Summer Holidays: A Parenting Away Game

“Each person deserves a day away in which no problems are confronted, no solutions searched for.”

School’s out for summer. Many dads in the US are already into non-stop parenting, eyeing up the calendar and wondering when they can lovingly launch their kids through the gates once more. My kids break up on Friday—we’re on for our customary eleven weeks without school.

I’m still making my way back to whatever constitutes normal after last month, so am taking the opportunity to update a 2021 essay on summer holidays. This still rings very true. For dads who’ve been here for a while, I imagine your holidays are getting progressively better as your kids become more autonomous and adventurous, so you’ll come to this essay with a different perspective than those summers spent chasing toddlers around a pool.

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Illustration by Tony Johnson

“No man needs a vacation so much as the man who has just had one.”
– Elbert Hubbard

Expectant parents soon tire of hearing the same refrain: "Everything changes when you have kids."

It's typically followed up with proof points: a fresh perspective on what matters in life, a "temporary" halting of your sleep schedule, or the metaphorical multiplying of your heart. But there's another big change that rarely gets talked about—the end of the holiday, or at least the meaning of “holiday” you once knew.

When you finally manage to break through the baby fog and bag yourself a vacation, they're an off-kilter echo of what they once were: like drinking a sugar-free Coca-Cola when you were expecting a full-fat one, or trying on a favourite shirt to realise it has become somewhat tighter as the years have progressed.

In the days Before Children (B.C.), holidays were a time to recharge. A week—maybe more—to detach from the day job, to work through a suitcase full of books and a well-stocked bar, your only hope sun and a western-facing horizon to exhaust your camera roll with a hundred identical sunset shots.

Now? Post-kids? Holidays are something else entirely. No longer a time for rest, at least by the old yardstick. It's a parenting away game: a new location without your home ground advantage; up against formidable opponents out of their regular routine; full-time kid duty, more exhausted than when you were at work, making it up as you go along whilst trying not to scream the entire operation into ruin. It's simultaneously wonderful and terrifying—a microcosm of the parenting experience. It’s a beautiful chaos as you exist atop one another in a tiny hotel room.

Holidays as a memory-making machine

So why do we do it? Part of it is a break from the routine. To get away from the steady drumbeat of parenting: waking them up, making sure they're fed, getting them dressed, escaping the house in a whirlwind of flailing limbs, attempting to hold down an actual job for eight or so hours before collecting them, feeding them, washing them, and finally getting them to bed so you can fall asleep in front of the TV only to have Netflix ridicule you with a “Are you still watching?” before you hit the sack and start all over again the following day.

If it was only about escaping the humdrum, I don't think we'd place so much importance on time off. The key factor—for my money, at least—is the unique ability of the family holiday as a memory maker. I want to invite you to close your eyes—just for a second—and conjure up a great vacation memory from your childhood. It won’t be long before something clear and concrete comes to the fore.

My mind takes me back to the summer of 1992. R.E.M.’s Automatic for the People soundtracked our drive down to the west coast of France, a Eurocamp site on the small island of Île de Ré. We'd driven down in the car from Manchester, our first trip that wasn’t heading to Ireland, so we’d finally be guaranteed—shock, horror—sunshine for August. We'd wake up every morning at the crack of dawn, pick up a fresh baguette (très chic), and return to our lime green tent to devour our petit-déjeuner with lashings of strawberry jam and whatever cheese we were brave enough to try that morning.

It was an eye-opening experience. It was the first time we met children who were noticeably different than we were. We made friends with the Dutch kids next door, amazed at their English. ("They're the same age as us and they speak TWO LANGUAGES!?!") We played board games together, smiling at their pronunciation of "Mono-poly" and how it rhymed with "roly-poly". We stayed up late—at least we thought it was late, though it was only 8.30 pm—running around the campsite with our new European friends, convincing the pool manager to open the piscine one evening, swimming under the light of a full moon in awe of more stars than we'd ever seen. ¹Our parents were sitting nearby, enjoying a drink with new friends, similarly relieved to have a few minutes of peace.

In 2021, our family took the short flight from Barcelona to Mallorca for ten days of island living. For those from the UK you'll have grown up with a murky view of Mallorca: it was primarily known for the resort town of Magaluf, home of the Club 18-30 holiday, marketed as a place for "sun, sand and sex", who ran adverts like this on TV in the 90s.²

Within a day of arriving at our quiet, quaint town in the middle of the island, I realised that the British perception couldn't be more wrong: golden beaches seemed to be at the end of every street, aquamarine seas that seemed Photoshopped, a stunning mountain range on the north side of the island that held its inhabits in a warm embrace. The kids spent at least five hours a day in some kind of water, and I was worried they might grow gills if we stayed any longer. We left with sand in our suitcase and smiles on our faces.

A holiday away from your family

Sure, holidays feel different now. And the family vacation will keep changing as our children get older. But as parents we need to start thinking about time off in two different ways. There's the holiday you take with your kids, the aforementioned memory makers. Then there's the holiday you take from them. This second type of vacation isn't as common, though it needs to be. Every so often, my wife takes the kids to the UK to see her parents whilst I stay in Barcelona. I see friends, catch up on reading, get deep work done, walk in the Collserola, cycle to the beach at dawn and come up with the sun. In a strange way, these weeks are like pre-kid holidays: quiet time, mine to use however I want.

The first time around, I didn't expect one week to be so transformational. I've had time away from my kids before. But it was always for work. This was different. When my family returned, I felt like I'd been away at a spa or meditation retreat—fully recharged, afresh, anew. And so glad to see them again. It happened the year after the pandemic and I realised I’d missed the feeling of missing my kids. We'd been together so long I'd forgotten how that felt.

This is the third time I’ve run this essay at the onset of summer. When it first went out, it was a week late—I was in Manchester, visiting family and travelling solo with two kids whilst my wife had time to herself. And honestly? I absolutely underestimated how relentless that experience would be. It was 2021, and the first time I’d had my two kids alone for longer than one night.³ This newsletter takes me somewhere between 10-15 hours a week. That summer in Manchester, I couldn’t find that time. I was jumping between parenting and a calendar full of meetings, leaning on family members to keep an eye on the kids for half an hour whilst I took a call or composed a reply to an urgent email. My experience that week contributed to my decision to take more time off during the summer. One recurring thought—how do single parents do this constantly whilst holding down a full-time job? By the time my kids went to bed, I wasn't far behind.

American comedy writer Robert Orben once said, "A vacation is having nothing to do and all day to do it." He clearly wasn't on holiday with his kids. But what might it look like if the vacation away from your family became just as normal as the one with them? These two holidays are complimentary and as essential as each other. The time you spend alone makes you a better parent when you're back together. It could be a week, maybe a weekend, or—like Madonna famously said—“just one day out of life”.

What would you do with it?

“Each person deserves a day away in which no problems are confronted, no solutions searched for. Each of us needs to withdraw from the cares which will not withdraw from us.”
― Maya Angelou

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3 things to read this week

1. “Dad Brain is Real, and It’s a Good Thing” by Darby Saxe in The New York Times. Last week was Father’s Day for most of you here, and it came with an influx of excellent essays. First up is this piece in the NYT, where Dr Saxbe, professor of psychology at the University of Southern California, outlines all the latest and greatest peer-reviewed research on how becoming a dad changes our brain and ends with a suggestion that “to most effectively champion families, we must recognize that fatherhood changes men just as it changes women.”

2. “Should We Expect More From Dads?” by Hua Hsu in The New Yorker. Hsu, author of the 2022 memoir Stay True, writes about recognising “the low bar awaiting me as a new father” and being congratulated on achieving the bare minimum—successfully collapsing a stroller or having a clean diaper change to hand—whilst his wife was afforded no such niceties. Taking in highlights from two fatherhood books, he wonders if “the old ways of thinking about being a man no longer hold purchase; they might soon be forgotten.” Weapons-grade TNF catnip.

3. “I’m A Single Mom. This Father’s Day I Celebrate The Bonus Dads” by Ke'Yonna Hall in The Washington Post. Father’s Day can be tough for all kinds of reasons. This piece reflects on the experience of raising a child solo and all the “uncles” who have stepped up to make a difference in the lives of this writer’s two children. This piece pairs wonderfully with a classic 2022 Isaac Fitzgerald: “The World Needs Uncles, Too.”

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TNF: Coming Soon to a City Near You?

GOOD EVENING AMERICA!

A month ago I asked if any of you were interested in bringing The New Fatherhood from a virtual space into a physical one and getting this thing out of your inbox and into a bar/park near you. The response was fantastic—over 400 of you dropped a random animal on the map, and I’ve been able to get a feel for where you all are with some surprising results—who knew there were so many dads with great taste in Denver?

I’ll be rolling out the next stage of the plan over the summer. From previous attempts, I know we need a certain density of dads to make a city work. So consider this your last call to let me know where you are.

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A few bits of paternal mental health

Thanks to Emily Oster and her team for sharing my essay on paternal postnatal depression again for Father’s Day. This year, Slate’s parenting podcast released a special episode on PPND, which continues the essential work of raising awareness on this issue. (Warning: I found the host of this episode slightly irritating, but the discussion with the researcher was well worth staying around for. Skip ahead to 3:30 for the good stuff.)

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Good Dadvice

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Say Hello

That’s it from me for this week. Good to get back into the swing of things. Thank you for the lovely comments on Mum’s eulogy and your messages of love and support.

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Branding by Selman Design. Illustration by Tony Johnson. Survey by Sprig.

1. Listening to Michael Stipe sing “Nightswimming” was never the same, and cueing it up today provides a powerful hit of nostalgia.

2. Can you even imagine that Club 18-30 advert running today? Let alone winning a Gold Lion at Cannes. How times change.

3. How times change, part deux. Earlier this year I did a nine-night solo parenting stint, which was challenging but quite delightful. We had a blast.