We are only about a week from my mid-summer. It is not the real middle of the summer and not the summer solstice, but the time when I have been away from school for the same amount of time as I have until school starts: the middle of summer break.
The middle is when the bell goes off: summer is now “ending” and school is “around the corner.” The back to school sales started immediately after July 4th, and I have learned to ignore them. But they are like that gnat buzzing around my ear.
I have two opposite responses to midsummer. I want to savor summer. I want to do all the things that I have not yet done. Yet, the urge to start to prepare for school grows more powerful the second half of the summer. I have done school planning throughout the summer, but at this time, I become more critical of myself and I start to feel as though I haven’t done enough. I look at my list of school tasks and beat myself up. I have been wasting my summer! What have I done with this time?
School is not the only clock ticking in my head. I am hyper aware that my family and I are experiencing a “last.” This is most likely the last summer that my entire family will be home together over the summer. My daughter just finished college and will be starting graduate school. My son will be a senior in high school. Next summer, one will be at grad school far away, and the other will be getting ready to leave for college. After that, our paths diverge.
This doesn’t mean that we won’t have vacations and holidays together. However, the odds of having anything close to a summer like this again are very slim. And it is almost over!
So I am trying to make this summer move in slow motion. I want to savor being together and not anticipate being apart. Even the negotiations about who gets a car to drive are making me melancholy. I don’t want to do school work, but I know if I don’t, I will pay for it later. Maybe that is a price worth paying.
The rest of my family seems keenly aware of this landmark as well. My daughter is spending tons of time with her grandparents. They aren’t in the same place with my son as they are with my daughter – and that is okay. He doesn’t feel slighted, but I wonder if he’ll get a similar opportunity.
We aren’t sitting around staring at each other. Both of my children have jobs. My wife and I are busy doing all those things that we cannot get to during the school year. I am busy, and fighting that busyness.
Summer is about to wane. My family’s life is at a turning point, too. It is going to take more than a few hundred words here or a few months of summer for me to adapt to our new world. It is not that I am not ready for it; it is that I am a little scared it isn’t going to be as nice as the brief interlude of this wonderful summer.
Next year and next summer will not be like this –and it is half over. Time to stop whining and savor this super summer while it is here.
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