That feeling I get when I drop my kids off...

 Sometimes I'm overcome with relief, as they go into someone else's care. 
A weight off my shoulders. 

But this week, it's a new dayhome and Kindergarten, both slightly unfamiliar territory, and my feelings are of uneasiness and worry. 

I have to push the feelings down as I drive to work. 
How does everyone else do this? 
Does everyone else also push these feelings down and go to work anyway while their children wail and cry and protest?

I know a lot of countries don't do this, do they have it right?
I console myself by remembering I don't work 40 hours  a week, my children are often only in other people's care for 15-20 hours  a week. 

Then I remember this study I read about years ago here: Biggest Daycare Study Ever

There is a direct correlation between time spent in care, and behaviour. The more time spent in unmaternal care (daycare facility, kindergarten) under the age of 5, the more likely the child will show behavioural issues once school-age. Are we the exception because we purposely chose maternal care/dayhomes?

It's science, it's proven, and yet it's not widely known because the results of the study were not widely accepted and in-turn shared, as they appeared unfavourable to working mothers. But I can't unread it. 

Then my brother shares this information: Relationship Rupture article
Here are the highlights: 

"The profound disruption of relationship rupture, they observe, is related to our earliest attachments and the way our system processes separation from our primary caregivers — a primal response not singular to the human animal:

Take a puppy away from his mother, place him alone in a wicker pen, and you will witness the universal mammalian reaction to the rupture of an attachment bond — a reflection of the limbic architecture mammals share. Short separations provoke an acute response known as protest, while prolonged separations yield the physiologic state of despair.

A lone puppy first enters the protest phase. He paces tirelessly, scanning his surroundings from all vantage points, barking, scratching vainly at the floor. He makes energetic and abortive attempts at scaling the walls of his prison, tumbling into a heap with each failure. He lets out a piteous whine, high-pitched and grating. Every aspect of his behavior broadcasts his distress, the same discomfort that all social mammals show when deprived of those to whom they are attached. Even young rats evidence protest: when their mother is absent they emit nonstop ultrasonic cries, a plaintive chorus inaudible to our dull ape ears.

Behaviorally and psychologically, the despair phase begins when fretfulness, which can manifest as anxiety in humans, collapses into lethargy — a condition that often accompanies depression. But abrupt and prolonged separation produces something much more than psychological havoc — it unleashes a full-system somatic shock."

And it breaks my heart a little bit more. 
3.5 hours until I pick my kids up. 

I guess I better get some work done to make this time well spent. Then it's a 3 day weekend, and 24/7 with the kids, no breaks, and all of this will float to the background until Monday morning again.

Human beings are a trip. 
Are we the only animal that pushes down our instincts in favour of some external proof, by way of science?

Art by Maurice Sendak from a vintage children’s book by Janice May Urdy.
https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/01/29/lets-be-enemies-maurice-sendak/