One of my favorite bosses (my last boss, in fact) loves summer and used to encourage us to make the most of it. “Michigan summers are fleeting,” she would say, “so you have to get out there and make a point to enjoy it while it lasts.” While this is undeniably true, and I loved her for saying it, for many years, summer was just a big problem. Honestly, summertime is just hell when you work, you can’t stay home and need reliable child care – it’s a no-win situation. For years when my daughter was young, and I was a divorced working mom, once school was out, summers were patchwork of expensive camps that I always had high hopes for, but ultimately ended up just being a place to park her while I worked. These were the days before “work from home” was any kind of a thing and clock watchers abounded in my corporate environment- you walk in a few minutes late one too many times, or try to sneak out early, and someone would notice.

I’m a victim of my own nostalgia so it’s easy for me to think that an ideal summer is like my childhood memory of summer. Long days fighting boredom with imagination, books, and neighborhood friends, sleeping in front of a box fan and eating snacks and microwave pizzas and watching too much television before being shooed outside to ride bikes and drink out of the hose and come home only when the fireflies starting their slow blink in the backyards. It should be sparklers and the excitement of a big summer movie and a summer road trip, Otter Pops and bug bites. Nowadays, if you’re a kid with working parents, you have “day camps” to look forward to, most of which cost thousands of dollars, and many of which don’t even have hours that match up with a 9-5 job (unless you purchase additional pre-care or after-care). 

Last night, while I was cooking dinner, those patchwork summers pre-Covid came back to me – how did we make it through? Nowadays, flex work is much more of a thing and if I need to, I can work from home. What I would have given for that flexibility ten years ago! I remember those days but they seem like they happened to someone else. Mornings waking up so early to make sure her bags and lunches were packed, dropping her off, many times with strangers, long commutes to work, white-knuckle gripping the steering wheel after work to make sure I could pick her up by 6pm – even the additional after care would close at 6 and then there would be additional charges and the horrible feeling of walking in to see your kid one of the last two or three to go home, looking as tired and bedraggled as I felt. Then home with her to cook dinner, clean up the dishes, baths and bedtime, only to have to wake up and do it all over again.

And I was lucky – enormously lucky. I had a great job with a great team. I had reliable transportation and could afford child care. What about all the families and single working parents who can’t? I stood there thinking about it and feeling immense gratitude that those days are over, and feeling anger at the same time that the US won’t do better (I almost wrote “incapable” but that is not accurate- we’re fully capable, we just don’t). Could I have done something differently? Or better? What options do people have? And what will it be like for her in the future, if she ever decides to become a parent? Will she struggle with the same guilt and self doubt? I would drag myself naked over gravel to keep that from happening (and no one needs to see that).

As I’m musing over these somber things, she comes padding into the kitchen, almost seventeen, four inches taller than me, all long tan legs and longer glossy hair. If I were to ask her, she would probably just shrug and laugh at some of the silly memories of Girl Scout camp or Camp Invention or the Nature Camp and ask when dinner will be ready. Her bare feet are planted firmly in the present and I can take her lead on that. All we have is the summer we are in and to circle back around, it’s fleeting. So maybe I need to make some plans for Otter Pops, fireflies, and sparklers.