Except for my two maternity leaves, I’ve always worked. I never wanted to be a stay-at-home mother. My mother worked, so it seemed natural for me to work while raising our two kids. Plus, I’m quite a high earner, so it never made financial sense for me to stay at home.
I’m usually perfectly content as a working parent. I’ve never second-guessed myself or felt guilty about working. But once summer rolls around, I become dissatisfied with my working parent status.
Like the good working parent that I am, I line up a schedule of summer camps for the kids. The kids get to have fun, explore their interests, and improve their skills. Camps in our area generally offer aftercare, so you can have childcare to cover your 9–5 working hours.
As a kid, I had the same arrangement. With two working parents, I went to many different summer camps throughout the years. I remember some fondly and others not at all.
Because we live in my hometown, my kids are even attending a camp that I attended as a child. I feel incredibly lucky to live somewhere with an abundance of summer options for the kids and to be able to afford them.
But still … when I’m dropping them off in the morning, I’m jealous. They get to spend weeks at these places designed for them to have fun and grow. Meanwhile, I go back to my home office and spend all day inside in front of the computer. Maybe I take a break for a walk or other exercise.
They go to the pool, go on field trips, learn to code, and play sports. When they get home they are tired from a day spent being active. I am tired from a day spent thinking and meeting and responding to emails. Their days sound like more fun.
I want a summer break too. A period of time where my only occupation is enjoyment. As adults, we don’t get that. Summer is the season that most reminds me of that.
I think about what we could do together if I had the summers off. I could take the kids to museums, local beaches and parks, summer concerts and movies, amusement parks, and of course the pool. We’d visit the library regularly and do some cool craft projects. Or we could spend the whole summer traveling.
I know we could fit in a lot of these activities on the weekends even while I’m working, but it would feel stressful instead of fun.
I sometimes fantasize about becoming a teacher, just so I can have the summers off. It must be so refreshing to have that six to eight weeks over the summer to disconnect from work.
I had a small taste of this in the summer of 2020 when my employer gave us extra days off to combat the fatigue everyone was feeling from the pandemic. Very few camps were running that summer and we didn’t feel comfortable sending them unvaccinated anyway.
We took day trips to the beach and local nature reserves, played mini-golf and did some fishing. The summer of 2020 was the closest to being a stay-at-home summer parent I ever got. We had a lot of fun, but the shadow of work was always in my mental background during those weekday outings.
As we head into August and the last few weeks before the kids return to school, I’m feeling melancholy that I’ve spent another summer in the daily grind of work.
And as my kids move into their teen years, I realize I’ve missed the opportunity to have that carefree summer where we are out and about all summer. They wouldn’t want to spend the whole summer with me now even if I were available to do so.
Looking back, if I had been more confident in my career opportunities, I can say that I should have taken a summer off. It would have meant either negotiating a leave of absence with an employer or quitting a job without another lined up. I’ve thought about doing both but was too risk-averse to ever act on the impulse.
As I said, this is the only time of the year I feel this way about working, so I know it will pass. But if this resonates with you, maybe think a little about how you could take an extended break from the workforce to have a summer off. I regret that I did not.
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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.
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