Back-to-School Emotions Are Here
Plus, a vlog for paid newsletter subscribers on what we just wrapped for issue no. 9 of the magazine.
Print magazine news!
We just wrapped copy for issue no. 9, arriving this October (hear more about it in the special video from Leah tucked down below, a special share for our paid newsletter subscribers).
Subscribe now to receive your copy, plus one of the last few issues of no. 8.
Just Pretend
Words by Hannah Weil McKinley
I’ve spent the last few weeks of summer attempting to hit “pause” on everything around me. Like if I could just freeze us right here for a while, I could catch my breath and hit “play” when I’m caught up on sleep and ready for all my daughters’ questions again. Ready for school and new friends and activities and long days that disappear while driving carpool and picking up snacks. I like to think that if I could get a couple weeks to myself I could get ahead of everything again and start to anticipate what my children need, instead of constantly playing catch up.
I still have to buy backpacks and a few more back-to-school bits, organize the girls’ room, and log the last minutes of my now first-grader’s summer reading. I’ll do those things when they’re asleep tonight, before we head into the last week of summer and then, in a blink, the first day of a new school year.
But it’s not just the school essentials and the new clothes I’m fighting off. I could bang out that to-do list in an afternoon if I have to. The bigger truth is that I suspect I’ve been putting it off so the reality of what’s ahead doesn’t hit me. Classic avoidance. I’ve been procrastinating and savoring the summer, like the looming signs that my children are both growing up won’t register if I don’t let them in. But here we are, ready or not, and my daughters are both bigger and older and there are no babies in this house, which is made increasingly obvious by the play kitchen we removed from their playroom and boxes of baby books my husband finally carted to Goodwill after months of sitting in our garage.
Instead, I have two girls who demand to dress themselves. They play together without much input from us, their voices carrying through the upstairs and into our bedroom while my husband and I lay in bed on a Saturday morning, thinking about the wispy-haired toddlers that we used to entertain with silly songs until breakfast.
