As a kid, summers stretched long and leisurely. The time between school years seemed to pass in slow motion. By the time you hit thirty, however, someone removes the plug from the bathtub of time and it goes spiraling rapidly down the drain. So now, summer starts disappearing as soon as it begins.
When I became a teacher, one thing I looked forward to was having summers off to focus on my writing. But now, a decade later, two months pass by in the blink of an eye. Which means, to truly get anything done, I have to be organized. This is not my natural state. I like to think of myself as fairly Zen–usually. Zen means, “sitting around and not doing much of anything and hoping it’ll get done on its own somehow,” right?
This year, my need to be organized was doubly important. The past couple of summers, our son had been in daycare/preschool, so I had the luxury of dropping him off one or two days a week to get some playtime in while I came home and wrote. I say “luxury,” but it was also kind of practical. We paid for the summer (whether we used it or not), so it just made sense to take him in on occasion.
This year, however, his program only ran through the last day I worked. Then he was off for the summer, just like me. Sure, we could’ve enrolled him in a day camp for two months, but that seemed like an unnecessary expense. So it’s been me and him all day. Every day. Week after week.
Which is awesome, actually. He’s a fantastic kid (our babysitter assures us of this) and I know how lucky I am to get to spend this much time with him. I’m seeing more of what he is capable of. I’m able to do more for him. I get to read him to sleep for every afternoon nap, which is one of my favorite activities in the world.
But I’m not getting done all of that stuff that I wanted to do.
This is largely because there’s a big difference between sitting at my desk in mid-June and mapping out a schedule that imagines I will hit the ground running at 6:30 every morning and work at all my various tasks like some wondrous machine that has unlimited reserves of energy, focus, and creativity versus the reality of summer, wherein my body reminds me that I truly need to take full advantage of each and every opportunity to sleep later, given how little sleep I get during the school year. It’s also not terribly realistic to expect that I’ll feel able to spend every second of my son’s nap pounding out page after page of writing when I’ve just spent the morning chasing after a three-and-a-half year old.
On or about June 28th, my itinerary for the summer went something like this:
-Teach the kid to read
-Write 30 pages every day
-Paint the hallway
-Clear out the storage unit
-Lose twenty pounds
I probably should have added “grow to 7 feet tall,” “cure cancer,” and “bring about world peace” for all the chance I had at actually accomplishing everything on my agenda.
Not that the summer has been an abject failure. I made good on my vow to sneak more vegetables into the kid’s diet. I’ve worked pretty steadily with him on writing his alphabet. I did a couple of sit-ups.
I don’t know, maybe I should be more upset with myself at not doing everything I set out to do. Or maybe it’s better to just accept that “haul myself out of the apartment before noon, for crying out loud” is a somewhat laudable goal for a dad on summer vacation.
