the grief of the end of the school year (when you're not counting down to anything)

Everyone else is counting down.

The group chats are full of it — how many days left, who's going to whose end-of-year thing, plans for the summer that assume a shared experience of the year, that everyone was there for all of it, that the year happened in more or less the same way for everyone who went through it. I read these messages in the evenings and I feel the gap between the conversation that is happening there and the year we have actually had, and I haven't found a graceful way to describe that gap to anyone who wasn't inside it with me.

And underneath the group chat there is the other thing, the thing I find harder to say out loud, which is that I am watching children I have known since middle school — children who started this journey at the same time as my daughter, who sat at the same lunch tables and went to the same birthday parties in year seven — and I am genuinely, wholeheartedly glad for them, and I am also aware, in a way that sits in my chest and doesn't quite shift, that I do not know if my daughter will make it to graduation.

I don't mean that dramatically. I mean it literally. I do not know. And most of the parents around me are planning for graduation with the easy confidence of people who haven't had to think about it as a question, and I am trying to be happy for their children — and I am, I genuinely am — while also holding something that I don't have a clean name for.

The end of the school year is supposed to feel like relief. I know this. I have felt it in previous years — that particular exhale that happens when the last day arrives and the summer opens up and everyone can put down whatever they've been carrying since September.

This year doesn't feel like that. This year the end of the school year feels like arriving at the finish line of something I didn't get to fully participate in, and being asked to celebrate finishing it anyway.

There were things that weren't going to happen this year and I knew that relatively early, and I made a kind of peace with knowing it. But making peace with something and not grieving it are different things, and I have been confusing them. The peace I made was with the facts. The grief is about what the facts cost — what they cost her, and what they cost me, and what they cost the version of the next few years that I had quietly imagined before I understood what we were dealing with — and that accounting is one I haven't done fully yet because there is always something more urgent to attend to.

There is a specific kind of ache to watching the school year end when your child has been in and out of it all year — not fully absent, not fully present, somewhere in the complicated middle ground that school avoidance tends to produce. She was there for some of it. She missed a lot of it. The parts she missed weren't evenly distributed, which means there are gaps in things that were supposed to be continuous, and those gaps don't close just because the year does.

Other parents talk about what their kids accomplished this year, and I listen, and I feel genuinely glad for them and also aware that the accounting works differently in our house. What she accomplished this year is harder to quantify and also, in some ways, more significant than it might look from the outside — getting through the mornings that felt impossible, going in on the days she managed to go in, sitting with the discomfort of a situation she couldn't fully control, continuing to try. That is not nothing. It is, in many ways, more than the things that get mentioned in the group chat. But it doesn't translate easily into a school year story, so mostly I don't tell it.

And then there are the end of year assemblies, and the awards, and the perfect attendance certificates — handed to children who rolled out of bed and made it there on time, which I don't begrudge them, I genuinely don't, but which sit next to an absence of any acknowledgement for my daughter, who walked through the front door of that school on days when walking through the front door of that school was one of the hardest things she had ever done. There is no award for getting there after a panic attack. There is no certificate for the morning she sat in the car for forty minutes and went in anyway. The system does not have a category for what she did this year, which means that what she did this year goes largely uncounted, and I find that — on the days when I let myself feel it — genuinely heartbreaking.

And somewhere alongside all of that, quietly and without anyone quite meaning it to happen, other parents have started to not quite know what to say to me. I notice it in the way conversations shift when I arrive — the slight recalibration, the careful avoidance of certain topics, the way some people have started to drift rather than ask a question they're not sure they want to know the answer to. School avoidance makes people uncomfortable in a way that other difficulties don't, and the discomfort tends to come out as distance, and the distance means that the year I have just had — which was one of the hardest of my life — is largely invisible to the people who used to be around me most. I am not angry about this. I understand it. It doesn't make it any less lonely.

There is also the forward-facing grief, which I find harder than the retrospective kind.

I do not know what next year looks like. I do not know what the year after that looks like. I do not know, and I am trying to sit with not knowing, whether my daughter will graduate with the friends she started middle school with — the ones I am watching now, finishing their year, moving forward — or whether we will be somewhere else entirely by then, on a different path that I haven't fully mapped yet and am not sure how to think about without catastrophising.

I have learned this year that I am not good at not knowing. I deal with uncertainty by filling it with activity, and the activity is sometimes useful and sometimes just a way of not sitting with the fact that I am frightened about what comes next and there is no action available that resolves the fear. I do the action anyway, most of the time, because it is better than doing nothing. But I am more aware than I used to be that the action and the feeling are not the same thing, and that the feeling is still there when the action is done.

I don't know how to end this post in a way that resolves anything, because I don't have a resolution. What I have is the end of a school year that was genuinely hard, and a daughter who is tired in a way that I recognise because I am also tired in that way, and a summer coming that I am trying to approach as a gift rather than as a gap.

And I have this — something I've been turning over for a few weeks now, which is that the grief I feel at the end of this year is not evidence that things are hopeless. It is evidence that I had hopes. That I had plans for how this was going to go and those plans ran into reality and reality won, and the gap between the plan and what happened is real and it is allowed to hurt. Grieving what you hoped for is not the same as giving up on what might still happen.

I'm not counting down to the end of this year. But I am, quietly, still counting on something.