“How,” a friend asked me recently, “is June going for you? Hate the
transition from the school schedule devil-we-know to camp and the
devil-we-don’t.”
Picking up the pieces of three work weeks shattered from the impact
of midday school events, early dismissals, half-days, and a school year
that ended for two of my children a month earlier than the other two, I
could only send a quick, impassioned agreement. June, as no general ever
said but every mother knows, is hell.
It’s hard not to love summer, what with the fresh tomatoes, the sunny
days, the swimming pools and the aura of freedom that hangs over it
all. But that freedom for my children comes with a high price tag for
me, and for every other working mother I know: even the most free-range
of young children cannot be left to roam the house and neighborhood
unsupervised all day.
I say “mothers” advisedly. In families where both parents work or
there is but one working parent, summer and the end of school means a
scramble to find somewhere else for children to spend their days (or a
caregiver to stay at home with them). Mothers are disproportionately the
ones who cope with that scramble. Fathers do join in this form of
summer “fun,” but what dads are missing is that sense that
children who aren’t at school should be in their mother’s care. Many
of our neighbors sign their kids up for ten full weeks of assorted camps or
day care minus the family vacation; I am the one wringing my hands over
whether that’s “too much structure.”
Except in those few communities where year-round school has somehow
won out over the forces of nostalgia and inertia that leave most
children available to help out with the harvest, working families at
every income level cope annually with the long summer school holiday. I
imagine most feel some level of my ambivalence. I do love summer. I love
the heat, I love leaving boots and coats behind, and I love that
feeling that the world is slacking off just a little. My in-box is
already less full, and my calendar full of lovely white spaces.
But the need to suddenly create and manage a different structure for
family life is as oppressive as a string of 90-degree days. I know
children spending weeks with grandparents, weeks at day and sleep-away
camp, children at home with a mother’s helper, children in summer
school, and children who (like mine) will spend their summer hopping
from one to another of these varying activities, meaning that every week
presents a new opportunity to sort out and screw up a new schedule of
pickups and drop-offs and lunches and hats and sunscreen and
but-wait-today-we-were-supposed-to-bring-water-shoes. Which is fine, and even fun, under one condition: that we all
recognize that this is the season when parents are in all-hands-on-deck
mode. Everything will take longer, everyone will respond more slowly,
and four hours of full-attention work followed by an afternoon at the
pool should be considered more effective and efficient than eight hours
of “work” interrupted by constant calls from children asking if they can
run through the sprinkler and if you know where the dog is. Summer
should mean adults without children can find time for family and friends
without guilt, and that we all make an extra effort to
recognize the difference between a real emergency (brain surgery) and a
manufactured one (FedEx deadline). In summer, flexibility and tolerance
should prevail.
In an ideal world, some of those summer rules would always apply, and
we would all, mothers and fathers alike, speak up more boldly about the
moments — like June, July and August — when the scramble to raise
children and to financially support them conflict. As Anne-Marie
Slaughter wrote in “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,”
for the July/August issue of the Atlantic, the more up front we are
about our need to lead a balanced life in which family and work both
play a part, the more the adjustments we make to our schedules to
accommodate both will become the norm.
Meanwhile, the days are long, but the summers short, and I can’t
really bring myself to wish for them to be any shorter, no matter how
antiquated our national accommodation for a bygone agricultural life. How did June go for me? Too crazily, and too quickly, but we will
adjust. July and August promise to offer some time to breathe.
