On September 1st, in a distant galaxy some eons ago, my faith in humanity was so badly shaken. I can still recall the conversation that did it. "And who have we here?" said Sister Immaculata, her small, pink face looming down at me from a tall, black and white column hung about with large, shiny rosary beads the size of conkers.
I had a pretty shrewd idea that my sister had already told her who I was, but I was bent on co-operation as instructed by my mother. So I reeled off my name and lineage.
"And what age are you?"
"Four, sister." So far, so good.
"And what age am I?"
I was pretty flummoxed at that, I can tell you. Here was a grown adult, in funny clothes, supposedly in charge of all these children and she didn't know her own age.
And furthermore, she expected me, a little four-year-old, to tell her.
In the course of the day, I was questioned closely by more of these creatures. "So you are Mary's little sister!" they would say. "And who am I?"
Or "What have I got in my hand for you?" Or, "Did I see you jumping that big puddle in the yard?" They seemed to suffer from a collective amnesia that worried me. And it got worse. Not only did you have to keep reminding them who they were, you had to show them how to do things as well. How to make the Sign of the Cross. How to draw a flower. Where to put the chalk and dusters.
The range of tasks they had forgotten how to do seemed endless and, as I later discovered, you had to show them over and over again, on a daily basis.
Throughout those early nightmare days, my anxiety grew. Alongside dealing with the nuns' forgetfulness, I had questions of my own. Why the endless threading of coloured beads on a string? Which colours were you meant to use and in what order? Why did my beads always roll off the desk and disappear down cracks in the floorboards?
And when I tried to retrieve them, why did Sister Immaculata make it all worse by asking me to remind her what she had said about leaving your place?
Perhaps toddlers today don't take what grown-ups say so literally. Or perhaps, they are more accepting of adult confusion and ignorance, given the number of times they've had to show their parents how to pre-set the video.
As we crawled through back-to-school traffic last September, I asked the boys if they remembered their first day at school. "Which school?" John demanded. "I've been to five so far, counting playschool."
"It was just like it's been ever since," said Andy, enigmatically.
Snatched from the comfort zone of a Montessori, they had been tossed on the sterner shore of a national school which called for different survival tactics.
Normally garrulous John went very quiet for a year, trying not to attract attention. But Andy returned entirely unfazed by his introduction to "big school." It was, he declared, "no problem".
It continued to be no problem until our first parent-teacher meeting. "Andrew is what I'd describe as very `laid back'," the teacher said, waggling his fingers in that irritating air-quotation-marks way and smiling for no reason that I could think of. "Isn't he?"
We gradually teased out the truth. Accustomed as he was to the personal attentions of his Montessori surrogate mum and her engaging Swedish assistant, Andy had assumed that the new teacher's barked commands to the class in general didn't apply individually to him. So when Sir said "Take out your Irish book", Andy continued to pursue his own agenda at the back of the class. This worked well for a time.
I missed the tell-tale signs that should have alerted me. Questions such as "Mum, what's a grindstone?" Or: "Mum, why is Sir always talking about my socks?" Even the significance of the teacher's note about having Andy's ears tested somehow escaped me. I supposed it was something we had to do before he joined the swimming class.
This is one of the conscience-flailing scourges of being a working-outside-the-home parent. Just like Andy, I didn't ever seem to know what was going on in school.
Other parents network at the school gates every day. They stand in clusters, discussing child psychology, auditing the cake sale, exchanging info on extra-curricular activities. They relate, debate and commiserate, saying things such as: "Aengus got 10 out of 10 in the spelling test. How did your fellow do?"
As an outsider, dropping the kids off and fleeing, I would hear nothing of any spelling test, least of all from Andy. For me, everything depends on locating the crumpled school note headed "important" stuck to the inside of a copybook with chewing gum. More often than not it goes unnoticed, until days later when it emerges to inform me that the teacher training day is tomorrow and Aaaah, the kids will be off school. From the kid's point of view, everything that happens in school is strictly confidential.
"What did you do today?" I ask eagerly, as wives once quizzed their husbands about the office.
"Nothing"
"Well, something must have happened!"
"Not really. Can I go on my bike now?"
Not that the boys don't have moments of nostalgia. As we edged through the traffic towards the school, Andy looked back fondly on his days with Sir. "When we moved on to second class, it was great to hear him shouting at the new kids in the corridor."
In the chaos, the kids amused themselves by spotting "first-day" mothers.
"Look - bet she's one," John chortled as a young woman, blinded by tears dashed across the road without looking.
"Oh no, that'll set Mum off," said Andy, who tends to laugh when I weep during sad mother-child goodbye scenes like in Star Wars, The Phantom Menace.
As I swallowed a compassionate lump in the throat, it set me thinking that these days school is less of a culture shock. Kids today are phased into education by creches and playschools. If I ever become a granny, I can hear myself saying: "Separation anxiety never did me any harm". And Andy replying: "Oh yeah? What about you at The Phantom Menace?"