June is the holiday season of the school year

Every culmination, all at once

Every parent I know has something to say about June, largely amounting to it being “too much.” It’s the holiday season of the school year, when you go to class to meet the chicks, go to some kind of graduation or stepping up ceremony and take 87 too many photos of your child walking in some kind of line with their classmates for posterity. 

It’s the season of year-end picnics, dance performances, the last soccer game, and the distribution of random awards certificates that will end up in The Pile. It’s the season of preparing for camp, shifting childcare needs, pondering the age old question of how to get through an entire work week when there are three midday school events, and thinking about whether it’s still worth it to try and get your kid to go to bed by 8 p.m. even though it’s the last week of school and definitely still light out. 

Part of my anxiety is the idea that summer is a season for less structure and fluidity, a desire for it to be a “time for unschooling,” as artist Austin Kleon says, when it conflicts with the reality of working and childcare. I’m fine with being more lax about screens and bedtimes, but also have kids that don’t necessarily do well with inconsistency. I believe in boredom, but also think you have to somewhat create the conditions in which it’s okay to meander—which for a five and seven year old usually just means lightly supervising them in some kind of outdoor scenario. I also, admittedly, have seasonal anxieties about how to get my kid on the bus to camp when he’s adamantly opposed to camp in the first place, and whether or not we should do anything at all that could be considered even loosely academic.

Perhaps as a result of these impending anxieties, or because of the overload of events, ceremonies, and culminations, my kids have also been prone to bouts of rage, despair, and manic joy that seem to come out of nowhere. I interpret as them clamoring for control (or reacting to the total lack of control) in a moment where everything seems more up for grabs. They’ve been bickering about everything, the subject matter of which is so inane that it’s not even worth describing. It’s the kind of fighting that is persistent arm poking—grating more than painful, intentionally irritating, designed to escalate. 

So, I am sitting with both the happy tears of watching Julian do a cheesy dance move with 100 of his fellow kindergarteners in a pair of school-issued purple sunglasses, and the pride of watching Ada get up with her modern dance class to do the performance she really didn’t want to do. I’m also sitting with the unreasonable demands of time and availability being placed on working parents to be present at all hours of the day as though working has a year-end, or any type of cyclical reprieve. I am sitting with being a person used to productivity confronted with a fair amount of ambiguity and undirected time, wanting to allow summer to organically unfurl. 

Last night Ada sat down at the kids’ art table, as she often does after dinner, with a very focused drawing project in mind. Perhaps intuiting that her parents might need some acknowledgement, she produced this haphazard “Parent Cirrtifacket.” 5 out of 5 stars, it says, “for the end of the year.” It included an arbitrary number and what she deemed a “Fruit Rank.” It’s equal parts extremely random and very on point, and it, too, will go into The Pile, to be re-discovered at a future date.

Recommendations:

• To eat: The New York pastry scene has been on fire. The seasonal stone fruit tart at Burrow is four bites of perfection. The strawberry pistachio (or whatever seasonal fruit) pastry at Otway Bakery is so flaky with incredible lamination. And everything at La Bicyclette in Fort Greene is chef’s kiss. (Also a great place to read, write, and work). (Radio Bakery in Greenpoint is next on my pastry field trip list.)

• Also to eat: The incredible birria tacos at Nene’s Taqueria on 4th Ave & Degraw, where we went on Father’s Day.

• To listen: Ocean Vuong on Death, Sex, and Money, whose voice is incredibly mellifluous and whose thoughts always seem to emerge fully formed.

  To listen: Ezra Klein on What Communes and Other Radical Experiments in Living Together Reveal. tl;dr living in single family houses as nuclear families is a historical anomaly! And very unsustainable!

• To watch: Platonic (Apple TV) with Rose Byrne and Seth Rogan as reunited forty-year-old friends trying to navigate a platonic friendship when one is post-divorce and the other is having a mid-life mom-life crisis.

• To read: Jessica Winter’s piece, “Elemental is a Tearful Metaphor for Pixar’s Decline” for the New Yorker, about their bomb of a recent release and the trajectory of this once-great studio.

• To make: summer salads are my forte. Julia Turshen has a great summer salad chart. IMHO adding herbs and either radicchio or fennel to pretty much any salad makes it better.

• To wear: The Zelda Bandeau bra from ARQ. Maximum comfort, my favorite of their styles.

• For the kids:

  • The Indigo Bunting x Les Gamins collab. Ada is OBSESSED with her hot dog sweatshirt.

  • “Ask a Cool Person: What are the Best Kids’ Swimsuits?”—a piece I write for The Strategist.

Lastly, would love your recs. What are your favorite running shorts? Ideally can hold a phone?