The Least Bad Summer

A while ago I had a robust newsletter called Your Mom, which was about motherhood, identity, etc. I never finished migrating those posts over to Earl Earl, and when I started working on my book (available for preorder here!) I had to kind of stop writing Your Mom because I had nothing left to give, but now I want to pick it back up again. If you’re getting this and you’d rather not, toggle the switch “off” next to Your Mom here.

A few summers ago, when my kids were maybe three and five or four and six, I started to think that my childhood memories of summer—long lazy stretches of sunshine on my back, eating fresh apricots out of a bucket of cool water and looking for bugs in my yard with my best friend who lived across the street—were as lovely in my mind as they must have been horrible in my parents’. Summer is for kids, duh, but the glory of it, the joyful freedom, the spoils are all for the kids (much like Christmas) and the adults meanwhile stand off to the corner gritting their teeth, longing for it to end. I wrote this a few years ago, and I felt it all so intensely, I toned down what I wrote so much because I felt so completely wrung out by their summer. Totally drained of my mental and physical reserves, and financial too since in order to get some bit of structure AND work you need either help or back to back camps, and every morning at that age is a fierce negotiation to get your kid to go along with either option. They never go happily.

I didn’t worry that there was something wrong with me, I knew what I was feeling was valid. So much of what I struggled with in early parenthood could be summarized by my summertime experience: how can I deal with having no control over a person I am so responsible for. How can I balance the feeling of being in charge, the one constantly saying “no,” “stop doing that", “get down from there,” to a person who is unpredictable, unreasonable, and occasionally at odds with themselves as well as with me. School would end and I would be filled with dread, the things I hated most about being a mother (being in charge) now taking up the greatest portion of what was on my plate. It felt impossible, lonely, and whenever I tried to bring it up I felt like an asshole.