Back to school. What backpacks don't carry.

My son is eleven. This is his sixth September at the same school, which means he has now done this transition enough times that it should feel familiar. It doesn't, not entirely. He still gets quieter in the week before. He still checks his bag multiple times on Sunday night. He still asks, for reasons that never fully make sense to me, whether he has everything — as if he might have forgotten something that isn't physically possible to forget.

I've stopped trying to talk him out of the Sunday anxiety. It doesn't help. What helps is being around, not at a screen myself, available for the particular low-key conversations that happen when everyone is ostensibly doing something else. The pre-school anxiety doesn't want to be addressed. It wants to be kept company.

This is what backpacks don't carry: the actual weight of the transition. The bag is full and organised. The thing that makes the Sunday harder to navigate isn't in the bag.

The Sunday bag-checking is a ritual I've stopped trying to truncate. It takes as long as it takes. On the third check I used to say: you've already checked it. Now I say nothing. The checking is not about the bag. Saying something about the bag doesn't address what the checking is about.