mom stories
5 Reasons I Broke Up With My Daughter a.k.a. sent her to preschool By Cris Pearlstein
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y the time September of last year rolled around my relationship with my toddler daughter was a dysfunctional codependency that was growing more unhealthy by the day. And like many other newly-formed relationships during quarantine, where two people are suddenly spending every second of every day together, it wasn’t going well. Don’t get me wrong, I knew becoming a mom meant I would be with my kid all the time, but I never signed up for all the time. I had always envisioned being able to drop Frankie off at a grandparents house for the weekend, or send her to have a sleepover with her cousins. I always imagined my sister, an incredibly talented artist, would take her for afternoons of arts and crafts, and I assumed my best friend and I getting our kids together for play dates would be a weekly occurrence. And I never thought anything would happen to the standing weekly date nights my husband and I relied on for our sanity. Well, we moved to a new city right before a global pandemic hit and so all of those dreams popped like the bubbles my daughter chases at the park. Being isolated in a two-bedroom apartment was taking a toll—on all of us. So I did what any self-respecting person in an unhappy relationship would do: I broke up with her. Yup, I enrolled her in full-time preschool during a global pandemic and I haven’t looked back. Now before you think I’m a horrible mother, you should know that as I write this essay she’s been going to school for about nine months and she is thriving. She tells me almost every day how much she loves her friends and her teachers. She wakes up excited for the day ahead. I can honestly say our break up was the best thing to happen
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NewYorkFamily.com | June 2021
to us and, if you, dear reader, are having a rough time in your parent-kid relationship and are in need of some guidance, keep reading. Maybe I can help you to decide whether you should break up with your kid, too. We needed to see other people. Sure, we had our good days. I’d take her scooting by the water to gaze at the sailboats, or we would walk to the giant baseball field to blow
bubbles and run in the grass. If it was sunny and she was in a good mood then I couldn’t think of anywhere else I’d rather be. Many days though, were not so good. When the weather was crappy or I was too anxious to leave our apartment, we stayed inside all day long. Things would spiral, and it got harder and harder to come up with activities that held her attention. But the worst part