School's Out. Daycare's Closed. Work Isn't.

It is the end of June, and depending on the ages of your kids, summer has either just blown a hole in your childcare or it is about to.

If you have a school-aged kid, you know the exact moment it hits. The backpacks get emptied out on the floor. The teachers say their goodbyes. The last worksheet comes home. And it lands on you that school just ended for ten weeks.

If your kids are little and still in daycare, summer does not bring a break at all. The drop-offs keep coming. The tuition does not pause for a single day. And then, often with barely any notice, your center announces it is closing for two or three weeks in July for cleaning or staff vacation, and you are suddenly scrambling to find backup care for an infant or toddler, with no school calendar and no camp to fall back on.

And if you are like a lot of families, you have both. A little one in daycare and a bigger one out of school, on two schedules that flatly refuse to line up. Camp runs nine to three. Daycare runs until six. Camp covers weeks two, four, and seven. Daycare closes weeks five and six. You are not managing one broken system. You are managing two at once, and trying to make them overlap with the hours you are actually supposed to be working.

So whatever shape it takes in your house, here is the truth underneath all of it. The structure that lets you work for most of the year gets thinner, or vanishes completely, at the exact moment your kids are home the most.

If you are a working mom, you already know the drill. You did not start planning summer in May. You started in February, the morning registration opened, refreshing the page at 7 a.m. with your credit card ready, because the good camp weeks sell out in minutes and the backup care options fill up just as fast.

You have a spreadsheet. Of course you have a spreadsheet.

Week one is the camp at the rec center. Week two is the one across town that a friend recommended. Week three has nothing, so that is the week the grandparents come, or you burn vacation days, or you and another mom split the kids and pray. Week four is the camp that runs nine to three, which is its own small joke, because no full-time job runs nine to three. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, the daycare goes dark for two weeks and the whole fragile thing has to be rebuilt from scratch.

You are not arranging childcare. You are running a logistics operation on top of the job you already have.

I think about this every summer with my girls, and I remember the earlier years too, when they were little and in full-time care. The costs that never once paused for summer. The patchwork only gets more complicated as they grow and the schedules multiply. What never changes is the mental load of being the one who holds the whole calendar in her head, who knows which week has a gap and which place needs the forms by Friday and who is driving whom on Tuesday.

And here is what gets me.

We are told, constantly, that the economy needs mothers. And it is true. Women are now the majority of the American workforce. Mothers are working at some of the highest rates we have ever recorded. We are not a nice-to-have. We are the engine.

And then June arrives, and the structure that lets us work for most of the year gets thin or disappears. No plan. No backup. No system. Just whatever each individual mother can duct-tape together with camps, daycare gaps, family, favors, and sheer force of will.

We have built an economy that depends on mothers and a calendar that pretends we do not exist.

The math does not work, and a lot of moms know it in their bones. For families with kids in daycare, the bill never drops, and a closure week can mean paying for care you cannot use and paying for backup on top of it. For families with school-aged kids, camp costs a fortune and still leaves you with the three-o’clock problem and the uncovered weeks. Plenty of mothers run the numbers in June and realize that for ten weeks, working actually costs them money. So some step back. Some go part-time. Some leave.

This is not a coincidence. It is the same squeeze we feel all year, just concentrated into one season.

When flexibility disappears, mothers are the ones who get pushed out. We have watched it happen with return-to-office mandates. You cannot flex around a camp that ends at three, or cover a surprise two-week daycare closure, when you are chained to a desk until five and someone is counting whether you are in your seat. Summer just makes the impossible math impossible faster.

And none of this even touches the part that does not show up in any economic report. The planning. The worrying. The being the default parent who carries it all while also being told to lean in, show up, and act like you do not have a toddler who needs a backup plan or a nine-year-old who has to be somewhere at 8:45 tomorrow morning.

So let me say the thing I want every mother reading this to hear.

The summer scramble is not a personal failing. You are not bad at planning. You are not disorganized. You are doing something genuinely hard inside a system that was built to ignore you, and you are doing it anyway, every year, without applause.

That deserves to be seen for what it is. Not a quirk of motherhood. A gap in our infrastructure that we have quietly agreed to let mothers absorb for free.

Until that changes, we do what we have always done. We cover for each other. We send the group text about the open camp spots and the sitter who has a couple weeks free. We swap days. We take the neighbor’s kid on Thursday so she can take ours on Friday. We build, between us, the safety net that should have been there all along.

That is the part that gives me hope. Not the system. The mothers holding it together in spite of the system.

So if you are staring down your own summer “vacation” right now, refreshing a waitlist, doing the math on vacation days, piecing together two schedules that will not cooperate, feeling like you are barely pulling it off, I want you to know you are not failing.

Give yourself the credit you deserve. You are pulling off the impossible, one week at a time.

Sarah Wells is the CEO of Sarah Wells Bags, a company she started at her kitchen table to make life a little easier for pumping moms, and has grown over 14 years into a brand that moms hand down to one another. She writes Moms Mean Business, a popular Substack on workforce, small business, and the realities of mom life, and is the author of Go Ask Your Mothers, and leader of the Otrera Collective, a mastermind for women-led brands. She’s also the founder and Executive Director of the Center for Modern Commerce Policy, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization working on the federal policy barriers facing digital sellers and e-commerce small businesses.

Through storytelling, strategy, and a seat at the tables where policy gets made, Sarah turns the real experience of building a modern business into change that helps the people building right alongside her.

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