The Illusion of Summer

Hello August, can you hear me?

The common Spanish greeting the first week of September is “¿Qué tal las vacaciones?” How were your holidays? Because you can always safely assume a vacation has taken place. If you’ve ever spent August in southern Europe, you know the drill: shutters down, whole towns half-asleep, nothing open during what should be peak tourist season. That’s because major parts of the Mediterranean historically close for weeks during August. I remember working in a role in London, where I partnered up with an Italian marketing manager who told me, “We have to sign this off by 31 July, otherwise it will wait until September.” And she wasn’t kidding. Companies close down—if not en masse, then at least in sync—allowing residents to take advantage of (and, increasingly, shelter from) the heights of summer.

This newsletter always closes up in August. But normally, the blinds come down with a little more grace, as we discuss the importance of taking time to recharge. This year didn’t go according to plan. Due to a perfect storm of family commitments, consulting projects that overran, and a deadline for rewrites on the book, I ended up spending the last few months shielding from the sun and staring into my laptop. The kids go back to school on Monday, which will feel like a holiday of sorts. I spent some time during a short staycation—cut shorter due to my grossly underestimating the amount of time it would take to compile exactly two hundred non-fiction endnotes in the Chicago style—that had me thinking about how my parents once managed it. It brought back to mind this old essay from 2021: “A Parenting Away Game”, which I’ve updated for this week, for me and every other parent who found summer tougher than expected.

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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 one constant refrain: “Everything changes when you have kids.”

It’s normally backed by a data point, or irrefutable vibe shift: a new perspective on what matters in life, a hopefully temporary (hah!) disruption in your sleep schedule, or the metaphorical multiplying of your heart. However, there’s a change that rarely gets discussed: the end of the holiday, at least as you knew it.

When you finally manage to break through the baby fog and get away, you’ll find something different; an off-kilter echo of what holidays once were—like accidentally picking up a sugar-free Coke, or buttoning up an old shirt and realising it doesn’t fit like it once did. Holidays B.C. (Before Children) were a time to recharge. A week—maybe more—to detach from the day job, to work your way through a suitcase full of books and a well-stocked bar. A simpler time, when all you hoped for was ample sun and a west-facing horizon to exhaust your iCloud storage with a hundred more sunsets.

Post-kids? Holidays take on another form. Something else entirely. No longer a time for rest, at least by the old yardstick. They’re a parenting away game: you’re in unfamiliar territory, without your home-ground advantage; up against formidable opponents out of their regular routine; on full-time duty, more exhausted than you were back in the office, making it up as you go along. It’s simultaneously wonderful and terrifying—a microcosm of the parenting experience all at once, a beautiful chaos, an abundance of emotions, as you live, sweatier than ever, atop of one another in a hotel room.

Holidays as a memory-making machine

So why do we do it? Part of it is a break from the routine. Our desire to get away from the steady drumbeat of parenting: waking them up, making sure they’re fed, getting them dressed, exiting the house in a whirlwind of flailing limbs and then attempting to manage all your own shit during a full day of work, before you collect them, try your best to feed them, wash them and get them to bed, only to fall asleep in front of the TV and have Netflix ridicule you by asking “Are you still watching?” before you throw yourself onto your mattress and start it all again tomorrow.

But if getting away was only about escaping the humdrum, would we place so much importance on time off? The key reason we do it—for my money, at least—is the unique ability of the family holiday as a memory maker. If I ask you to think about a memorable vacation from your own childhood, I’m sure it won’t be long before something clear and concrete comes to the fore.

My mind takes me back to sometime around 1991. Eurocamp on Île de Ré, a small island off the west coast of France. We’d driven down in the car from Manchester, our first trip that wasn’t Ireland-bound. We’d wake up at the crack of dawn, pick up a fresh baguette (très chic), take it back to our lime-green tent, and devour it for breakfast with heaps of strawberry jam and whatever cheese we were brave enough to try that day. It was eye-opening. It felt like the first time we met other children who weren’t like us. It was a feeling that would come back, many years later, sitting with my children as we watched Bluey befriend Jean-Luc. Except these kids weren’t French—they were Dutch, and they spoke better English than we did. I remember thinking, “They’re the same age as me and they speak TWO LANGUAGES!” We spent ten days running around the campsite during the day, and playing board games during the evening, smiling at their pronunciation of “Mono-poly.” We stayed up late (at least we thought it was back then; it was probably not even 8.30 pm), one night convincing the pool manager to re-open la piscine so we could swim under the light of a full moon, in awe of more stars than our city eyes had ever seen, our parents enjoying a drink or two on a table nearby with other parents who were similarly relieved to have a few minutes’ peace to themselves.

A holiday away from your family

Sure, holidays feel different now. And the family vacation will continue to change, as our children get older, until the day when they’ll be heading away on a holiday of their own. But as parents, we need to start thinking about our time off in two different ways. There’s the holiday you take with your kids, the aforementioned memory makers. But then there’s the holiday you take from them. This second type of vacation isn’t as common, though it needs to be. Yes, I spent two weeks in France with my family that summer, but the reason it was so revelatory is that, up until then, summer holidays had meant running around the streets in a small town in Northern Ireland, staying with our grandma for the best part of July and August, whilst our parents worked.

Today, families with both parents employed year-round are increasingly becoming the norm—my wonderful Granny Mo, who looked after us for six weeks of the year, every year, was just ahead of the curve. Sure, my parents worked over the summer. But they were working freed from the responsibility of parenting. And I’m sure a few weeks of child-free time does wonders for the soul (and your marriage). Instead, I spent those months juggling being a parent with calendars chock-full of meetings; first missing, then eventually hitting the second deadline for my revised manuscript, watching two children fighting for my attention—and sometimes do it by fighting each other; and leaning on family to keep an eye on my kids whilst I spent an afternoon to go to a local co-working space, or to hide in a room as I jumped on “just one last call” for 30 minutes. One recurring thought of the last few months: how in the hell do single parents with a full-time job manage this? I spent most of the summer heading to bed within an hour after finally convincing my kids to hit the hay. Robert Orben once said, “A vacation is having nothing to do and all day to do it.” He clearly wasn’t on a weeklong holiday with his family.

But here’s the rub. A good friend sent me a message in the middle of August: “How was your summer. Send me some photos.” Immediately my mind went to how tough things had been. But, scrolling through my camera roll, forced to consider the carefully selected highlights of the last three months, things didn’t look all that bad. We spent time a lot of time on the water, trying not to fall in it, with “Paddy,” our new stand-up paddleboard. My sisters and I got all our families together for the first time in a long time (outside of congregating to bury someone). I shed a tear (or eleven) with good friends watching “The Visitors” at SFMOMA, during a moment in history when the world needs to fall into its feminine ways more than ever. That afternoon, I took a Waymo home, which was the most impressed I’ve been by a piece of technology since my 33.6k modem noisily attached itself to the internet for the first time. We whooped and hollered as we watched the global Sumud flotilla leave Barcelona port last weekend—dozens of boats bound for Gaza, heading out to break through the boat barricade. In a summer where flags were used across England to sow division, it was impossible not to feel overwhelmed with emotion seeing so many Irish flags raised across the fleet.

So, how was my holiday? Before my friend asked to see my photos, I might have told you, “I haven’t really had one.” But summer was there, outside the window, every day. It was messy and memorable. I got to spend time with some of my favourite people in the world, family and friends who mean the world. It might not have been the best summer on record. But—spoiler alert—there’s another one around the corner. Another bite at the apple. And another chance to get it right.

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Good Dadvice

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That’s all I’ve got in the tank this week. Next week I’ll be back with a new essay and an all-new bunch of links. How was it for you?

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