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Three of my best friends sent their daughters off to college recently. I sent mine off to pre-K-3. Molly and I weren't sure how it would go. Months back, when we enrolled her at our neighborhood public school, just three doors down from us, Larkin liked the idea. "What's happening in September?" we'd ask, and she'd chorus: "I'm going to school!"

We knew it couldn't be that simple. I recalled her initial miseries at the kiddie room at my gym: the tears and the agonized clinging; the time she tantrumed herself into a semi-conscious state on the floor, and I had to be summoned to get her.So hersummerlong acquiescence seemed like the calm before the storm.

And sure enough, last week the hurricane began to swirl into shape. If we mentioned school, she frowned and fell silent. Then one day she turned to me and announced, "I don't want to go to school." At orientation day last Thursday she seemed happy enough - until that night, when she reversed course. "I'm not going to school," she said. "I'm going to stay home and play."

But whom would she play with? "Tessa is going to school," I reminded her. "Joel's going. Matthew's going." Everyone was going to school. Even Mommy. "She's a teacher, remember?"
 "Then I'll be the only one. I'll stay home with you and Bert and never leave!"

 Her behavior underwent a curious regression. At mealtime she wanted to sit in our laps, wanted us to feed her. She cried in fake-babyspeak. She clamped onto my leg, whimpering like a dog, and wouldn't let go. There's more than a little parental ego in one's worries about first-day-of-school dramas. You envision your child in total meltdown mode, and you can't help wincing at being seen as a parent who has bungled the job. Have we coddled her too much? Stunted her independence? "I can see it," I said to Molly. "Twenty kids in that class on Monday, and ours will be the one going spastic on the floor." 
 

Over the weekend we tried to counter Larkin's resistance and allay her fears. I promised her a Saturday trip to an amusement park. Molly read her a book about a reluctant little raccoon and his first school day. I sat her down and told her how I hadn't wanted to go either when I was a boy, how I'd told my mother I hated school. And we gave her a dime-sized glass bead, a beautiful translucent blue, brought back years ago from a trip to Germany; it had our love inside it, we told her, and she could carry it in her pocket in school all day.

 Alas, nothing seemed to sway her. Last night her theatrics reached a crescendo. We took out her school clothes, and she threw them across the room in rage. "OK," I sighed to Molly after we finally got her to bed. "Tomorrow is going to be ugly."

 But three-year-olds are lucky charms, full of sweet surprises. After all that drama, at 6:15 this morning we heard the thump-thump of feet in the hallway, and then there was Larkin, standing by our bed with a ready smile. "Hey Daddy, come help me get dressed for school!"

 Most mornings, helping her dress is an ordeal, since she favors bizarre combinations, multiple layers, winter boots in mid-summer, and so on -- and changes her mind five times in the process. But the school uniform of khaki pants or skirt and red tennis shirt mercifully eliminates choice. Larkin dressed in a flash -- the same clothes she hurled across the room last night -- and hurried downstairs for breakfast.

Soon it was time. We packed a blanket for nap time, loaded up her backpack, and headed out to walk the half block to school. Walking a few steps ahead, I heard Lark telling Molly about how when I was a little boy, I hadn't wanted to go to school either. "But then after a few days, Daddy liked it," she said, earnestly.

 At the Pre-K-3 room we were the first to arrive. Larkin said an only slightly shy hello to her new teacher, then took a seat at a table and settled down to the serious business of mashing four cans' worth of Play-Doh into a single parti-colored mountain. She barely raised her glance when Molly and I kissed her goodbye.

The school's pre-K schedule goes all the way till 4 PM if you want it. But we're using it as a half-day program, so I'll still have afternoons with Larkin. When I went to pick her up this afternoon, it was nap period, and I worried that Larkin, who stopped napping a year ago, would have put up a major fuss. A bit nervously I opened the classroom door. In the darkened room, children lay beneath blankets on little cots. It looked like a barracks of tiny recruits; and stepping carefully among them, I felt awed by the prospect of these small persons making their way out into the world, their destinies entrusted to strangers for the first time.
 
The teacher, Ms. Mesite, was sitting at a table, holding a little boy who clearly had been crying. I looked around for Larkin. "She's in there," Ms. Mesite whispered, nodding toward the second, inner room. "She didn't want to nap." Uh-oh, I thought; what trouble did she make? Had she backslid into rage and resistance? Terrorized the others? I didn't hear anything from the other room.

Had she ranted and finally fallen asleep from sheer exhaustion?

 Crossing to the door, I leaned in to survey a dim room filled with eight or ten kids sleeping. And one little blond girl, sitting quietly on her cot, paging through a book.