The Moms of Summer: Why I Hate Summer Vacation

I’ve read that the Mommy Wars were over; that both the stay at home and working moms have ultimately concluded that neither camp is perfect—you’re facing mixed emotions and potential time in therapy regardless of the path you take.

Sure, we moms have our share of differences. Some of us like to nurse our babies long enough that the child can walk up and pull up our shirt; while others would prefer to scatter Cheerios and bits of American cheese on a tray in front of her child and call it dinner.

There are moms who like to have the Today Show playing in the kitchen during breakfast, bringing the kids up to speed on the latest details of the Casey Anthony murder trial; and moms who want to shield their kids from real world horrors like child murders, sexting and whatever happened to Matt Lauer’s hair.

There does, however, exist one set of mothers that I will never understand, a group so delusional that I would go out on a limb and suggest they seek help. I call these moms the “I can’t wait for school to be over” crowd.

These are the women that say things like, “I can’t wait for summer vacation to start and not be tied to a schedule,” and then they stare off into the distance, perhaps imagining their children quietly building sandcastles next to them on the beach, while they flip through the latest issue of Good Housekeeping.

Don’t these moms understand the importance of boundaries? That school was invented to not only teach our youngsters how to count and read, but also to prevent injuries?

It took me 16 years to get all four of my children out of the house and into school full day, and while I totally own the fact that if you do the crime, you’ve got to do the time, I have paid my dues to these people. They need to find somewhere else to go for eight hours every day because I’m busy.

I usually start to sweat around mid-April, when all of those end-of-the-year notices start to come home in the backpacks. I need to make plans, plans, plans to keep those kiddies moving morning through night, and prevent a repeat of summers gone by where eight pairs of eyeballs would look at me each morning, awaiting their marching orders.

I had become a cruise director, BUT I NEVER WANTED TO BE A CRUISE DIRECTOR! I’m just not that organized. Or fun.

A lot of summers, I was my own worst enemy, implementing well-intentioned programs that would ultimately torture both the children and me, like the year we unplugged the televisions in our house.

Then, there was the summer I signed everybody up for a slew of camps and lessons and spent most of July and August racing from one end of Monmouth County to the other.

We’ve tried low-key summers too, where I envisioned the kids roaming the neighborhood, the way my siblings and I did long ago. We’d throw rocks at each other, ride bikes up and down the street barefoot and stare at our neighbors’ aboveground pool, beckoning as we stood sweating in our backyard on a mid-July afternoon. 

My kids gave it a try for about 20 minutes and came back to report that the rest of the neighborhood was either at basketball camp, the beach club or on a cruise to Alaska.

These Summer Mommies are often the same ones that don’t see the logic in full-day Kindergarten. When I told two friends, with much younger children, that I had signed my youngest child up to go to a full-day Pre-K program, one of them said incredulously, “But won’t you miss him?”

He’s coming home, isn’t he? Some time apart is good for all relationships, including those that you literally gave birth to.

In two months, I will have the opportunity to really put that absence-makes-the-heart-grow-fonder notion to the test when my oldest child leaves for college over seven hours away.

And while in theory, it would seem like a dream-come-true, I’m finding it’s one thing to want to get them out of your hair for a few hours so you can go to the food store by yourself and fold some laundry, but it’s another to want them to disappear altogether.

Where's my beach chair?