d failed to give her what she needed. If I was already getting motherhood wrong in ways I couldn’t yet see.
Read: Guilt Has Always Been Part of My Motherhood Experience (And That’s Normal)
Of course, no screening on earth could answer those questions.
Even if Bella had identified every letter, read a chapter book aloud, and counted to one million, it wouldn’t prove I was a good mother. And if she’d struggled, it wouldn’t prove I was a bad one.
The screening wasn’t evaluating my parenting any more than it was evaluating her future.
But this screening aside, elementary school is about to provide an endless stream of opportunities to spin out about my parenting. There will be report cards, reading groups, parent-teacher conferences, WhatsApp chats, and standardized tests.
There will always be another metric, another benchmark, and another opportunity to mistake measurement for meaning.
What I’m hoping—what I’m trying to hold onto before it gets harder to do so—is that Bella gets to stay Bella through all of it.
All of it being: the kid who asks strangers about their families. The kid who notices when someone is sitting alone. The kid who can spend an hour inventing elaborate histories for a handful of dolls.
So when September comes and I start to spiral—and I will—she’s my reminder to look up from the clipboard.
Bella isn’t worried about being ready for kindergarten.
She’s already a lion.
