Back to School

Today was the first day back to school for kids in our district. Hudson dreads this day every year, and today was no different.

His anxiety over going back to school started about a week ago. It’s the same anxiety that he endures at the end of every summer, and despite our best efforts, there’s no reasoning with him.

In a soft and wounded voice, he’ll say:

“Dad, I don’t want to go back to school…’

And he’ll usually go on about how he doesn’t see the point in it, or how he thinks he’ll never use anything he learns in school later in life. He added something new this year:

‘I’m not used to it anymore.’

Like many individuals with autism, Hudson needs structure in his daily life. He usually will argue against the routines we set up for him, and he doesn’t see how they help keep him balanced and regulated.

Summers are particularly hard because there is no programming here that meets his needs. We tried a local summer camp (who told us that their staff was trained on handling kids with autism), but he only made it an hour before having to come home. We’ve tried summer school, but it wasn’t the right fit for him, either.

The school year takes so much out of him. This year, we gave him the summer off. We had no options for structure, no way to give him a routine he needed but also hated. He picked up a couple of small chores to do around the house and he was generally free to do what he wanted.

He slept poorly the past two nights. We all did.

The ride to school this morning was mostly quiet. When his aide came to meet him, I could tell he was fighting back tears. It took everything he had in him to get out of the truck.

Kayla and I hoped today would go well for him, but we braced ourselves for the inevitable call that he had had a meltdown, or that he’d broken a non-negoitable rule from the student handbook.

No call came. We got a message from his teacher that the day ‘was going great’. When he came home, he had a sheet in his folder. It was an assignment to write down his experience on the first day. And while he said he was nervous before school, he finished the assignment by saying he thought the year would be ‘great’.

The same Hudson who had struggled for years with understanding and expressing his feelings without a meltdown was able to articulate his feelings about the day, found the strength to keep it together, and showed us that he has at least some level of optimism about the 4th grade.

We’re not naive enough to expect everyday to go like this. But maybe, just maybe, it’ll be better than we imagine.