“When is your summer vacation, Mommy?” my youngest asked.
I explained that most of the time, adults don’t get a summer vacation. We went to Michigan, I said. Remember that? A week ago? “But that was for three days,” she said, pointing out the ridiculousness of calling that a summer vacation. Too true.
This summer in particular has been (mentally, metaphorically) more a fitness adventure vacation than a beach vacation. I never really understood why people would book those. I’m all for a good hike one afternoon, but I’ve always believed a vacation should be about rest, from work, from routine, from whatever is keeping you up at night.
For me, this summer has been about forms. I have lists of the forms I have to fill out. Forms for child care, forms for liability waivers for the childhood memories my children are perilously creating, forms for Girls Scouts that require calling the pediatrician for vaccination records, because that’s a form I thought I had readily available as a good, conscientious mother… but apparently not. Forms for adulting, lists for keeping the forms straight. And I’m writing them all out long-hand because currently I’m printer-less, and I don’t understand why all this same information, time after time, isn’t just downloadable from my brain to the page, or why these lines are so small. Do you even want my phone number with area code? Are these forms from 1989 when we were just using 7 numbers? What is going on here?
I thought back to my daughter’s question. “When is your summer vacation?” And I remembered that they’ve been to the pool three times this week, and are already the June-tan that only childhood can acquire, even though they’re covered in SPF 50. And that they’ve created synchronized swimming routines for themselves and had watermelon with breakfast, lunch and dinner. And I’ve been there for all of that (except the tan part… which I’ll never achieve).
Childhood heroine Anne Shirley once said, “Tomorrow is a new day, fresh with no mistakes in it.” And I’ve repeated that to myself with more frequency than perhaps is ideal over time. Because while tomorrow may be my oyster, today I seem to be muddling through a bit, still, not appreciating that no matter what else is going on, this is the season of watermelon and flip-flops and dinner on patios. Even in the muddle, I can wake up today, and do better than I did yesterday, finish the day with fewer mistakes than the day before. Make lists and cross them off. Learn my pediatrician’s number by heart, so I don’t have to look it up for every form, put that ill-fated worm back in the cool grass when he strays to the hot sidewalk, and try to finish the day having done more to the good, breathed in a few more of those golden summer moments than I managed yesterday.
Summer vacation as an adult is really listening to children playing, and slowing down to appreciate how much later the sun is out, and how echoes stretch deeper the longer the shadows grow. So, for my summer vacation, I’ll get in the water, even though it’s way too cold and I’ll take photos of the sunset, to add to the photos of all the other sunsets, and to the photos of that mountain peaks that look the same as the mountain we climbed last weekend. (Because summer of not, some mountains we keep climbing, and documenting that is, in the end, documenting our lives.)
And in the midst of it all, remembering that summer doesn’t pass us by, just because we’re adults. We just have to go find it.
