In a country that graduates illiterate students from high school, some people question the value of summer vacation. It was made for an agrarian context that has nothing to do with our day and age. It is pointless. Children regress in academic skills, gain weight, and watch television. The list of grievances, many of them quite reasonable, goes on.
However, what people miss is that one of the greatest obstacles to reaping the rich and eternal rewards that summer vacation has to offer is the absence of mothers in the home. One of the contributions to children backsliding in academic skills and morphing into increasingly socially disturbed couch potatoes is that there is no daily home life happening in which they can join. Home is a transit center for adults and children recharging to sally forth again to disparate activities, a holding pen and bunkhouse, deserted on an ordinary Tuesday morning.
For mothers whose children are in school while they oversee homemaking and the care of younger children, summer can be an intense experience of everyone home all the time. This is not the time to lose heart, though, because the experience of summer is a spiritual one that those older children should not be deprived of. It requires careful work to make the days seem glorious, but there are glories lurking in those unstructured, lengthy days of leisure. Without the careful foresight of a mother, the initial glee at having absolutely nothing to do can turn into a waking nightmare of bickering and misery. Read on and see that the solution can be quite simple.
School as daycare has become largely the norm. Without nine hours of institutional organized activity, children whose parents go to work are left to fend for themselves. These days, their parents might be working from home, but that just means that a distracted parent is all the more likely to encourage mindless nonsense like playing video games and watching TV. Instead of an exciting opportunity to do something really different from the school year, summer vacation can become a tedious exercise in distraction techniques.
Ah, but one of the most unfortunate things that can happen to summer is the endless camp rotation. Whether there is a mother at home or not, this scheme ensnares many. It’s certainly the most labor-intensive for parents who must diligently, months ahead, submit forms and applications, deposits and vaccination cards. Drop off and pick up varies for every camp and the minutia are enough to keep a part-time employee busy. Rather than the expanse of unscheduled days, a real change from the predictable hum of the school year, the summer is truncated into hyper-organized, constantly changing, bite-sized scheduled chunks. It’s a tragedy to squander the promise of summer for continuous activity.
That’s not to say that summer camps are a problem per se. Some summer camps are excellent and life-changing. Summer is a time when other activities are on hold and people can focus exclusively on a sport, hobby, or interest and get together with other enthusiasts. From that perspective, summer camps can be a great opportunity. The difference is pursuing something worthwhile versus filling in the calendar squares of summer with summer camp offerings simply because they must be filled. Additionally, summer camps are not for families to enjoy summer together.
Summering well often means capturing the splendor of sameness, the intoxicating wonder of an ever-present now to be savored. Families who seem to thrive in summer living often have a place that they go, almost always involving water. Whether a family lake house or a local swimming hole, a family camp or one’s own home, having a nexus for the days is a principle of organization quite different from scheduling. The needs of eating and sleeping assert themselves, and the days will have predictable patterns.
For anyone in the Northern Hemisphere, even quite far south, there is an electrifying quality to the longer days. Getting children to bed at a usual time becomes an impossible feat unless you’ve engaged in vigorous early morning fishing or swimming. Rather than futilely police the bedtime hour, relaxing standards and savoring the evening glow produces a hint of a never-ending day. The next day, returning again to the same pond, lake, seaside, or pool, the morning, perhaps already hot as if yesterday’s heat never faded, blazes with the promise of the same joys and frustrations as the day before and the day before that. We still live in time, of course, and there will be delightful differences, like the day you had wild berries or stayed up late to watch fireworks, but it is the days of sameness that give us a hint of eternity.
For the very young, summer stretches ahead like an unending road. Their perception of time is so novel that two or three months is still a very long time. For adults, so often time passes in a bewildering blink, and we think that the way to make time expand is to seek new and different experiences. There is a way of seeking instead to be childlike: captivated by repetition and sameness.
Whether a summer vacation consists of eight weeks at the pool or two weeks in a cabin by the lake, the unrelenting sun lingering in the evening sky, the dull days of boredom becoming long stretches of wonder, and the delights so different from every other season invite meditations on eternity. There may be a moment when you are stunned at the sensory overload, putting a foot down into soft sand, a glimmer of water on the horizon, sheltering pines above. That astonishing presence—sameness and difference all at once—sears itself into memory leaving the conviction that this is a moment to savor for the rest of your life, a hint of an eternity to come.
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