you know you're a parent of a school-avoidant child when...

...your back to school supplies look a little different from everyone else's.

You have adopted what can only be described as a Mary Poppins approach to preparedness. Not the cheerful singing version, the version where you have quietly developed the ability to produce, from your bag, whatever might be needed at any given moment of any given morning. Face wipes, lint roller, eyelash curler, propranolol. You are ready. You do not know for what, exactly, but you are ready for it.

You know the school attendance line by heart. Not because you looked it up, but because at some point it just became part of you, in the same way you know your own phone number and your children's birthdays and exactly how many minutes it takes to get to school via the quiet route at 8:43am on a Thursday.

The attendance officer knows your name. You know hers. There is a warmth to this relationship that you did not ask for and have come to genuinely appreciate.

You start a new email and the school's attendance address is the first thing that populates. Every time. You have made peace with this.

You have a script in your Notes app for calling in an absence. You have refined it over several drafts. It is, at this point, quite good.

There are snacks in the glovebox. Not for the children. For you. Because you genuinely do not know how long school drop-off is going to take on any given morning, and a person cannot negotiate with a teenager on an empty stomach.

You are awake at 4am. Not because you set an alarm, but because your brain has decided that 4am is the appropriate time to run through every possible scenario for how the morning might go, and to pray, just pray, that today is the day she catches a break.

You hold your breath at dismissal. Actually hold it, to the point where you have to remind yourself that passing out in the school car park would not improve the situation. You are waiting to see which version of her is going to get in the car.

You have a binder. You know what's in it. You update it.

You have developed a very specific ability to read a teenager's silence from the other side of a room. There are at least four different kinds and you can identify all of them.

Your sister told you to stop searching for bears in the woods. To stop looking for problems before they arrive. And with the greatest respect to your sister, who means well and loves you, she has not spent three years in these particular woods. There are bears in these woods. Quite a lot of them, as it turns out. Staying vigilant is not a personality flaw. It is, in this specific situation, a completely reasonable response to lived experience.

You cry in the car. Not sad crying, relief crying, which is its own specific kind of crying that requires its own specific kind of explanation if anyone happens to see you. She made it through the doors. Maybe she lasted one class. Maybe she lasted twenty minutes. You know what it took for her to do that, even if nobody else in that building does, and the release of it has to go somewhere.

You are, somehow, still here. Still packing the glovebox, still lying awake at 4am, still holding your breath at 3pm. Still showing up for a child who is doing the same, in her own way, in her own time.

That's the part nobody puts on the back to school list.