Storing Up Treasures in My Heart

Tap. Tap. This thing still on?

Apologies for the radio silence. When I get overwhelmed in life, I go dark. I hide. I shut down. Granted, I still want to be invited to everything, but I want to go to nothing. I want to lay in my bed at an obscenely early hour for a forty-four-year-old woman with a good book and think, “Bet that party’s not nearly as fun without me.” The key to this is staying off social media lest you come across photos of said party looking way more fun than you’re having with your book. But summer, oh my goodness, summer. I have deleted social media from my phone every summer since my rising tenth grader graduated kindergarten, and it was the best idea I’ve ever had.

In the beginning, it was driven by a sentimental thought of being more present with my kids. “Stare at them and not your phone,” I told myself, always a bit weepy at the end of another school year. But what started as a plea to slow down the clock has turned into adult me getting to partake in a full-fledged 80s-kid summer. You see, when I was a child, we all went dark for the summer. Our moms didn’t go to insane efforts to make sure you kept in touch with your classmates. You played with whoever lived within walking distance of your house, and for me, that was no one I hung out with during the school year. You didn’t know what the heck all those kids you had just spent five days a week with for the past nine months were doing, and you really didn’t care. I had Price is Right in the morning and Ricky Lake in the evening, some running around in the woods mixed with an impressive diet of individually wrapped processed cheese and oatmeal cream pies in between, and that was where I learned the rhythm of a reset. One is not meant to be the same person twelve months out of the year. I think everyone needs a minimum of two months a year where they go dark. Way darker than sitting out a mom’s night out. Two months dark where, whatever you’re doing, no one’s watching. Because here is the thing, from someone who has done it now for ten years, at 44 years old I still get that “back to school” feeling. That “look at me and my new Keds” excitement when August inevitably rolls back around.

Because let’s be honest, adulthood can feel like the same day on repeat until you die sometimes. I remember the first summer after I graduated college, the low-key depression of realizing that I would not, in fact, ever get a “summer break” again. No string bikinis and Marlboro Lights with nothing to worry about except making it to our four p.m. restaurant shifts without third degree sunburns. Summers were fun. Summers were exciting . You studied hard and then poof, you got three months of something different. A change of pace. An ultimate reset. And every year, whether it was second grade or sophomore year of college, I entered August a changed woman. A new me. And as I have mentioned previously with my love of New Year’s Day, I love a fresh start.

And so, a couple of days ago, I signed off Instagram until August, and today I experienced my first long, slow day in a very long time. Long gone for me are the never-ending days of entertaining toddlers until bedtime. Through all the hustle and bustle of raising teenagers, what I often find myself craving is some sense of hibernation. To hole up and live in privacy, quietly and contently with the ones who mean the most. To spend our days doing everything and nothing with no one watching to know the difference.

One of my very favorite verses of the Bible is Luke 2:19. The scene is after an angel has appeared to Mary to tell her that she is pregnant with Jesus. And the verse says Mary “treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.” In my heart. That’s where I store up all my summer treasure, in my heart.