Lessons from Summer Break

when you don’t plan, your children climb trees…

It’s mid-September and both kids finallllllyyyyy just completed their first full week of school. Summer break was filled with camp and vacation, and then, nearly 3 weeks of unstructured time back home with a broken car and no plans. Lessons learned from the No Plans Part of Summer Vacation:

–I have a mental health condition called “Chronic Always Annoyedness.” I am sure there’s a psychotherapist out there who diagnoses this. Because I have it. I think there are people who are simply more genetically predisposed to being annoyed by other people and I am one of those people, and my psychosis will affect my children for the rest of their lives. It’s one thing to be annoyed by your coworker who microwaves bacon in the office kitchen every day; it’s another to be annoyed by these collections of organisms you spawned. It is a cause for much self-reflection. Am I built to co-habitate with my own progeny? Because I have a hard time taking the spit bubbles; the squirming; the endless kicking on the post of the kitchen table, day after day; the public nose-picking; the outside voices always used in inside spaces; the non-flushing of the toilets. My solution, after many weeks spent with said progeny, was often rage. I need help.

–Plans vs No plans: No Plans Win. When I looked at the big gap in our schedule between vacation and school, I thought I would fill it by going on fun adventures around the city. I’ve heard about these people who cart their kids to museums and beaches and cultural attractions; I subscribe to their Instagram feeds. But partly out of laziness, partly out of design, and partly on account of the whole broken car situation, I discovered that sometimes it is best to do nothing. The kids seemed to have the most fun running around the park, building nests out of twigs, digging holes in the holes in the dirt. The solution to boredom with kids is not to make more plans, but to be happier with one’s lack of plans.

–Immersive childcare is immersive. You spend all day with the kids; then you want to talk about them. T works in an office all day, but when he leaves the office, he’s done, more or less.  But the more you spend around your kids, I think, the more you burrow into their idiosyncrasies, their phobias, their foibles, their strangely insightful little minds. Being around them for weeks on end did not want to make me be around them more, but it made me want to discuss them more than ever. I’m glad they’re back in school. Now I can focus endlessly on my other favorite subject: me.