School has started again, but I have not. The epilogue to a story

School has started again, but I have not. School has started again, but I have not noticed it at all. I intend to continue down this path. With my second son now in his fourth year of secondary school, I can report that I no longer feel any thrill about it. ‘And why should you?’ my son rightly says. ‘I’m the one going to school, not you. You’ve got nothing to do with it, and anyway, you’ve never come to a parents’ evening.’ It’s true, I’ve never been to a parents’ evening. Is that my fault? Yes.

I have attempted to schedule several online appointments, but each time an urgent matter has intervened, necessitating a cancellation. Each time, the reason was significant: I simply forgot. This year will be better, I promise myself—not my son, who has already moved on and pays no attention to anything I say, let alone parent-teacher meetings. Yet this thrill that I do not feel—and which, after all, is not really my place to feel—suggests that many things have come to an end. Buying exercise books, organising his books, checking that his rucksack still has a zip and isn’t full of mud, asking him what time school starts – or rather, reminding him what time school starts – waking him up, waiting for him for lunch, asking him if he’s read his holiday reading – or rather, already knowing the answer (he hasn’t read them). All of this has now been packed into the rucksack of past years—which also encompasses his older sister’s years, when I was vaguely informed about homework and tests. It is as if my brain had said: ‘Stop.’ It’s no longer my business. I can’t even count how many full years of school I’ve looked after since the start of primary school, but I’d say fifteen. At first, with the torment of not being able to pick them up every day, so much so that once a very nice mum saw me arriving out of breath at the primary school gates and said: ‘What’s going on, is it snowing?’ From that day on, I stopped saying hello to her. Quite simply, I don’t see her; I just can’t recognise her – unfortunately, my eyesight isn’t very good from a distance. At first she used to wave her arms about, but then she stopped. I took part in the end-of-year trips, the goodbyes to the teacher, the secondary school performances, the all-nighters and the class pizza nights for as long as it was necessary.

I fell out of love with school, then fell back in love with it; I became frustrated with a teacher—I believe it was the Latin teacher—who addressed me without making eye contact and treated my son like a goldfish; I archived the class chats so as not to see them, then I reactivated them so I could see them; I bought an embarrassing number of rulers and compasses (the items that go missing most often, along with pens); I made loads of sandwiches but also packed plenty of snacks into their rucksacks, only to find a few dozen of them squashed under their science books. I took them to school on my moped when they were running late – which was always. This routine persisted for many years. Then they grew up; somehow they learnt to cope on their own, stopped asking me for help and presenting me with emergencies to sort out or stomach aches to avoid class tests, and my brain stopped registering the word: school. Has it started again? Great. Do you need your books? Mum, I’ll sort it out – I’ll buy them second-hand. I’ve been excluded from all the rituals, but I think I can accept that. You don’t mind that we never talk about tests, do you? Mum, you’re really odd sometimes. Odd how? Really odd, but if it makes you feel important, I’ve lost my compass again.