the end of the school year hits differently this time

The last day of school came and went, and I spent most of it trying to figure out the feeling I was supposed to be having. I think it was relief. It kept slipping away every time I got close to it and turning into something I hadn't budgeted for emotionally and definitely wasn't prepared to deal with in a Trader Joe's parking lot.

It has been a hard year, which I know isn't a surprising thing to say out loud when you're in the middle of this. Hard is the baseline here, the thing we've all more or less made our peace with, or told ourselves we have, which is not quite the same thing. But there is a particular kind of hard at the end of a year like this one, when you look back at September and try to map the distance between where you started and where you ended up, and the map doesn't look like progress so much as a record of everything you managed to do not to fall apart.

There is a version of a plan that existed in my head in September and it’s one of the things I find the hardest to let go of. The one where things improved steadily, where we found a rhythm, where she walked into that building more days than she didn't. I was very committed to that version. I had a plan for it — a colour-coded calendar and a level of optimism that I now recognise as a coping mechanism rather than a forecast, but I stand by the colour-coding. That version of the plan ended somewhere around November, and I didn't really grieve it at the time because the actual year was still happening and demanding all my available attention. I also hadn't found the right Trader Joe's parking lot yet.

There are things she missed that she can't get back. Milestones that we know we’re meant to hit, but didn’t quite make. My house this week has been a study in contrasts that I wasn't prepared for. One daughter came home on the last day with blurry polaroids of friends from lunch, documenting the last lunch of 7th grade. She had a report card tucked under her arm and a handful of notes from classmates telling her to stay in touch over summer. There is the reluctant last-day photo taken on the doorstep because I asked. End of year rituals that every kid should have the joy of experiencing. In contrast, my other daughter logged off her final call, closed the laptop, and that was that. No polaroids. No notes. The last day looked like every other day, except it was the last one, and I stood in the kitchen afterwards not quite knowing what to do with the distance between those two endings, happening in the same house on the same afternoon.

The grief and the guilt arrive together, which I don't think gets said enough. Somewhere underneath the sadness is a small voice which points out that other parents got their children through the school year, so what does it say about me that I didn't, or couldn't, or some combination of both that I still haven't worked out. I know, on the level where I keep the things I've read and the things professionals have told me, that school avoidance is not a parenting failure, that it isn't caused by loving your child wrong or not being firm enough or being too firm or any of the other explanations that arrive helpfully from the outside. I know all of this. And then the last day of school comes, and one daughter walks in with polaroids and the other closes a laptop, and the knowing and the feeling are in two completely different rooms with no obvious way to get them into the same one. The guilt isn't rational, but it is, on the hard days, extremely convincing.

I don't think parents talk enough about this particular sadness. Not the crisis version, not the acute fear that hits in the early days, but the slower, quieter grief that arrives at the end of a year that was survivable but not what you wanted for her. The sadness of doing everything you could think of and still not knowing if any of it was the right thing, of arriving at the other side exhausted and not entirely sure what you're supposed to do with that now that there's finally a little space to feel it.

There is relief too, somewhere in there. I'm glad the year is over in the way you're glad when something hard finally stops. We made it to the other side of this year. Without a big song and dance. Just a closing of a laptop, a very large exhale and a quiet end.