Here's Summer

“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.