Everything Happened | vol. 237
I got that summer camp/summer camp sadness
A few weeks back, I was complaining about the summer camp grind to Meaghan (name drop) including making her, I’m assuming, lose her dinner over the phrase “khaki-colored chowder” to describe summer bathwater, and she asked if Nick would be back soon to contribute his labor to the enterprise.
Lol Nick was actually scheduled to return THE NEXT DAY I’m just a huge baby about a new routine and doing things solo. For the two+ years that Nick was leaving monthly to take care of his dad for up to a week at a time, I was locked in. On top of it. Had to be, basically! I mean, to the extent that cereal for dinner as the rule not the exception is being on top of it (listen, why even VITAMIN-FORTIFY the GRAINS if we’re limiting their consumption to breakfast.) After his dad passed, I let those muscles atrophy, grateful for the opportunity to exhale. So I am now the opposite of locked in. I’m..locked out? Banging on the glass at the church, so to speak.
June 17 was the first day that I’ve ever had to get three kids to three different places for the day, even though the youngest is 2.5 now. Before Jane started pre-K last September, she and Polly were in daycare together. One destination. When she matriculated (lol) daycare, she started riding the bus in the morning with Desi. One destination. Clean! Now that Jane’s a public school kid like her brother, she’s been spat onto the hostile rocky shores that is the American school-age kid summer.
If you are reading this you probably already know that in the U.S., we suspend school for 10-12 weeks in the summer. The solutions for what we are to do with these children in the meantime are as confounding and irrelevant for most families as the agricultural origin of summer break. Most households don’t have an extra caregiver they can pull off the shelf to manage kids over the break. Like the majority of households, Nick and I both have to work, not because it gives us spiritual fulfillment but because the bank still owns most of our house.
Since I have a WFH laptop job, we definitely allow them to rot on the couch while doing a speed run of Netflix for the one-off school closures during the year. I hunch over my little emails in the adjacent room hoping they don’t encounter a jar they can’t open or whatever, and it’s no big deal. (Actually, it’s a relief to not try to put them in whatever little ‘day camps’ pop up around school closures anymore, which they hated going to and which I hated convincing them to go to.)
So it’s a patchwork of summer day camps for the middle class American family then, lotteried into by frenzied parents (jk it’s moms) in fucking January, hundreds of dollars per week per kid for the opportunity to provide lunch, two snacks, and transportation both ways to a camp that ends for the day at, inexplicably, 3 p.m.
The last time I wrote about this (Summer is Jail), someone emailed me that they had to unsubscribe because they couldn’t take more of my descriptions of “how much it sucks to have three children.” Huh. I figured it was pretty clear that I love having three children?? It was my dream?? I am moved on a daily basis that they even exist, that Nick and I lassoed them down from the celestial plane and now they walk among us, demanding “mo’ cheese” or explaining Minecraft mods?? I’m just disappointed that the systems meant to support families are the Bluesmobile at the end of the movie and we’re supposed to pretend it’s not falling apart as we drive it. And I don’t mind saying so.
I appreciated Edan Lepucki’s recent newsletter on divesting from what she calls the “summer camp industrial complex.” Her family crunched the numbers on three kids, three schedules, three months of camp and decided that she would take a hiatus from her full-time freelance work and BE the summer childcare this year.
And like, damn. I wish I could!!!
There was a time when I would have sold buckets of plasma to afford as much childcare as possible because putting in full-time hours with babies and toddlers absolutely wrings the life out of you. But now that my big kids are school-age, hanging out with them is not as “adorable” or “sweet” as it used to be, however it is way more straight-forwardly fun. I would sort of love to bop around with them for the summer, going on hikes, chilling at the pool, tie-dying shirts and shit. I agree divestment is an intriguing solution, but for whom is it really possible?
Recently a Badlantic headline was following me around IG and the gist was like, “What’s the deal with summer day camp? Why can’t kids just hang out? Modern parents fear their children being underscheduled!!!”
Listen, I didn’t click and I can’t even find it to reference it. But in my fan fiction version of how this article came to be, a boomer writer is annoyed that his children and grandchildren’s summer routine is seemingly being held captive by nonrefundable camps that were booked six months ago, preventing said boomer writer from forcing everyone to convene at the family vacation home during the week of his choosing.
Interesting theory. Wish you had talked to one (1) parent about their motivations behind summer camp enrollment.
Parents have
to
work?????
Wages
have not
kept up with
inflation???
Our infrastructure is
built for cars
not people???
Most kids need a
parent to drive them to
the house of any of their friends??
It reminds me of those cursed Twitter threads during the formula shortage in 2021, when geniuses would suggest that parents struggling to find formula should just breastfeed. This formula business makes it so complicated!!!!
Would personally love to underschedule my children but until they can walk to a safe and engaging third space or we can afford our life on one income, I will be doing the cursed summer camp registration dance steps alongside my peers, a line dance of neoliberal dread????? Clap, stomp, turn and face front????
Both Jane and Desi love school and are lukewarm to hateful re: camp. Per my gcal, there are 6 weeks left until my own little individualist hack of taking them to Ohio for two weeks of free grandparent care while I work remotely from my hometown and try not to lose my shit. And 8 weeks until school starts again and we can all loosen our sphincters.
Probably someone smarter than me has proposed an equitable systemic solution to the problem, and probably other countries already have a tidy system we could attempt to replicate. I’m too tired to do the research though, because I had to pack three dumb little lunches today.
yr mate,
Evie
###
FACT CHECK: shrewd reader pointed out that this was actually in the New Yorker and was written by a 44-year-old. Here is a baffling quote:
"Summer-camp mania feels, instead, like a much more typical corrosion of modern life. Although many of us have stopped believing the myths that places like TIP and the bucolic summer camp tell us about the competition our children will face, we cannot stop sending our kids to them because we cannot conceive of an unscheduled moment. Nor can we explain why things have to be this way. This is just how kids grow up now, and we feel powerless to find an alternative because we cannot take the week off to even figure out what it might be."
I cannot emphasize enough how much I am not trying to engineer my kids' social mobility by putting them in Y camp.
Here is the full piece: https://www.newyorker.com/news/fault-lines/summer-camp-and-parenting-panics
Very careless conflation of traditional sleepaway camps, which are often about shoring up social class, and summer day camp.
I am baffled that you have had not one, but at least two people give you a sanctimonious reason why they unsubscribed, rather than just unsubscribing and moving on. Don't folks know that you can just not read a thing if it isn't your bag??