‘My daughter gets homesick when she goes to nursery – opposite our house’

And, still, each time I depart, she wails like a wartime evacuee, appalled at being on her own. She has developed, as her brother did before her, a strain of homesickness so profound that it kicks in over distances barely measurable by science.

In his case, I cited my own rural upbringing, the hour-long trip from school each day, utilising several buses, with a two-mile walk at its terminus. When this failed to impress upon him the concept of relative hardships, I pointed to our bedroom window and told him we’d be right there. Sadly, he took this so literally that any time he looked up at our window and didn’t see us, he was devastated, since he had taken those warm words as a commitment to surrender all other responsibilities and stand at the window of our bedroom, engaged in the legally inadvisable practice of staring into a primary school for eight hours each day.

With my daughter, we’ve tried to learn from such missteps, adopting something closer to a cold-turkey approach. We drop her off with little fanfare and say we’ll be back to pick her up later.

At first, this was fine. Lately, it has not been. There are tantrums and strops and dangerously adhesive clings. More than once, she’s had to be peeled off me by nursery staff, as I back away at their insistence. They always tell me not to worry, and sometimes I can even hear them over her plaintive keening.

And then, on some days, the trauma begins on our own doorstep. Recently, she’s become obsessed with bringing things from home to ease the transition. Last week it was, variously, a transformer, a hair bobble and a single chess piece. Yesterday, it was her cuddly snow leopard. I say “her” cuddly snow leopard, but it was actually one we’d allowed her to “borrow” from her cousins Ardal and Nora the previous evening. After a brief, demeaning charade of removing the leopard from her arms, I allow her to keep it for the walk, and then for the hellos and the coat hangings. By the time she’s required to take her seat, she’s grasping it so tightly that removing it would require several strong men, or one moderately sized piece of industrial machinery.

I’ve always detected a distaste among nursery staff for bringing in home comforts, likely because it would lead to every child wanting to do it, while also increasing the chance of precious objects from home becoming mixed in with their own stock. These are good and sensible concerns but, in this moment, they mean nothing to me, the sole protagonist of reality. After a brief, pleading glance at her key worker, I intuit consent from her to let my daughter keep it, just this once. For the fifth or sixth such time.

I withdraw to neither crying nor wailing. If anything, she seems delighted that I’m leaving her and the plushy in peace and, when I return to pick her up that afternoon, she’s still clutching it.

I envisaged I’d have a job ahead of me the following morning, but that is a problem for future Séamas, who I’ve always considered something of a bore. And then, miraculously, no mention of the leopard comes at all. No dolly, toy or chess-piece either. We’re bag-packed, shoes-on and ready to hit the road, and I’m about to pat myself on the back for yet another excellent bit of parenting, when her demand comes, loud and clear.

“Pancake,” she says. I’m not overjoyed at her tone, but any chance to get food into her is worth taking, so I give her a single store-bought pancake, buttered just how she likes it. She picks it up and marches to the door. “Darling,” I say, “eat up, we have to go.”

“NO!” she replies, with fiery commitment. “I bring pancake to nursery.” Her lip is trembling, the bead of an unspent tear forming in her left eye. She is holding the buttered bread-stuff in front of her chest with both hands, in a posture of eucharistic solemnity.

We are late now, as evidenced by the steady stream of people I can see filing into the school through the frosted glass in our front door. I gather her bag, her bottle and her brother, and make the short trip across the road, where, in the tumult of comings and goings, none of her nursery workers have a chance to interrogate me about the silent vigil my daughter is observing with the steadfastly uneaten emotional-support pancake she now clutches with reverent awe.

I feel that they may have something to say to me about it all at pick-up tomorrow. Thankfully, that seems like a problem for future Séamas. I’m free now. He’s on his own.

Photograph by Getty Images