Nobody’s dressed and it’s almost midday

As I write this it’s almost midday. Nobody’s dressed. I’ve been up since before 6.30am.

So far I’ve half cleaned the house, walked a puppy, done training with a puppy, played referee amid full scale sibling warfare, searched puppy poo for Lego figures and cleaned up sick. There’s wet laundry been sat in the washing machine overnight. I have a birthday to organise for next week which I feel totally unprepared for. I haven’t ordered any school uniform yet. My hair’s frizzy. My teeth need cleaning. I feel gross, and I’m absolutely shattered.

We can’t go out anywhere properly because it’s too busy. All the kids want to do is go on their screens. My arm looks like a pin cushion from puppy teething. Everyone’s bickering or hyperactive and climbing the walls. It’s constant noise. It’s constant demands. I have not stopped.

This is school holiday reality for families like ours, where there is no break, where the break is actually harder than the usual routine.

We’re deep in it now, I’m starting to feel the approach of September, and I’ve got really mixed feelings. Trepidation. Part of me is looking forward to it and is desperate to get back to some kind of normality, some kind of routine, and to just carve out a few hours in the day that I can call my own. Part of me is absolutely dreading it, because I know it’s going to bring huge transitions, and over these next few weeks we’re going to start to feel the anxiety rise. In fact it’s already happening. So that’s going to take even more of my capacity as I scaffold their transitions back to school, knowing full well that I might be sending at least one of them into an environment that isn’t the best fit, and wondering whether I’m doing the right thing. I’ve still got an EHCP to go back on before deadline. So many things.

It’s all feeling rather a lot this week, and I think I’ve probably let the self-care slip a little. I’m not following my own advice entirely. I’ve managed to read the odd page of my book here and there. I’ve found a series on Apple TV I quite like and I’ve been staying up too late watching it, because it’s the only me time I get and it’s quiet – when it would be more sensible to try to get more sleep. But I really need to get back to my breathing and my meditation, and to just calm and quieten everything down a bit in my head, which currently has about 420 tabs open. Everything’s running at the same time. Sometimes I think the noise inside my head is louder than the noise outside, even in this house.

But we’ll get through. The land shark puppy phase will pass. The children will get back into some routine, and I will find myself again. I just need to be kind to myself for a few more weeks.

And I really feel for those who know that September will come and go and nothing will change, that they’re stuck in this phase forever, or at least that’s how it feels. Because if your child can’t attend school – and I’ve been there, so I know about this – you see all the back to school photos come on social media and it just makes your heart ache, because you know that your child doesn’t get that, and you don’t get that as a parent either.

So if you’re deep in the trenches and clinging on for dear life, I see you.

Take a deep breath. Take a few of them. Try, in those tiny in-between moments you can snatch, to do something just for you. Just show your brain that you’re worth doing something for. That you are valued.

I’m right here with you.

If you need something to reach for in one of those in-between moments, my free Pocket of Calm meditation is short enough to actually fit into a school holiday day, and you can find it here.