All We Feel and Experience around Back-To-School Season

It feels early, summer too short, but here we are. It can be a key to freedom for many mothers, and it can also be bittersweet. It’s a moment where we have to give our children away, a little bit more, to the world. It can bring up BIG feelings. Are we letting the world strip our babies of the wildness we have tried so hard to foster and protect? But don’t they need to learn how to be in the world? But is it really necessary right now? Is it really time to hand off another morsel of the pure, awesome Divine within them? And the closeness of our relationships, the intimacy of mama and kiddo, those long summer days of frenzy and sweetness. Now someone else is spending hours of the days with them, all so ‘what?’, we can have freedom? 

On the other hand.

Dear goddess, can we please have some freedom? Can I pee by myself, can I have an uninterrupted thought, can I take some time to sit in the comatose state that arrives once we are not in constant putting-out-fires/tantrums, breaking up sibling squabbles, cleaning up messes, that first breath of air that we feel like we should immediately put to good use writing the Great American novel, or getting back to our long-lost painting, or insert-neglected-passion-here. Or, of course, for so many of us, going to work a full-time job with more than every moment of childcare we are allotted.

Can we stop to process, to assimilate this life we are living at 100 miles an hour? We drop them off and tear up (or sob) as they turn away. Or maybe they cling to us, crying, feeling fear, and all we want in the world is to comfort and protect them. The Grief. All the grief of motherhood, watching our babies grow further and further away from us.

Then, if we even get that chance to stop, we are flooded with all the things we ‘should’ do with this new free time, including ‘just’ rest, and usually what rises to the fore is The Guilt. We haven’t noticed that our babies are two inches taller than the last time we looked. They’re off to school, and when TF did that happen, because just 10 minutes ago, we were up in the night nursing, pumping, rocking, crying, holding the little lumps that have now (in my case at least) turned into all knees and elbows. (PS Please take the time to rest. Please give yourself permission to adjust. Please tell The Guilt to shut up.)

The kiddos experience their own transition too, into the rigor, the hard corners and tight schedules and concentrated socialization of school. Not only are we holding space for the tornado of emotions we are feeling, but we also need to parent our littles through their own tornadoes. 

Your version of this may be a little or a lot different. Maybe you’ve had full-time childcare from the beginning, and that first too-early moment was a brutal, all-at-once version of it all, ripping the bandaid from a tender wound. Maybe you have a 12-month-old, and school is not quite such a rude dose of reality yet, and you feel the separation, but not as much the educational system yet. Maybe you feel guilt-free freedom! (If so, bravo!) 

It’s all natural and understandable because we all have different circumstances, challenges, and privileges. But whatever this season brings for you, I wish you kindness and gentleness toward your tired, stressed, mama self. No matter what your picture looks like, I know you are holding so much. Please go easy on yourself, and please reach out to your community of mamas to be seen and held, to commiserate and to empathize. It’s hard in ways so invisible to the rest of the world. We’re in this together.

Drea Awdish, Facilitator and Coach

Live The Question Coaching