When you become the safe person again

We’ve reached that transitional phase where my child has finished school for the summer holidays and is now at home.

They’re a little older now and are about to move up to secondary school. They’re in a very supportive school, and generally life at home is, within reason, relatively calm.

But since school finished, they’ve lost all of the safe adults they were seeing every day. They no longer have access to their occupational therapy sessions, they no longer have their daily routine, and they’re not seeing their school friends.

All of that means that I have very much become the safe person once again. Not that I ever stopped being, but as a family we were all a little more supported.

I think so many of you will understand this. When the routine drops away, even though school itself can be difficult and you worry about them burning themselves out, it also strips away the supports that were quietly holding everyone up.

The last few days have been incredibly intense. We’re needing attention almost constantly. Requests can’t wait. We’re seeking dopamine hits, wanting to buy things, looking for things to sell so we can buy different things. And I’m suddenly reminded just how much more scaffolding my child needs at home than they have done for quite some time.

That inevitably puts a lot more on my own capacity too.

I’m finding myself going right back to the PDA 101 basics.

When my child’s anxiety is lower, they naturally become more tolerant. You gradually find yourself relaxing because they can cope with more. But that doesn’t mean their nervous system has changed. They’re still wired exactly the same way.

So when you suddenly remove the routine, the familiar people and the daily structure, they need much more from me again. Even though I know that, even though I expect it every year, the reality of it can still catch me by surprise.

Because of my own profile, we can very easily trigger one another. Sometimes that’s our greatest strength because I genuinely understand what it feels like from the inside. Other times, if I don’t have the capacity to give what they need in that moment, we can end up reacting in very similar ways.

That’s my reminder that I need to lean back into my own toolkit. Not because everything suddenly becomes perfect, but because the nervous system I bring into the room really does matter.

For me, that looks like reading a few pages of my book, listening to a meditation most days, taking one deep breath before I walk into a room where I know my child is struggling and is likely to place more demands on me.

And, of course, it’s not just one child. My other autistic child has also found all of the end-of-term changes incredibly overwhelming, and we now have a fifteen-week-old puppy who is wonderful but also needs a huge amount of patience and training. It’s a lot.

So I’m trying not to pile pressure on myself. I’m not planning lots of days out or filling every day with activities. I’m taking things day by day while we all settle into this new normal for the holidays.

I’m also making a conscious effort to notice the glimmers. The moments when everyone is laughing. The unexpected calm. Thirty quiet seconds with a glass of something refreshing. Those moments matter too.

If you’re finding yourself in this transition as well, this is your reminder to look after yourself too. Even if it’s only in tiny, snatched moments between everything else.

We spend so much time trying to regulate the people we love, sometimes the most helpful thing we can do is gently lower our own baseline first. Not because it magically fixes everything, but because it changes the nervous system we bring into the room.

And that really does matter.