The summer holidays fill me with fear. Currently I’ve a sense of impending doom because I have three kids to organise; so far I’ve only got two weeks sorted, and with inset days there are still five weeks to fill.
I know women who’ve been working on spreadsheets since Easter. They’ve assigned dates to family members, they’ve booked activities well in advance, they’ve coordinated with other families for childcare swaps and to ensure their offspring aren’t turning up to Kids Club knowing not a soul. Their efficiency is off the chart. THESE are the women that should be running the country.
And I appreciate that some men will be involved in summer-holiday planning, but I’ve yet to meet one who has taken it fully into their hands and is colour-coding the family calendar with said plans. Perhaps this is how we’ll know when we’ve reached equal parenting nirvana.
First off, there’s the practical fear – the kids are too young to be home alone so how do we both continue to do our jobs and be present at work while keeping at least one eye on them? Someone needs to book and pay for day trips and kids clubs. And the feeding; the volume of food required, the cost of it, and how do I make my repertoire of jacket potatoes, cheese and ham toasties and mince-based meals stretch to six weeks of mostly eating at home without giving everyone scurvy?
And then there’s the simmering undercurrent of guilt, because we’re meant to make it special.
Back in 2018, a meme did the rounds.
“You only get 18 delicious summers with your kids. This is one of your 18. If that's not perspective, I don't know what is”.
Initially, the sentiment might give you an ‘aw’ moment. It might. But after the first couple of times seeing it, while I angrily stare down my partner who has not been targeted with this shite and has no idea of how much it seeps into my brain to commit to the to-do list, it makes me want to throw my head back and roar ‘FUCK YOUR EIGHTEEN SUMMERS’.
This meme creeps back out in the run up to the summer, just as working parents everywhere are starting to realise that they have around six weeks annual leave a year (if they’re lucky), there are thirteen weeks of school holidays to account for, and there’s at least a six week summer stretch staring down at them. Admittedly I’m not brilliant at maths, but this is quite the conundrum.
And if you don’t work, it doesn’t mean this is an easy time for you. Sure, the logistics might be easier but it is possible to have too much time with your kids. As I am writing this – and I promise I’m not making this up for poetic license - I just went to the loo and I heard little footsteps padding along the corridor and watched as the lock creepily turned where my five year old is jimmying it open from the outside with a knife. Six weeks is a very long time.
The internet isn’t entirely clear where this idea of '18 summers' came from, attributing it to a few different women. One, Heather Duckworth of Florida, accompanied her words with a picture of a porch scattered with shoes. And in her Facebook post that went viral, Heather writes “Because I know that all too soon those shoes will be running off exploring the world...and my porch will be empty.”
Now, I have three kids – they are five, ten and twelve and all live at home.
If their shoes were restricted to one spot I’d be pretty happy, but they are scattered all over the damn place, and never in a pair.
Maybe the 18 summers people are not wrangling a baby, toddler or young kids. I get it, I really do. The nostalgia is WILD when my iPhone throws up a memory of my eldest aged five brandishing a fake saw, wearing a builders hard hat and nothing else, and then pans to my middle one clutching a stone – its name was Rachel - that we carried everywhere for five months. But I have made it my mission not to be that woman that says ‘Cherish every moment’ and if I think really hard, I can also remember the battle to get my son to put on clothes to leave the house and the catastrophe that ensued if we misplaced ‘Rachel’. Which both happened multiple times a day.
This idea of making every minute precious – nay, delicious – is laughable. On the first day of the summer holidays one year, my son tripped on a hose, landed face-first on a concrete step and broke his tooth, resulting in an emergency dentist trip and very expensive root canal surgery. The first day. There are definitely delicious moments, but if someone is setting themselves up for a full summer of deliciousness, I fear they’re in for an almighty fall.
I have to question the 18 years too. There was a summer when I was fifteen and my parents went on holiday and I chose to stay home, my mate moved in with me, and we’d walk along to Blockbuster every day having scraped together a pile of change to hire a Friends video. I mean, we loved it, but forty-two year old me thinks we were morons for not taking advantage of free holidays.
A couple of years later and I was back on family holidays, only now we could drink their gin with them rather than drinking it syphoned off into a bottle to swig neat in the graveyard. The last few years we’ve gone to Dorset where family and cousins are, and we watch our kids together play in the sea we had so much fun in 30+ years ago. It’s not over when they’re eighteen. You could argue, it actually gets better. My parents watch with wry smiles on their faces as we arrive on the beach carting inflatables and picnics and changes of clothes and buckets of ‘precious’ stones and try not to lose a child. I cannot wait for my turn to saunter on to the beach with my camping chair and flask of hot tea and watch the utter chaos of someone else trying to suncream an angry three-year-old.
When you break it down it’s just another thing for women to feel guilty about. There’s the saying about women having to work like they don’t have kids and parent like they don’t work. Add in to that trying to do both those things without the sanctity of school for six hours of the day and... well, we’re fucked.
So anyway, I’m just going to be over here mildly panicking but trying not to guilt myself into planning an epic summer. Because, like the rest of the year, often it’s about surviving with some moments of brilliant thrown in. And we’ll all remember it better than it was anyway.
Won’t you join me?
Steph Douglas is the founder of thoughtful gifting company Don’t Buy Her Flowers and talks with guests about the Rush Hour on the Don’t Buy Her Flowers podcast.