the back-to-school advertisements are not for me anymore
Another flashback post from my other blog
This is a post that I originally shared on my WordPress blog. It’s about how strange it was when the old school routine ended and life somehow went on without the annual school uniform shopping chaos.
Friday, January 20, 2023
It’s mid-January. The busyness of the Christmas and New Year’s season has given way to a slower pace. The hot days are interspersed with cold, damp days. A few nights ago, a low, dark storm cloud rolled across our neighbourhood as it charged eastwards. The eastern sky was still bright blue, the pale clouds tinged with peach tones as the westering sun sank low. But above us, it was so dark that it felt as if someone had switched off the sun, a whole half hour before the appointed sunset time. Flashes of lightning flickered in the south, eventually sending the rumble of thunderclaps in our direction.
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Today feels almost autumnal, though there are some 6-ish weeks remaining until autumn officially arrives. Not that the weather reads the calendar the way we humans do. But today the thick cover of grey clouds have waited until mid-afternoon to break apart, revealing the bright cerulean skies of summer. The sunlight is harsh but obscured by the clouds. From my vantage point here, I can see the swaying treetops in their myriad shades of green. I can’t see the road, but I can hear the swish of tyres on bitumen. In a fortnight’s time, this part of the day will be noisier, as the schools return after the summer break.
I like to listen to the radio when I do the housework, both for the inoffensive golden oldies music* and for the hourly news updates. It’s easier to get stuff done when I’m not super-invested in the music that’s being played, but I’m also not hating every moment of it. I like most of it, even if it’s purely the nostalgia factor.
*Though as the radio station in question has recently added bands like Nirvana, Evanescence and Red Hot Chilli Peppers to their rotation, I can’t help but think they’re just trying to give their Gen X and Millennial listeners – such as myself – a bit of an existential crisis.
As I unstacked and stacked the dishwasher, a radio advertisement for the ‘back to school’ sales came on. Here in Victoria, Australia, the school year begins in late January, and is divided into 4 terms, each of approximately 12 weeks’ duration; the school year then ends shortly before Christmas. It varies slightly from year-to-year, with the end of first term determined by Easter, and certain year levels finish earlier than others.
Since 2007, when my eldest first began school, this mid-to-late January season has been entirely arranged around the back-to-school routine. Or, even before that, when I was a volunteer in a youth group that was arranged around the school calendar, this time of year meant meetings and events in preparation for the imminent new semester of work. And, because I had children at a young age, it hadn’t been that many years since I had finished my own school years. I finished high school at the end of the 1990s; it was less than three years after that that I was married and had a baby.
What I am trying to convey is that, for the majority of my existence, my routine and the rhythms of the year have been determined by the Victorian school term calendar. Since 1986, when I was a kindergarten kid myself, there have been only a handful of years where the school terms have not determined my routine.
As that ‘back to school’ ad played – I think they were advertising lowered prices on school stationery – I felt terribly anxious. It was an odd reaction, a sense that I had forgotten something important. My immediate thought was, Oh no, I haven’t picked up the school books, I haven’t taken my kids for new uniform items, I haven’t ordered name label stickers for their pencils yet. It was an anxiety response, a chest tightening, heart racing moment. And then, a second later, I recalled: this isn’t my life anymore. The conglomeration of normal annual cues, like ‘back to school’ ads, the summer heat, the long days, all of that stuff, feels to me like it needs to be punctuated with frantic errands to the school uniform shop.
How strange to think that won’t be part of the routine anymore: take a number ticket and wait, try on a dozen items, die a little on the inside when they tally up the price. Wander over to the schoolbook order collection point and wrestle several heavy boxes out to the car. Take the kids for oat milk iced chocolates to make it fun. Recoil in horror at the contents of the school bags that weren’t emptied out at the start of the summer. (I think that was a salad sandwich once, but it would require forensic analysis to be sure.) Drop the dresses off at the tailors to be hemmed because I haven’t touched a sewing machine since 1995 and I’m not about to start. When I walked past the school shoe shop this week, I remarked to my husband, “This is the first January in 15 or so years that I don’t have to go in here.”
All those January end-of-holidays school-related errands are simply not my life anymore. The last minute rush to label a set of pencils, the annual promise that this will be the year I work out the problem of making the ultimate Instagrammable school lunches (spoiler alert: that never happened, but the kids did eat and that’s the main thing), the influx of school emails about upcoming events and camps and purportedly voluntary fees… It’s all now a thing of the past, to be eventually wrapped up in a neat little package of memories I will think of as My Kids’ School Years. I have a pair of photo frames sitting there with matting cut to allow space for 14 years’ worth of school portraits. Perhaps I will finally get around to printing off appropriately sized copies of my kids’ school portraits. It’s one of those projects that I wished I had done as the years happened, because I think it would have been a nice way to watch the years unfold. A little bit like an Advent calendar, perhaps, but at the rate of one square per year, the item within is a pocket-sized portrait of one’s child, and the countdown takes 14 years.
It’s simultaneously a relief and a little disorienting, to hear the ‘back to school’ ads and remember that they’re not relevant to me anymore. And that’s okay. It doesn’t need to feel like anything in particular. I have the time to rest on it, to process it, to let it meld until only the important information remains, and the once-necessary minutiae fade into the background. I might not really feel the change until after the normal school year begins and I am not out there battling the morning school commute. I am not going to miss that.
The barista at a café I frequented on school drop offs last year did say recently that she hoped I would still visit them for my favourite oat lattes and cold brew coffees. That was nice of her.
So, here I am on the threshold of something new, though I don’t know what it looks like. I guess in some ways it’ll look like my old routine, only with less driving in peak hour traffic and less phone calls from the school nurse, and hopefully more painting, drawing, creative writing and travelling. I expect that I will post more in this blog. I certainly hope to have more time to share my writings. I very much like the idea of writing little travel diaries on here, if and when I manage to see more of Victoria. Maybe I will share some excerpts from what I dubbed my ‘plague diaries’: the journals I wrote during the two years that we in Melbourne lived through a series of pandemic lockdowns. Most of it is a study of the clouds I could see from my townhouse’s upstairs windows.
This new phase of life also offers up some fresh possibilities. No longer using my finite energy reserves on all things motherhood, I can think about who I want to be into the future. Do I return to university? Do I try selling my art again? Do I take some online courses? Do I look for a casual job? I don’t yet have firm answers on those questions. They don’t need an urgent response. Not yet.
2023 is my year to take a desperately-needed break, having never had that kind of luxury in my adult life. I went straight from high school to university to full-time-stay-at-home motherhood, with nary a break in between.
I’m optimistic about the opportunities it represents to perhaps fulfil my potential, in a way I haven’t had access to in the past twenty years. Even if, right now, it feels a bit strange.