Ice-Cream | I Scream
When summer planning, summer magic, summer everything falls to you.
As my daughter counts the days down to summer with delight, I count them down with some kind of dread. In her mind there are open days, filled with adventures and treats. In mine, there’s balancing more and more and more, and working out how to do so from a suitcase or an airbnb cooker or a house of people coming and going. She’s relieved there's no schedule, no leaving the house at 7.20am everyday, no hours ahead scheduled. I’m more imagining being thrown by the fluidity of time and ever longer bedtimes.
If Scrooge existed in the summer, who would it be? Answer on a postcard preferably.
And yet summer is my favourite month. I yearn for long light filled days as I endure the winter months and call them hygge. I love the feeling of finding a new place, getting lost a little, knowing that our discoveries have been found by others thousands of times before. I love that people smile more and that there’s an uplift in our collective mood, there’s almost joy coming into this greyed out nation in long floaty dresses and exposed knees.
But I also know that the summer holidays mean less WhatsApp messages around lost uniform and more “but I’m bored.” It’s not the same, it’s different, and it’s also a lot.
Mums often carry the weight of summer, not just in the passports and wipes, but the emotional luggage. The guilt that maybe the summer we managed to pull off wasn’t quite as fancy as the one we see scrolling our socials. The frustrations of still trying to meet work deadlines while being acutely aware that there are only so many summers and we need to make the most of absolutely every one. The sadness, maybe even bittersweetness, of remembering our own childhood summers as we take a photo of our kids in the exact same spot where we were told to say “cheese” for the camera.
I write this in a moment that the country is baking, the shorts are out, and the tracks are buckling. There’s a hint of what’s to come. Schools have been cancelled or have shortened days where I live, and so I tick two more days off my time and my daughter adds two more to hers. The balance sheet is decorated with scratch and sniff stickers and I can’t help but press my nose to them.
I know this pre-summer feeling acutely. I know that it arrives in a panic right around now, just at the moment that there are teacher gift emails sprinkling my messages and activities week kit lists that feel impossibly long and all too easy to figure out via amazon. We’re so close to the end of a year, and I know what she means about the relief in that. But it all speeds up a little right now, like the half-life of schools just runs away with itself.
I’ve come to learn that summer takes planning that goes beyond flights and snacks. It’s also planning how we do want to show up in it. What’s a more helpful mindset? What do we want to do and what do we absolutely not? It’s having a conversation with a partner saying those three fiction books I bought at the airport, I will absolutely read all of them by the pool before we return home. It’s accepting that picnic teas are the best kind of dinners and outside movie nights with thrown together sheets are the stuff of memories too. That it’s ok if the twelve family members we’re on holiday have different ideas about what an acceptable wake up time is and the number of visits to a french supermarket.
Ok, I’d love to hear what’s a memory you do want to make this summer? And one truly impossible, ridiculous standard/ assumption/ expectation you want to let go off even before it’s begun.
x Claire
P.S. How do you find the summer months? If you want to vent/ explore/ confide/ plan before, during and even after then join The Wellery right now as we explore what summer wellbeing is. I thought we’d make our next community meet-up all about the ice-creams and the I Screams of the summer season.
Wellery Monthly Meet-up | Mapping Your Summer Feelings
Wednesday 15th July, 7pm to 8pm
We’re keeping it light this summer. So bring your brightest pens and nicest paper and come and make a Summer Feelings Constellation with me. We’ll be putting all your feelings onto the page.
Summer can start to feel stressful like it’s even more difficult to maintain our wellbeing. The weeks that stretch ahead are even more of a juggling act. We can start to notice conflicted emotions around it: not just of joy and anticipation, but resentment (when you’re partner finishes all the books he’s brought on holiday and you’re on page 36 of your first one), regret (of the echoes of those past summers), and even frustration (when it all just gets too much).
Let’s get them out of you now, so we can invite in the summer feelings we do want to have.
The Zoom Link to Register will go out to out to paid subscribers in our chat.
P.S. Also to US readers (or other countries where you have different dates for summer holidays) I know this whole thing is completely ridiculous as you are weeks in so maybe you offer as the seasoned travellers that you now are your most favourite summer survival strategy or anti-summer bucket list item. Here’s a gift of one from a previous year.
