The Back-to-School List That Starts Now

The school year begins, for the person who plans it, in late July.

Not for teachers. Not for children. Not for anyone who experiences the start of September as an arrival rather than a destination. For the person who manages the transition, the school year begins when they open their phone in late July and start a note called September.

Into this note goes: uniform sizes, shoe sizes, whether the school bag lasted the year or needs replacing, the permission form for the autumn term trip that the school mentioned in passing and that needs to actually be located and completed, the revision of after-school arrangements now that one schedule has changed, the mental arithmetic of who does pickup on which days.

I know this note well. I've been keeping it for years.

This year I handed him the note at the start of July and said: can you own half of this?

He looked at it for a long time.

He said: I didn't realise half of this existed.

That's the right response. That's the beginning of shared labour — not execution, but awareness. You can't own what you don't know is there.