A while back I was chatting with my family, and someone said how lucky our kid is — goes to kindergarten, doesn't have to work, and doesn't have homework the way elementary school kids do. If only someone would open a kindergarten for grown-ups.
I laughed and said I had no idea how the teachers there handle a class of fifteen-month-olds, but a room full of four-hundred-month-olds? That'd be a breeze.
My wife shot me a look. "Four hundred months? That's you."
Fair point. I'm past thirty, and my alarm goes off three times before I drag myself up. I scroll my phone under the table during meetings. The moment I get home I collapse onto the couch and refuse to move. I'm basically a giant toddler. The only difference is that when a kindergarten kid cries, someone picks them up and comforts them. When we cry, we hide in the bathroom and turn the tap on full blast.
Later we walked past a nursing home and my wife teased, "Could young people live in one of these?" I glanced at the grand entrance and answered seriously: "This one looks fancy. You'd probably have to enter a lottery to get in. You wouldn't stand a chance."
We both laughed. These days there's a lottery for kindergarten spots, a lottery for elementary schools — apparently even nursing homes run lotteries now. Our generation is stuck in the middle: too old to be babies, too young to retire, not even qualified to enter the draw.
It made me think of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. The hero is born an old man, gets younger as he goes, and finally dies as an infant in his lover's arms. I thought it was romantic when I first saw it. Now it feels like someone took my life and ran it backwards.
So what would happen if you really put adults in a kindergarten? I pictured it: morning craft class wouldn't be clay figurines — it'd be a lesson on fixing your water heater. Afternoon outdoor activity wouldn't be the slide — it'd be queuing at the hospital for an appointment. At nap time the teachers wouldn't need to coax anyone; hand out one melatonin tablet each and the whole room goes quiet.
There's been no shortage of child influencers online lately — kids of a few years old who can talk circles around adults in a livestream. Some people criticize this as forcing growth, dragging children into the adult world too early. I suspect the critics are mostly jealous. These kids cleared the Earth Online dungeon at a young age, made their money, and now get to enjoy the rest of their lives. The rest of us are still grinding away in the same dungeon, so of course we're sour about it.
The kindergarten teacher assigned craft homework. At first I took it seriously — gathered materials, drew up plans, built the thing by hand. Then I noticed the other parents just ordered from the links the teacher had recommended; those kits go together easily and look great. So I got smart and ordered from the link too. Then a different teacher posted in the group saying she hoped we'd actually make things ourselves, using materials from everyday life. I looked silently at the delivery box I'd just opened and thought: this is a material from everyday life.
It occurred to me that this is probably the "kindergarten" a four-hundred-month-old needs. Not an actual classroom with an actual teacher, but a place and a few moments where you can forget you're a grown-up.
People say the hardest thing for an adult is keeping a child's heart at an age when you're supposed to be mature. I'd say the hardest thing is keeping a back door open for yourself at the age when you're supposed to act like a grown-up — so you can slip out now and then and be a kid for a while.
Kindergarten, nursing home — they're just metaphors. A four-hundred-month-old doesn't need to be comforted. They just need to be allowed, once in a while: allowed to stare into space, allowed to make mistakes, allowed to do something completely useless, allowed to smear tanghulu all over their face.
And if you can't win the lottery for a spot in the four-hundred-month kindergarten, that's fine. As long as you get to be a baby now and then, you're out of school wherever you are.