Back to School

It's the end of summer, my tomatoes are ripening nicely, and it's back to school.  With a great jolt, our family life shifts abruptly from the more relaxed pattern of summer, back into the pattern of term.

I have to admit that I have been so caught up in meetings and planning the Great Campaign to get Julie back into school at all, that I have rather forgotten that she has a brother.  In the end I pack him off in shoes that have suddenly become too small for him, trousers that are too short, and clutching half a cheese sandwich, which is all that stands between him and starvation.  It is a tough year for Duncan: he is starting his GCSE courses, and for some reason he has to sit some of the controlled assessments for English literature straight away, before the teaching of the course really gets under way.  English essays are hard enough for most of us, but he has Asperger's Syndrome and struggles to decode the question and grasp what is required.  He has his first crisis of confidence, probably the first of many to come in the years ahead.  We have a meltdown one night, and I am suddenly and sharply reminded that until Julie got sick, Duncan was my problem child, the one that kept me up at night with worry.  Nowadays, I just don't have that much time to think about him, but his path has not magically got smoother.  Thank goodness we spent that week away together in Portugal this summer.

Julie went into school for half a day this week as part of a sixth-form taster.  She thinks, and this is probably true, that she would cope better with the smaller classes and more relaxed style of work at sixth-form.  There is still a year to go though, and we have to get her through her GCSEs first.  The exams she took over the summer produced mixed results, suggesting that her education really did take quite a battering.  It is hardly surprising: in one subject she had no teaching at all for six months, then three hurried crammer sessions in the weeks just before the exam.

When I am a bit stressed, I like to fantasize about my next city-break in Europe, or a longer trip to the Western Isles (of Scotland).  I know I am getting too stressed, when I start to fantasize about not coming back!  In my escape fantasy I whisk my children away from the artificial strain of trying to pass these exams and we live out a future in which they don't have to try to pretend to be just like everyone else.  But the hard reality is that wherever we go, our family is going to need to rely heavily on the support of other people.  For the next few years we will probably have an ongoing relationship with psychiatric services, and we will no doubt see the inside of A&E a few more times. Here we have reasonably good services, kind friends, and employment which pays the bills.

And apart from anything else, it is a not a bad place to grow tomatoes.