The Emergency Contact

It’s 3:16pm and I can already tell.

She walks out of school with her backpack on wrong, jumper sleeves pulled over her hands, and a look on her face like the day clawed its way across her skin.

There’s a hole in her tights and two of her fingers are purple from the felt pens they use for Big Writing. One shoelace is missing. Her bag thumps the back of her knees as she walks, like it’s punishing her for surviving the day.

I want to reach out. I want to unzip the feelings for her and sort them into labelled trays so she doesn’t have to carry them all at once. But right now, I’m just a safe zone. Not a fix.

Not a word. Not a wave. Just straight past me and into meltdown position: folded into herself, jaw set, eyes doing that thousand-yard stare that means don’t talk to me unless you want to suffer.

Her teacher smiles at me.

“She had a great day!”

Did she? Did she really?

Because I’ve learned to decode that sentence.

What it actually means is:

“She followed every rule, said nothing when she was confused, stayed quiet when she was overwhelmed, and didn’t bite anyone.”

It doesn’t mean she was okay.

It means she was compliant.

And now she’s unraveling in the one place it’s safe to fall apart: home.

The three-year-old is trying to show her a picture she made out of pasta shapes.

She shoves it away. Screams. Covers her ears.

And there it is, the explosion after the performance.

The detonation of the mask.

I want to say it’s okay.

I want to remind her that she’s safe now, that she can stim, cry, say whatever she needs.

But I also want to scream at the world that made her spend seven hours today pretending to be someone else just to survive phonics, P.E., and fluorescent lighting.

She didn’t implode at school.

She saved it for me.

Because she trusts me with the mess.

Which is beautiful. And brutal.

Because on days like this, I’m the mess too.

I haven’t eaten anything solid since 11am.

The toddler refused to nap and then screamed because I wouldn’t let her lick the bathroom tiles.

I’m down to my last brain cell and it’s currently buffering.

But still, I kneel beside my seven-year-old, who’s now sobbing under a blanket on the hallway floor.

And I say the same thing I always say, even if I’m not sure she can hear me over the noise inside her head:

“You did so well today.

I know it was hard.

I’m so proud of you for getting through it.”

She doesn’t reply. Just nods, once.

It’s enough.

Later, much later, after snacks and silence and a very specific YouTube playlist she needs to regulate, she’ll tell me about the thing that broke her:

Someone took her favourite pencil.

She didn’t say anything.

She didn’t want to make a fuss.

I want to find the pencil thief.

I want to write a TED Talk on the emotional significance of stationery.

I want to scream SHE WAS NEVER OKAY AND YOU DIDN’T NOTICE.

But I don’t.

Because this is the part no one sees.

Not the teachers.

Not the school mums.

Not the GP or the paediatrician or the family members who think she’s “fine at school so it can’t be that bad.”

This is what masking looks like.

A child who explodes in the safest place they have.

And a mum who holds the wreckage with shaking hands, hoping no one knocks at the door right now, because she’s not sure she could make small talk over this much rawness.