When September feels like a pair of too-tight pants

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Around 11 p.m. one night last week, one of my 11-year-old girls wandered into my bedroom, unable to sleep. She and her twin sister just started sixth grade – the first year of middle school in our town – and it’s a big change: much earlier bus, an inscrutable seven-period schedule, hundreds of new kids to meet.

I figured my kid, who is sensitive, was probably feeling the late-night ache and angst of early tweendom. Maybe she was worried about her math homework? Maybe she had nobody to sit with at lunch? Maybe she’d somehow heard about the school shooting in Minneapolis, and was thinking about an upcoming lockdown drill?

As she stretched out on the bed between my husband and me, I asked, How’s it going?

I didn’t anticipate what came next: She started talking, of all things, about four square, the popular playground game. I didn’t play it as a kid, but apparently there are many iterations, and the rules she learned at her elementary school are different from the rules her new classmates  learned at the two other elementary schools in town. The different rules perplexed her.

Lying between us, while my husband patted her arm and I played with the cowlick in her hair, she ran down the differences. Two-second holds. The power of the “king.” Overhand versus underhand serves (both permissible). A special play called “rooftop.” A rule known as “chicken feet.”

I had no idea what she was talking about, but I was sure there was a lesson for me in there somewhere. In the midst of all the newness and change she’s navigating, her brain fixated on the varying rules for a familiar game. Middle school can be fraught, but learning a few new rules to a game she’s played forever? That’s slightly confusing, but manageable in the grand scheme of early adolescence. It was also a welcome reminder that even though her feet are a size bigger than mine, and she’ll almost certainly be taller than me in a year, she’s still very much a little kid. At least for now.

Though she does have a growing awareness of the world and its challenges. Unlike me, however, she hasn’t been reading all summer about starving people in Gaza, or the war in Ukraine, or airstrikes in Iran, or the upheaval at the CDC, or the deployment of the National Guard, or federal efforts to rewrite American history, or how AI is coming for us all, or mass deportations, or the future of public media, or the independence of the Federal Reserve, or Harvard’s legal proceedings, or the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, or the fate of the Epstein files. (She has been reading about Tayvis. Who hasn’t been?)

My nervous system wants something in life to feel slightly more normal.

A defining feature of President Trump’s second term is the roiling avalanche of news, and clearly, the administration kept pace this summer. It’s no wonder that by late August — and in spite of all the fun I had with my family over the last few months — I began to crave the more predictable rhythms of fall. My nervous system wants something in life to feel slightly more normal.

At first, of course, September can feel like a pair of too-tight pants: uncomfortable, restrictive, mildly annoying. I re-learn this every year, as we bumble back into the routines of school, homework, soccer practice, piano lessons and eating dinner at a reasonable hour. We’re not there yet, on any of it, but I know we’ll sort it.

The transition sent me back to an essay we published around this time last year by Alysia Abbott. She’d just dropped her daughter off for a semester in Paris and wrote about la rentrée,  which is how the French refer to the transition between summer and fall: the return to work, the return to school, and so on.

Katrin Lambach, a parent coach, recently wrote on social media: “La rentrée is a return — to rhythm, to steadiness, to who we are when things are clear … Think of it like sliding into a pair of well-worn slippers. Comfortable. Familiar. And just right for walking forward.” I like how her description combines the uncertainty inherent in forward motion — of the future, come what may — with the groundedness of what feels familiar.

As we enter the fall, with its newly empty nests, waning sunlight and fresh rounds of headlines and crises, I’m crossing my fingers for more four square-level problems to navigate. As for the rest, I’ll be taking it bird by bird, as Anne Lamott would say.

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