Why I'm here.

That was a tumultuous week and a bit!  Every reason why I am back in this country was played out and I’ve never felt more helpless in all my life.

So, the show went well.  It was everything you expect a school show to be: celebratory, difficult to hear at times, excellent comic timing, full of glances off stage and into the audience, first class playing to the spot on the wall at the back of the hall.  It was superb and brought the house down.  The thrilled looks on the faces of the pupils made it all worthwhile.  The grip that daughter had on me in the hug at the end I can still feel around my neck.  She was beaming.  It’s why I’m back here now.

After the curtain calls were the last few days of the school year.  A trip to a pub to hear about a World War Two dogfight, some squash and a play in the local park.  Daughter was happy for me to come along.  She knows that I am fascinated by war stories.  Watching her, afterwards, sitting with her mates for one of the last times at school and eating her lunch was a beautiful sight.  Friendships will grow and evolve and change over the years and this last snapshot of, not innocence exactly but childhood, perhaps more correctly, was just delightful.

That has been the mark of the past couple of weeks.  We are entering the transition phase.  I’m now told to “shut up” every minute for each of the banal Dad joke phrases and promises that slip out of the mouth in a purposeful attempt to make her smile.  She is on the cusp of genuine embarrassment for the “olds” - you know, that part of growing up where independence is marked out with shrugs and tuts and despaired pouts.  At the moment she is still happy to hold hands as we walk down the street and, even though I’m being told to shut up, she’s telling me so through a smile still, and barely contained giggles.

And then we had the Leavers’ Assembly and I cried.  I cried because they all stood up in turn and spoke about an aspect of their year they had enjoyed or had been of significance to them.  Daughter stood up and spoke about learning the haka that had been written for them by a colleague of mine back in NZ.  Then they played a video of them performing the haka.  I had not seen this.  Daughter had made much of learning it at the time but then wouldn’t do it for me or kept saying she forgot the words and whatever excuse she could come up with.  I don’t think she did this completely on purpose but for the video of the whole class doing the haka to come on to the screen in the hall did for me.  I cried.  I’m about to cry now.

After that they sang a Bugsy number and sang a bit more and I cried again.  I am in awe of daughter.  I know that she feels these times as important.  She is looking forward to secondary school but has, as you would expect, all the nerves and butterflies that go with a step like this one.  But she has strength and guts inside her that I don’t know where she gets them from.  The last four years of her life have been an avalanche.  At each moment she has kept herself and kept going.  She is incredible.  I hope that the bond we have now will help us through the next years, especially when she gets to the part where she starts to ask questions of me and why I turned her life upside down.

Now we have the holidays.  I told daughter she could be lazy for the few couple of days off.  She took me at my word and has been exactly thus.  Next she has the duty of family visits and trip away to look forward to.  She’ll soon have “have you done that homework?” ringing in her ears and she’ll be getting ready for another tumultuous week in September. I’ll be helpless again.