The 10-second reset for overwhelmed moms this back-to-school season
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A Tai Chi master on late summer, grounding, and a gentler kind of back-to-school reset.
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I’ve spent the better part of a quarter century in Vermont, which makes me something of an authority on what January 1 actually feels like. It feels like the dead of winter, because it is. It’s dark before dinner. The ground is solid enough to park a truck on. The air hurts your face. There is nothing about waking up that morning, holiday whirlwind behind you and bank account thoroughly drained, that suggests a fresh start. The only thing it’s beginning is the long stretch of please don’t make me leave the house until the sun comes back.
January has never fooled me
So I’ve never bought the January reset. Resolutions in the dead of winter feel like being asked to sprint at the bottom of a pool. And if the plants aren’t planting, neither am I, thankyouverymuch.
Back-to-school season is another story. We’re sending our kids out the door in fresh kicks, backpacks stuffed with untouched supplies, (hopefully) buzzing about seeing old friends and making new ones. Never mind that getting them there meant filling out endless forms with the same info, locating a specific water bottle and a single matching sock while somebody whines about wearing socks in general. That morning has always felt like the real turning of the year to me. A clean slate. A new routine. A chance for everyone in the house, parents included, to quietly reset the goals that fell apart sometime around June.
I am, for the record, almost entirely on the other side of this now. My son is away at college, and my daughter is starting her sophomore year of high school. Which puts me a few years ahead of you in line, close enough to turn around and confirm the thing nobody in the thick of the sock wars believes. It does not last forever. Those endless mornings turn out to be extremely endable, and I mean that in the good way. There is a version of you, not so far off, who waves them out the door and gets to keep the whole quiet morning for herself.
Turns out I’m not the only one who feels the year turn over in September. There’s an actual framework for it.
The case for a fifth season
I recently spoke with Leda Elliott, a Tai Chi and Reiki master and the author of The Five Seasons Method, who explained that many of the world’s oldest wisdom traditions don’t stop at four seasons. They recognize a fifth. Late summer. That golden stretch of roughly September when it’s not hot and it’s not cold, when you need neither the AC nor the heat, when everything hangs in a kind of amber-lit balance before fall tips us all indoors.
In Chinese medicine, Elliott told me, late summer is the season of grounding. The balance point. The steady center of the whole wheel. Which, if you have ever stood in a suddenly too-quiet kitchen wondering how the kid you swear was in a booster seat last week is old enough to drive himself to campus, feels almost aggressively appropriate.
Each season comes with its own kind of superpower, she explained. Late summer’s is intention, the steadying power of a mind that can stay where you put it. When it’s strong, you can focus and settle. When it’s weak, the mind scatters and takes off running a thousand miles an hour in every direction. (If you haven’t felt this in the notebook aisle of Staples, have you ever even shopped for school supplies?)
The antidote she offers isn’t a color-coded family command center or a 5 a.m. routine. A lot of it is about letting go. She teaches a humility practice built around releasing the expectations that pile up this time of year. The right classes. The right extracurriculars. The college list you swore you would be normal about. The endless scroll of what everyone else’s family appears to be effortlessly pulling off.
“As a mom, you have to be the one who’s grounded,” she said. “Come back to earth. Feel your feet on the ground.” She meant it partly for the kids, who take their cues from us whether we want them to or not. But standing in my emptier kitchen, I heard it more as an instruction for myself. Be here for this part. Don’t spend the years I have left vibrating at the frequency of a hummingbird who mainlined an espresso.
Two ways to come back to earth
Getting there, in her world, doesn’t require much. The most basic practice is grounding in the most literal sense. You lie down on the floor, or better, on the actual grass outside, close your eyes, and let your whole weight sink into the earth. The idea is to feel the ground hold you and steady you, even if all you can spare is ten seconds before someone needs a ride somewhere. Elliott swears the hardest part is convincing grown adults to stay put for those ten seconds. The preschoolers she teaches, for what it’s worth, have no such trouble.
The other she calls the Buzzy Belly. You lie down, rest a hand on your stomach, and breathe so your belly rises and falls instead of your chest. If you’re clenched, and most of us are, she has you gently tap the area first to loosen it, until you feel a faint buzz of energy under your hand. So much of the day gets spent tight right in the middle, holding stress exactly where it likes to gather. The breath is how you check in. Is my belly soft and moving, or have I been white-knuckling drop-off since 7 a.m.?
I find this both reassuring and mildly indicting. I would love to be the calm, grounded center of my household this fall. I would also like to get through a single September without becoming the woman in the grocery line telling a stranger with a toddler to cherish every minute.
But I think Elliott is onto something with the reset. Not the Pinterest version, with laminated chore charts and a bento box situation I would abandon by week two. The quieter version. The one where the new year doesn’t show up in a blizzard demanding I become a different person, but in the soft gold of a September afternoon, asking only that I put my feet on the ground and pay attention to who is still walking out my door.
My daughter gets fresh kicks and a clean slate. I get a season that asks me to slow down long enough to watch her go. This year, I’ll take it.
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