Here Comes the Tidal Wave of Summer
It's okay if you're scared of summer.
Summer used to be my favorite time of year. As a kid, summer meant endless blue slushies and hot pockets at West Point’s Delafield Pond. Summer meant spinning my lifeguard whistle around my fingers during the day and $2 movies at Mahan Hall at night. It was careening down Ciel Mischke’s water slide into her pool. It was sleepovers on the trampoline, calling Z100 to try to get on the radio, and picking raspberry bushes clean. Summer meant freedom.
Ha!
What a joke. Adulthood is such a cataclysmic bait and switch. As a mother of two little kids, ages five and three, summer means endless stretches of 100-degree days, overpriced summer camps, and texting all my friends only to find out they’ve all vacated to cooler climes. Many friends have parents or parents-in-law with houses north of the Mason-Dixon line, and I love these friends, I really do, but come July 17th, I will hate them with the fire of a thousand suns while I wrangle yet another swim diaper onto my wriggling three year old and beg him to get in the car so we can go to the YMCA pool just one more time.
Summer was fun, once, wasn’t it?
Back in January, when my kids were still fighting over the last dregs of the Reindeer Pez dispenser, a text pinged my phone from the Moms text chain for my son’s preschool class.
“Hey, just curious what summer camps everyone is signing up for?”
It was an innocent throwaway text, a little lob to see what conversation she might get started. But all I felt was white-hot rage. Summer camps!? It was January! January! Couldn’t a mother get a little tiny breath of fresh, winter air before she was on to scheduling and planning the next season? No, is the answer. No, she cannot.
My thumbs couldn’t fly fast enough. I just finished pulling off the Magic of Christmas, and now I’m supposed to plan Hot kid Summer?!!? Then I quickly registered my five-year-old for MBA’s “First Camp” and “Soccer Kiddies.”
Let’s face it: things are different for me than they were for my mother in the 1990s. (Sorry, Mom, but it’s true.) For one, I don’t live on a military installation, where kids can run free, semi-chaperoned, for most of the day. I don't have a built-in group of mom-friends who can lounge in the backyard drinking Fresca while the kids play in the sprinkler. As an adult, summer feels a little terrifying. Like a tidal wave coming right at you.
Maybe I’m the only one that feels this way. Or maybe not.
Perhaps you’re dreading summer, too. Maybe you over-scheduled your June, July and August, lined up ten straight weeks of camps and art classes and vacations, hoping to avoid the doldrums, the sweat, the whiney children, and the whiney woman in the mirror. (It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, etc.) Summer Fear is a real thing. And lately, I’ve been forced to admit that sometimes I make plans compulsively, as an insurance policy against future loneliness.
In the end, I’m considering canceling a few of those summer camps. I panic-registered, and now I’m looking at a jam-packed calendar and wishing I’d given myself (and my kids) a bit more space for boredom, for spontaneity, for — dare I say it — freedom.
You received this email because at some point in the past, you expressed interest or signed up for email updates. I hope the words bring a bit of encouragement to keep entering into the (mostly) dark forest we call life.
Recent Favorites
APP: I recently subscribed to the Freedom App which allows me to block certain websites and applications while I’m writing or spending time with my children. I love this app, because it isn’t easy to work around, and it allows me to focus without getting sucked into “research” when I should be writing, or social media when I should be spending time with the people I love.
WATCH: Air (Movie, in Theaters!). This is the story of the executives at Nike who signed Michael Jordan to create Air Jordan shoes. I loved this movie so much that I grabbed my phone out during the movie and started texting people that they needed to go see it. Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Jason Bateman, Viola Davis, give incredible performances.
READ: I Don’t Want to Smell You Get High by Thomas Chatterton Williams for The Atlantic. I’ve long been suspicious of the after-effects of legalizing marijuana, and this writer does an excellent job of describing some of the inadvertent trade-offs. “On a recent Monday morning, I boarded an overflowing L train from Williamsburg into Manhattan, the entire car reeking of freshly puffed ganja. Progress demands that elderly people and small children must also inhale this? Something is perversely unserious about a culture that insists the answer is yes and that you are some kind of “Karen” if you beg to differ.”
One More Thing…
I’d love to hear from you this week. How do you approach summer? With dread? Excitement? Joy? Anticipation? How might these newsletters offer some light into the weeks and months to come? I am always open to suggestions.
— Claire
I think what you are speaking of is “mom envy”. It’s easy (so easy) and tempting to look at what someone else is doing and think that you are doing it wrong or missing out. I struggled with this so much when I had a baby. I never had “baby bliss” and I had to get off social media for a while because I ended up being so down that my experience was so different than how I perceived others’ experiences. Actually Ruth Chou Simons GraceLaced Podcast is right in the middle of addressing this very theme in their latest season on limitations.
By the way, I really like your writing! I have noticed a difference since you came back from the writers’ retreat. Do you like the Brontë sisters? I am just now reading Charlotte and Anne’s works! It is soo remarkable the themes they tackled for the time period they wrote in. I didn’t read the Brontë sisters for a long time because I thought the books would be too sad. But their writing too amazing to pass up.
Well. I live at the place you grew up, and none of that is true anymore here.
The world is different. Keep your kids close to you.