Mom Summer

Summer has been on my mind since January, when I had to set reminders to get the boys into Arboretum Camp. When I’m bummed or bored or anxious, I like to plan.

When Ben, our younger son, was sick, I planned something, some camp or activity, for every week of that first horrible summer for Alex (the older one), thinking he’d get to have fun and be with friends, while the rest of us were stuck at home. That super backfired when he told us he was miserable and felt like we were sending him away, a trend that continued into the school year, making him hate the first grade. 

Since that summer, I’ve tried to balance having some plans with having some down time, putting me firmly into a gray area that makes me deeply uncomfortable. How much activity is too much? What if I don’t have enough planned? 

If they’re bored, they’ll come to me, and though I am lucky enough to work from home, I do occasionally need to complete some work. So they need to be engaged but not overscheduled, busy but not over-stimulated, and if they spend more than an hour watching tv when it’s nice out, so help me god, I’m going to lose it. 

On to the balance beam we go, heading into these final days of the school year. I think this is as much about parenting philosophy as anything else. Do we make sure our kids are busy so they don’t have time to get bored and into trouble, or maybe just to make sure they don’t have enough time to bother us? Or do we set them free and tell them to figure it out, knowing we’re facing down a summer full of conflict?

It’s also about giving them meaningful experiences, maybe experiences our parents didn’t or couldn’t give to us. Or do we make the summer a learning experience in a different way, forcing them to be bored and figure out how to get out of it on their own? 

Covid and then a cancer treatment sapped this willingness to deal with discomfort and conflict out of me for a while, and I feel like I’m just now regaining the fortitude to endure teaching them this lesson. Would it have been easier if we’d done it that way from the beginning? Absolutely. 

But have you ever been on a playground and been the only mom not actively helping your child? Try being the only one allowing your kid to struggle while every other mom swoops to the rescue at the first hint of hardship, either with a laugh and a whoop and a foozie/zerbert on the belly, or with gentle caresses and big searching eyes looking for the hurt she can soothe with her force of will. And then you try to stand to the side while your hilarious little animal of a child tries to climb up the slide while some other kid is coming down, or when he picks up mulch and cocks his chubby arm to throw, or worse, when he starts to climb up the ladder multiple times his height to get to the taller slide. You try standing aside while the other moms hover, maybe also side-eying you to see if you’re ever going to step in. You can feel their thoughts, weighing your actions against their own and judging themselves to be superior. “At least I’m not like her,” she internally sighs. 

So no, kids don’t know how to be bored. And we’ve done it to ourselves and each other. This means those of us who are type-A set alarms and reminders to sign our kids up for camp every week of the summer. But after scheduling every minute of the summer, we realize they need some freedom to make their own choices and we unschedule a few weeks. How will they do? You remember that the pool is always an option, so you can work early and late, flex around afternoon pool time. But then the older one declares the pool to not be as fun anymore because the slides don’t feel as scary as they used to. And the little one is almost self sufficient in the pool but not quite, especially if he wanders into the deep end. Swim lessons aren’t challenging him enough. They’re holding him back to keep us there to get more money out of us, I swear. 

The knot of anxiety grows every time I think about the shortening space of time between now and the end of the school year, about how the decisions I made in January and again in April (park district camp planning time) will affect our summer break, which brings out the need to be perfect in a way that fall or winter never elicit. I take their happiness so seriously that I make myself and probably them miserable in the process. When they’re this little, all they really want is ME, though the older one is getting to the point where he wants his friends too. They want calm, relaxed, present Me, and she’s harder to find these days, especially when she’s freaking out over planning everything to perfection so she can just have a goddamn second to herself. 

And then it hits me that this is what it’s about. I want them to have things planned so I can take myself out of it. I want them happy and self-directed or cared for by someone else so I can get my shit done and then be able to sit with my thoughts or read a book without anyone asking me for anything. I want to be able to be the person I was before kids who could chill and roll with it. And this realization makes me feel like absolute garbage.