The last few days before terms starts are a slog. When your kids are at a certain age and stage, the whole summer is a slog and yet somehow in the the last few days you reach a new level of hysteria and despair.
I remember one year my children - I think five and seven at the time - spent the entire summer smacking my bottom. Just casually, whenever they saw me. Hi mum, *whack*. There was nothing I could do to get them to stop this. I was a nervous wreck, alternately screaming my head off or weeping. By the end of term I was basically rigid and non-verbal; my children were wild.
A friend recalls one of her childhood summers in the Eighties when her mother locked herself in the bathroom with the cordless phone, (they were a fancy family), and called her sister to come and take her three children away because they were driving her so mental she couldn’t trust herself not to e.g. set fire to the house.
But even if your children are, say, between 8 and 12 and no longer a total slog but not yet acid teenagers, and you (whisper it) quite enjoyed the summer holidays, the last days can get a bit screechy.
When the morning itself arrives and the kids are snapping on their ties, lacing up their shoes and going “proing” on the sharp end of new HB pencils with a forefinger, while you may have been waiting for this moment for days, weeks - the whole damn summer - when it actually arrives you will most likely experience an epic crash. Epic.
If you have been doing most of the childcare over the summer - even if that means little more than helping them download Steam for a better Geometry Dash playing experience and tossing them a hot pita bread every now and again - when they go, they leave a space in your life that is greater than the actual space they took up. Your home, your life, feels like you are standing at the bottom of a large, drained swimming pool, with no exit strategy.
And if you have a youngest child starting at primary school this week, watch out. Take a beat before you cut all your hair off/get your nose pierced/buy a puppy/have another baby/leave your husband. The last child going to primary school can trigger the sort of life crisis that makes men in their fifties go, “Steady on”.
All this is completely normal. Even if you have been sitting about for six weeks, thinking, “When they’re back at school Imma clear out that cupboard, go for a run, write my business plan,” etc, you might do nothing for the first week - fortnight! - except stare at a wall.
Yesterday I was in a state of sheer panic at the cliff edge I was about to fall off. Now I am spinning through the air towards the ravine, drinking a bottomless cup of tea and considering un-installing Instagram so that I don’t watch IG Reels until 3pm. There will be a visible paff of dust at around 1.45pm, which is my 3am of daytime, when I hit rock bottom.
Anyway if that’s you, too - that’s okay. Join the club. I have been through this back-to-school high/crash for the last five years and it’s the same every time. Who am I? WHO AM I? I tend to solve it by doing a lot of experimental cooking and fiddly admin, including - don’t judge - looking up what Christmas shows we want to go and see. Seriously, there are no tickets left by half term.
How are you? Are you having any mid-life crisis fantasies - the madder the better - that you are willing to share to amuse the group? Please leave a comment in the handy box below.
It's so not my life, but I love reading your stuff Esther. I even sprang a whole long read of my own off a piece you wrote recently. x
As a teacher myself going back after 6 weeks is another level of anxiety and panic. It is NOT my favourite time of the year.
Add in a child starting secondary school and my workplace being disrupted by RAAC and quite frankly I am already shouting " stop I want to get off"
Roll on half term...