They seem fine. But it’s only day one.

By the time I send this, this past week will have seen my 20th wedding anniversary, the addition of a new boy to our household of the canine variety, and both of my children back at school. It’s a lot in one week, but then it’s been a lot all summer. It’s felt like a very, very long summer, and I’ve had really mixed feelings about the return.

Our wedding anniversary was a very understated affair. A couple of snatched moments trying to show each other that we matter, and a takeaway. Nothing overly romantic or particularly special by most people’s standards, but special to us. We’re quite used to life being this way now. Sometimes you take the moments where you can get them.

And then there’s the dog.

We’d been on lots of rescue lists since we lost our elderly dogs earlier this year and hadn’t heard anything. Eventually we got a puppy and assumed that was that. Then, of course, the phone call came.

The timing couldn’t really have been worse. The weekend before school started again, when everybody was already carrying all the anxiety and uncertainty that comes with that transition. But he sounded perfect. And he needed a family just like ours.

So we asked the children what they wanted to do and, of course, we now have a beautiful spotty boy too.

And in honesty, perhaps the timing wasn’t so bad after all. He’s been a wonderful distraction for them. They’ve bonded with him incredibly quickly and he’s very used to children, incredibly gentle and seems to have slotted into our slightly unconventional family remarkably easily.

Perhaps I’m hoping for too much to think he might one day come close to the almost ‘therapy dog’ status my old hound had within our family. Or perhaps sometimes things really do just happen for a reason. I don’t know yet. But I do know one thing. Between him and a Labrador puppy, I’m certainly going to be a lot fitter than I was a few months ago.

Which brings me back to that elusive time for myself.

I’ve been desperate to carve out some time for myself once the children went back, although that time is now going to have to include squeezing in lots of extra dog walks, as well as trying to do some work and all the usual household stuff. But the prospect of finally getting a little bit of space back has been tinged with that familiar edge of worry.

My children are both making some big transitions this year and, as I’m sure many of you have done too, I’ve done everything I can backwards and forwards with schools to try to make sure their new teachers understand. I’ve talked about the importance of building relationships, focusing on connection and safety, and understanding what they might see, and perhaps more importantly, what they might not see.

But you don’t really know, do you? Not until they start living it day by day. And that was the thought going round my head the day before they went back.

It feels slightly wrong sometimes that there’s this big experiment when we send our children back into school and hope for the best. We’ve told the teachers everything we possibly can. We’ve communicated and explained. They make all the right noises and make us think they’ve understood, but really we don’t actually know. And it’s our children who pay the price if it turns out they didn’t quite get it.

Often our children will mask all day at school, so it’s us who will see the impact at home. Us and our children. And then we’re back to square one with a new classroom and a new teacher, trying to get people to understand all over again exactly what autistic masking is and why a child appearing to be absolutely fine at school doesn’t necessarily mean that they are.

Which is why a comment on one of my Facebook posts this week about masking really surprised me. Somebody genuinely believed that masking was a good thing, that learning to mask would somehow set autistic children up for the “real world”.

I’m sorry, but the real world doesn’t have to mean that my child has to turn themselves into someone they’re not and hide their distress for other people’s convenience.

I want my children to be able to be themselves. I want them to know that their needs matter and that the adults around them understand that looking fine isn’t the same thing as being fine. I don’t want successfully hiding their distress to be something we teach them to aspire to.

And then the first day back arrived.

Both of my children went in, and our return has actually gone better than I hoped so far. But we’ve also had a spanner thrown into the works because our school transport hasn’t continued in the way it should have done. That’s caused more agitation and worry and added another layer of anxiety to something that already had enough uncertainty around it.

So by the end of that first day, I found myself sitting with two slightly contradictory things. Relief that they had both gone in and that it had gone better than I’d feared, alongside the knowledge that one good day doesn’t necessarily tell us very much yet.

I think we all know that the novelty of those first few days back can sometimes suppress what’s coming. A child can appear to be managing beautifully and we start wondering whether perhaps this year really will be different. And maybe it will. I really hope it will.

But for now, I just have to sit and wait, put as much scaffolding around everybody as I can, be supportive and hope that they genuinely, genuinely are having a good return. Time will tell.

And I’m thinking of everybody else going through this too. Those of you watching and waiting to see how the return really unfolds. Those dealing with the fallout at home after a child has held everything together all day. Those whose children haven’t been able to go back in the way everybody hoped they would. And especially those of you who don’t actually have a placement for your child to go back to at all this September, and how difficult that in itself is.

There can be so much sitting behind the simple question, “How was the first day back?” Because for many of us, the first day doesn’t really tell us very much at all. We’re watching, waiting, noticing the little signs and trying not to get too far ahead of ourselves.

So that’s where I am this week. Relieved that we’ve got through the return better than I expected, cautiously hopeful that perhaps things really might be okay, but not quite ready to exhale yet.

In the meantime, I’ll keep putting the scaffolding around them where I can, reminding myself that I can only work with what I know today, and trying to find those little pockets of time for myself amongst everything else.

Although apparently I’ll be spending quite a lot of those pockets walking dogs.

Perhaps that’s not such a bad thing either.