We are, as a culture, obsessed with summer — or at least the idea of it. I blame our collective youth, when summer was the ultimate reward for surviving the school year: three months of freedom, sunshine, mischief, and maybe even a splash of titillating summer love. Just think about how many iconic songs there are about summertime and how many movies have been made about summer vacation. It’s the time of year we are all taught to yearn for and dream about — and if you’re not headed to France, are you even alive?
Because of all this, I tend to set high summer expectations. I mean, not France (I wish!), but often smaller things that feel important to me. I’m going to spend more time gardening this summer than I did last summer is something I say to myself every February. Also, I’m going to go on more walks. And of course I’m going to sit outside and read more.
Yeah, right. It never, ever happens. As a good friend said to me yesterday, summertime is “like New Year’s Eve spread out over three months.” The hope and expectations are always so high. The reality is, without fail, disappointing.
And for good reason. Summertime is not an easygoing season for parents. We often have less free time than we do the rest of the year because our kids are home and asking us for snacks every 14 minutes. In a survey of parents conducted by Atomik Research in 2023, nearly half said they find summer more stressful than the school year because kids have so much free time. Many parents also said their work-life balance tends to worsen over the summer rather than improve. There’s even a phrase, the “summer ceiling,” used to refer to the collective obstacles faced by working mothers over the summer “as a result of the scarcity (or complete lack) of childcare resources, couple equity and overall gender equality.”
My kids attend a community day camp, run by our local government, so I do get some work time and free time during the week (though it’s for just six hours a day, and I spend 80 minutes each day driving to and from). And the camp is, amazingly, quite affordable. So I am absolutely one of the lucky ones; affordable summer childcare is much harder to find in the rest of the country. Here’s a bar chart based on a 2019 survey of approximately 1000 U.S. parents conducted by the Center for American Progress. Nearly one in five parents reported there aren’t enough camp slots for kids in their community, and more than half said cost is a big challenge:
So, yeah — we might think we’ll have more time to relax or engage in fun hobbies over the summer, but we often actually have less. I’ve also found that summertime is often the time when difficult things just kind of happen. Last summer, I separated from my husband, which pretty much took over the entire summer and all my feelings. This summer, there have been several unexpected hardships — new financial concerns and new family health issues. Maybe summer is when the shit in life tends to hit the fan, at least for me?
Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that every summer, around the end of July, deep disappointment sets in. I see the state of my garden (why can’t my perennials grow like my weeds?!), I realize that I haven’t taken a walk in two weeks, I wonder why I am not getting nearly enough work done. Then I feel sad or even guilty, like I’m somehow wasting my summer yet again — as if summer is a gorgeous ripe piece of fruit waiting to be enjoyed and I’m too unmotivated or distracted to pluck it. It’s a simple gift I should be able to enjoy, and but somehow I can’t and it’s my own damned fault.