School is out for good for my twins, and almost immediately, at the valedictory dinner, held on their last day of exams, they morphed into sophisticated suited men, carrying around glasses of beer as if to the manner born. Their father had a contrasting air of boyish glee at the prospect of eliminating school fees. We had three children aged under two and now the third of them, our daughter, is about to enter her final year at school.

No one ever believes that school will end while they are still there. Some days at school can feel like years, navigating multiple subjects, complex personalities (and that’s just the teachers!) and bustling social, sporting, speaking, social justice events, outings and camps, all of which ensure that students are fully engaged.

The final day creeps up like a sudden tumble on what seemed like an endless, even road. A door suddenly appears and opens wide, with a hundred new paths leading from it, fanning out to the horizon. How can any student know for sure which road to take when the paths are so numerous and the world is so vast?

One of those paths took our boys on a flight from our Melbourne base to schoolies, in Byron Bay. We dropped them at the airport, where my mutterings about staying safe and looking after friends, repeated far more often and fervently than I probably realised, were apparently unnecessary (as far as one can judge from a state away).

My own transition out of school, fast approaching now, will be much harder. As a parent, my past 13 years have been defined by school. I’ve half-finished multiple conversations in the schoolyard while trying to locate little children, eschewed the politics of parent committees in favour of flexing my latent teacher tendencies as a parent helper in the classroom. I’ve hosted birthday parties at play centres and in the park, and prayed for sunny skies (learning the hard way that November birthdays are best celebrated indoors).

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I’ve hired hiking boots and sleeping bags for school camps, happy not to have to store them in our little place in St Kilda by the sea. I’ve thrilled at the arrival of new schoolbooks from educational resources supplier Campion at the start of a new year and heaved a sigh of relief to unload them (at half price) to the next cohort of students at year’s end. I’ve attended dozens of parent-teacher interviews that felt like speed-dating sessions and rejoiced when those meetings moved online instead of taking place in a draughty hall with 10 anxious parents waiting a metre away for their time slot.

I’ve met lovely parents who rose out of a sea of unfamiliar faces to become friends.

Yes, school has dominated my life for 13 long years and as much as the children are heading off in a new direction, I am too. Of course, for as long as we live, we’ll never stop thinking and worrying as parents, but the daily concerns – as precious as they’ve been – of attending to school-aged children are all but over. School will be out, too, for the parents of this household.