Back to School: Why It’s Okay If You’re Not 100% Happy Your Kids Are Back in School
I turn left out of the elementary school parking lot, the damp left rain boot of my 7-year-old propped on the passenger armrest, and my iced oat latte is still warm enough to steam through the sip lid. For the entire month of August, my social media feed has been full of memes counting down to the first day, parents holding celebratory coffee mugs, captions that declare this the best day of the year. I pull into the grocery store parking lot 10 minutes later, and instead of feeling the euphoria everyone talks about, I dig my phone out of my bag to text my sister: I don’t miss the 6am wake-ups or the fighting over screen time, but I kind of miss them already.
Three nights earlier, I stood in the school gym eating a stale chocolate chip cookie from the PTA table at back-to-school night, when another mom leaned over and asked, “Aren’t you just so happy they’re back? I was this close to losing my mind by the third week of break.” I laughed and said yeah, me too, because that’s what you say. But it wasn’t the whole truth.
This summer was weirdly good for us. My husband took four extra weeks of remote work after a big project wrapped, so we skipped the pricey overnight camps and the cross-country road trip we’d half-planned. We spent most mornings picking wild blackberries along the back fence, most afternoons napping on the couch while the kids built Lego towers across the living room floor. I didn’t yell half as much as I usually do when we’re rushing from piano lessons to playdates. When my younger son had a panic attack before bed one night because he was scared of the oncoming thunderstorm, we just sat on the porch and watched the sky turn purple instead of rushing him to bed to stick to our schedule. It was messy – there were crumbs in every crack of the sectional, we went through three bottles of sunscreen in a month – but it was ours.
The first day of school, when I walked him into his new classroom, he squeezed my hand so hard his nails left half-moon marks on my palm. He didn’t want to let go. I knelt down and he whispered in my ear that he was scared I’d forget to come get him. I told him I wouldn’t, I wrote my phone number on the sticky note in his pocket like the nurse suggested, and I left, standing in the hallway for a minute blinking back my own tears because I never expected that. I thought I’d be glad to have the house quiet again.
What no one talks about much is that feelings don’t have to be all one thing. You can be thrilled to have uninterrupted time to finish work without someone interrupting you every 10 minutes to ask for a snack, and still grieve the end of the lazy days that fit your family just right. I’ve talked to three other parents in the last two weeks who’ve said the same thing – they don’t post about it on Instagram, because they don’t want to seem ungrateful or like they don’t love their kids, but they don’t feel that big celebratory high everyone else is talking about.
I’ve tried a few small things to make the transition softer for all of us, that don’t take a lot of time or money. First, I stopped filling every empty hour of the school day with chores and work. I used to think six kid-free hours meant I had to check off every item on my to-do list, but now I leave 20 minutes a day unplanned. Most days I sit on the back porch and eat a popsicle before I open my laptop, the same way we did all summer. It’s a tiny thing, but it softens the jolt of the new routine.
For the kids, I swapped the generic “how was school?” check-in after dismissal for two specific questions: “What’s one thing that went well today, and what’s one thing that felt hard?” It stops the automatic “fine” answer, and gives both of them space to talk about the small hard stuff – like when my older son’s best friend isn’t in his class, or when the lunch line was too long and he didn’t get the pizza he wanted – before it builds up into a meltdown at dinner. We also kept one summer ritual: every Friday after school, we stop at the gas station down the street for soft serve, just like we did all break. It gives them something familiar to hold onto when everything else at school feels new and unsteady.
When I volunteered in my older son’s classroom last week, the teacher told me the first three weeks of school are almost all transition, not reading or math. Most kids are still adjusting, and that’s what she expects. She said parents always apologize if their kid cries at drop off or acts out at the end of the day, but there’s nothing to apologize for.
This week, after drop off, I didn’t rush home. I sat at the small park near the school, drank my coffee, and watched a group of ducks swim in the pond. I still have a million things to do: fold three loads of laundry, answer a stack of work emails, bake cookies for the PTA fundraiser next week. But I’m not going to pretend I’m over the moon that summer is over. I’m not heartbroken that my kids are back in school, either. They get to paint and play four-square and learn new things, that’s good. I get quiet time to get things done, that’s good. But it’s okay that it feels a little like losing something, too. Next month, my younger son will probably stop squeezing my hand so hard at drop off. We’ll fall into the new routine and it will feel normal. For now, this is enough.
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