My kids have been at my parents’ house since last Saturday, and appear to be having the time of their lives. Today, they are at a local lake with a small beach and large wading area for the second day in a row, an excursion always followed by ice cream at Stewart’s. This ice cream & beach combo comes after an earlier trip to a local farmhouse where they’ve had breakfast, and already convinced their grandpa they need jellybeans from the old school candy counter.
The days prior were on-and-off stormy, so they went to Barnes & Noble where my dad got the kids Pokemon cards. From there they went to a mall foodcourt (a novel concept in 2023!) and ate a nourishing lunch of fries, pizza, and Gatorade. It’s unclear how much TV they’ve watched, but I assume it’s a lot, even though most of the updates from my parents include more wholesome activities like riding bikes, digging holes, picking raspberries in the backyard, and being cute in the bathtub. I’m glad they know this is what to share with me, as though to reassure me that of how analog and wholesome the week has been.
When Ada called us, three days in to the stay, she sounded very self-assured and slightly admonishing. “You know my favorite bathing suit? The tankini?” She asked, referring to the rather gauche bathing suit we quickly procured at Target after our luggage didn’t arrive in Palm Springs during spring break. “Yes,” I said, wondering where this was going. “Well, you forgot to pack the bottoms and I’m … quite disappointed,” she relayed in a measured tone. “But Harabaji (her grandpa) says if it’s okay with you we can go back to Target and find a new bottom.” I reminded her there were at least three other bathing suits in the suitcase and she acknowledged this, but again reminded me she was disappointed because this one was here favorite. It was clear she’d already worked through her actual anger and formulated this plan before calling me. I approved the plan and she went on to describe a variety of Julian’s infractions before needing to run to dinner.
There’s a true liberation to not knowing what your kids are doing all day, being freed from trying to limit sugar, screens, and fighting, which is one of the things I think the school year truly gives us (and that we fully lost during COVID). They’re not in your care for those 7 hours a day, and thus you are relieved from the pressure of determining whether that time is being well-spent. You’re also relieved of them processing their emotions at you in real-time, and more able to be the mom that approves getting the new bathing suit bottoms an hour after the freak out and not having to endure the actual freak out.
School is, by design, usually very structured and meant to be more demanding than non-school, so aside from the obvious caveats of occasional bum teachers and dysfunctional schools, it’s a largely out-of-sight, out-of-mind experience. After school and weekends are when we endure more of the guilt of whether time is spent the “right” way and summer, too, seems more and more like it falls into this bucket. It’s a level of time-scrutiny that is very attached the idea that forms of summer activity still have more virtue than others, that’s very oriented towards some perfectly fine-tuned balance of leisure with just enough productivity and stimulation.
Summer is both framed up as the time to do everything else you didn’t do during the rest of the year. It also presents—for both adults and the children under their care—as the time for rest and relaxation, for beach trips, afternoon naps, for letting kids bide time and experience the serendipity that comes with boredom. But there can be an intense type of FOMO, unsurprisingly exacerbated by social media, that comes with examining everyone else’s summer choices and thinking about how you’re spending your time and creating the “right” conditions for the ways your kids will spend their time.
It turns out that FOMO applies to both productivity and leisure because it’s an aspirational framework that plagues when you think more of either could make your life better. So sitting there questioning whether your kid is going to too much or too little camp, or the right camp, or whether there’s too much repetition, enough novelty, too much change, not enough trips, not enough beaches or time on boats, or too much time spent sitting on the couch while mom is on Zoom—is a slippery vortex to find yourself in.
I’m very excited to see my kids for dinner this evening, and many times throughout the week I’ve reflected on the assurance I get from seeing only the very tiny analog slice of what the kids are doing. It’s afforded me the privilege of time, of course, and less cleaning, cooking, or accommodating the kids in our daily schedule. We’ve gone to see a nighttime movie, ordered all the spicy food that we actually wanted to eat at an Indian restaurant, and made an impromptu overnight trip to see friends on the 4th. But on top of that, I know it’s alleviated me from the above FOMO, from feeling that my kids’ supposed leisure-productivity balance could be more finely tuned, a very modern flavor of parental emotional labor that I’d more often like to leave behind, starting ASAP.
Recommendations:
To read: The Radical Theology of Mr. Rogers (via Kottke)
Printshop: the tiny linocut food prints by Ana Inciardi. I got the mini pickle jar for Ada and the ice cream sandwich for Julian.
To wear: A new pair of Sabah’s, the best slip-on sockless shoes of summer.
To watch: Asteroid City. Loved Scarlett Johansson and Tom Hanks. The cinematography is a little distracting (to me), and while not my favorite Wes Anderson, a very good Wes Anderson. (Also: The Missing Bill Murray part from Asteroid City)
To drink: A High Life with Aperol and lemon juice which is officially called a Spaghett but is like a cross between a negroni and an aperol spritz.
Best undies for kids: A guide I put together for The Strategist
To listen: This snippet of a longer interview with Hanya Yanigahara on Brad Listi’s podcast. She writes with an incredible level of rigor and its super interesting to hear how disciplined her process is.
Summer reading: The Dispossessed by Ursula LeGuin and in the queue: All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews, Speedboat by Renata Adler
Yes to all of this. The mental and emotional labor of thinking of the perfect medium of activities and all the things related to our kids is so exhausting and when I think about how much I think about it all, it feels like a dumb waste of time! The kids are alright!
And have you heard of JOMO? Joy of missing out! I like to think of that when I’m having FOMO.
Our son spent 2 weeks in TX away from us and we ate our first fancy dinner since he was a newborn. Almost 9 years! I've also given up on forcing him to do the summer workbook that school sent home and will make up bonus activities instead, like write a thank you note to your aunt or make a shopping list with prices and compare to the actual receipt. Life skills!