we don't have a plan for 10th grade and I am doing great

It is July. September is six weeks away, give or take, and I have not yet successfully answered the question of what 10th grade looks like for my daughter. I have, however, created several documents, attended two meetings that ended without resolution, read the same three articles multiple times as though they might say something different on the fourth pass, and had a number of conversations that begin with "so I've been thinking" and end with me saying "I know, I know" in the tone that means I really don’t know.

I am a person who has, in other areas of my life, been described as organised. I have a filing system. I back things up. I send calendar invites with the right time zone. My approach to uncertainty is generally to turn it into a spreadsheet until it feels manageable, which is a coping mechanism I stand by despite everything. The spreadsheet for 10th grade currently has four columns and no data in any of them, which is its own kind of information about where we are.

The options exist, technically. There are schools, there are programmes, there are conversations we've had and conversations we haven't finished. The problem isn't that there's nothing to choose from. The problem is that none of the options feel settled in the way a plan is supposed to feel settled — none of them have that quality of clicking into place, of the future becoming legible. They're all still floating, and I am the person standing beneath them trying to figure out which one to reach for, and every time I reach, it shifts.

The thing about planning when you have a school-avoidant child is that the plans keep turning out to be wrong, not through any particular failing of the planning, but because the situation doesn't hold still long enough to be planned around. Last September I had a plan. It was a good plan. It had contingencies, and the contingencies had contingencies, and I had a folder on my desktop and a handwritten list on the kitchen counter and I was, briefly, a person who felt prepared. The plan lasted until approximately the third week of school, at which point the contingencies also stopped working and I was back at the kitchen table at 6am with a cup of tea going cold and a revised plan that I could already tell wasn't going to hold either. I have made my peace with this. Mostly. In the sense that I now hold all plans loosely and with one hand while keeping the other hand free to catch whatever comes next.

What I haven't made my peace with is having no plan at all. A plan that falls apart at least had a shape before it fell. This has no shape yet. September is six weeks away and I am looking at a blank page and trying to tell myself that blank pages are fine, that they are full of possibility (!), but truthfully I’m finding it considerably harder to believe about this one.

I know, intellectually, that this is not a catastrophe. Families navigate September without finished plans all the time. The absence of a plan is not the absence of a path. My daughter is not sitting somewhere tallying my organisational failures. The colour-coded calendar I bought in May, the one that was going to make everything legible, is not actually load-bearing, no matter how much part of me wants it to be.

But what I feel is the particular low-grade anxiety of a type A person in a situation that does not reward being type A. This situation keeps handing me things I can't file or schedule or turn into a checklist, and I keep trying to file and schedule them anyway, and it keeps not working, and I keep being surprised by this even though I have been here before. Oh, how the cycle continues. The spreadsheet is still open on my laptop. The four columns are still empty. I added a fifth column last week on the grounds that five might somehow be more useful than four, and it isn't, and I know it isn't, and I haven't closed it.

I'll figure it out. We'll figure it out. We always do, in the end, in the slightly chaotic, definitely not how I planned it way that this tends to go. I just need to sit with the empty columns for a little while longer, and try to remember that the plan was never really the point.

The fifth column remains open, just in case.