the dread arrives in August. here’s what to do with it.
August 10th. Five weeks until school starts, give or take, and the calendar that looked so reassuringly far away in June is suddenly not far away at all. The school meeting is booked. The emails have been sent. The plan, such as it is, exists. And still there is something sitting in the chest that the plan hasn't touched, because anxiety doesn't actually respond to plans, which is one of the more frustrating features of this whole situation and one that takes a while to stop being surprised by.
My daughter's preferred strategy right now is to not have the conversation at all. "Can we talk about this later" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in our house in August, and later has a way of arriving as a different, equally busy, equally avoidant version of later. I've stopped pushing on it directly, not because the conversation doesn't need to happen but because I've learned that the indirect version, the one that happens in the car or on a walk or during something where we're side by side rather than across from each other, tends to actually go somewhere. The face-to-face version mostly just produces "can we talk about this later."
The thing I keep reminding myself is that her wanting to avoid the conversation about September is not the same as not thinking about September. She's thinking about it. She's thinking about it considerably more than she's letting on, in the specific and exhausting way that anxious people think about the thing they're not talking about. The avoidance is information, not absence.
What I've noticed helps in this window, and helps is doing modest work in that sentence, is keeping things low-key and matter of fact rather than treating September as either a non-event or a crisis. Both of those framings make it worse, one by pretending there's nothing to think about and one by confirming that there's everything to think about. The middle ground, the "yes it's going to be hard and we're going to figure it out" version, is easier to say than to maintain but it's the one worth aiming for.
Routine helps too, in the unsexy way that routine always helps with anxiety. Not a military schedule, just a gentle move toward earlier wake times and some shape to the day, because the jump from summer to September is harder on a nervous system when it's also a jump from completely formless days to something with a bell in it. We're not quite there yet, but we're nudging.
The other thing, and this is the one I find hardest to remember when I'm in full preparation mode, is that connection matters more than any of the practical stuff. Not connection about school. Just connection. Time where she's not being managed or prepared or gently steered toward a conversation we both know we need to have. Time where she feels like herself and I feel like her parent rather than her case manager. That relationship is what she's going to need when September actually arrives, and it's the one thing I can actually build between now and then.
I have my own version of the August dread too, which I'm managing with a combination of excessive list-making and a cup of tea I keep forgetting is there until it goes cold. It looks like thinking about September at inconvenient times and having conversations with my husband that start with "so I've been thinking" and end without resolving anything, because there's nothing to resolve yet, because September hasn't happened yet. The planning brain wants something to do and there isn't quite enough to do, which produces its own particular kind of restlessness.
What I keep coming back to is this. We've done the things we can do for now. The meeting is booked. The emails are sent. The plan exists. The rest of it is September's problem, and September will come whether or not I've spent August worrying about it, so I'm trying, imperfectly and with limited success, to let some of August just be August.
She'll talk about it eventually. Probably in the car. Almost definitely at an inconvenient time.