How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour and with that one is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days.     -Annie Dillard

It’s happening again.

It started in late May, and it continues to roll out across my social media feeds through the first weeks of and into the middle of June: the shriek of panic or lament that school is out for the summer.

This doesn’t come from the students, of course. The students are thrilled to be cut loose from the constraints of the school year’s 180 days.

No, the cry comes– to a person– from their mothers, women who work full-time, part-time, away from or at home, mothers who meet the many demands on their lives–in one way or another–in part because their children are in school.

Until they aren’t.

Yes, the school year has ended, and suddenly these children are not neatly and appropriately occupied for six to eight hours a day and are instead unavoidably At Home.

The heart of the maternal need is a simple question: What to do? 

And this blog post intends to answer it.

Or, anyway, to offer something–just a little something–that could potentially be helpful. 

***

First, an acknowledgement:  It might be easy for someone standing on the outside to throw a little shade on these lamenting mothers (“Don’t you want to be with your children?” they may ask, and maybe–can you tell?–they are even snide about it). Because mothers are supposed to revel in motherhood. They are supposed to preside over the lives of their children unruffled and wise, smiling warm and unwavering smiles. They are not, in fact, meant to be people so much as mothers–which is an oxymoronic expectation, but I digress.

Those smug assumptions about motherhood come from people who have never been mothers or who have never observed motherhood closely– or who, having long ago released their now-grown children into the world, remember all of it with an affectionate and overblown fondness that has obliterated the harder kernels of memory.

Parenting is hard. That’s a fact.

And children, newly released from the bonds of school, brimming with energetic demands or rendered dissatisfied and fractious by their freedom, can be a challenge. Even to themselves.

***

So here, another acknowledgement: Children are meant to be enjoyed. I will amplify this and go so far as to say that people are meant to be enjoyed, that beyond meeting the demands of survival (that whole food, clothing, shelter bit), enjoyment is The Thing. Enjoying someone is embodied love: it is saying and showing that the other is terrifically worthwhile.

We should do this for one another, and parents should most absolutely definitely do this for their children.

***

Yet another acknowledgement: No one is enjoyable all the time. And a child, newly released from the fetters of the school’s calendar year, might be uniquely un-enjoyable

• because he is suddenly released from the fetters of the school’s calendar year (and sad/moody/disgruntled about it). (No, seriously, that can happen).
• because she is overwhelmed by the space of days and the newborn freedom to do what she chooses.
• because they are, quite simply, bored.

Children ought to be enjoyed–as ought all people. But with children the stakes are high because they won’t be children long, and so we feel an urgency to enjoy them and a wretched guilt when we can’t.

The thing is (see above), no one is enjoyable all of the time. At the end of the day, children are people.

As are their parents.

***

In light of all this, I have an encouragement for families and especially for the Mother of the Summertime Lament:

Create (and keep) a routine.

I know, I know. That sounds so boring. And after all of this build-up, surely I could have something a bit more thrilling in mind.

But hear me out.

A routine offers structure and predictability–and these things are unbelievably helpful to children. And their parents.

Need proof? Think of Mr. Rogers, who is currently if belatedly enjoying a new appreciation of his work. How did he begin Every Single Episode? With a predictable routine: changing work-shoes and jacket for sneakers and sweater–signs that he was at leisure with the children, giving them his undivided attention. He finished the program the same way, in reverse. And although I was always sorry to see him make his way to that coat closet, he was also meeting my expectations.

For a child, predictably met expectations create a sense of security.

A secure child is a (more) content child.

And a content child is always (far) easier to enjoy.

***

Beyond contentment, routines bring other gifts. For example, they enable better supervision over the use of screens.

Screens, the bedeviling temptation of the summer holiday. They pacify children–until they don’t. I’m sure there are all kinds of studies about screens and boredom and the surprisingly heightened dissatisfaction they

engender as soon as the screen goes off.

Without going into all of that, I think a parent’s best ally when confronting screen use is to limit it, and to be the boss of it, because children typically lack the judgment and control that is helpful to do the same.

With a routine, screen time can just fall into place. As in

• we always have an hour of screen-time as soon as we wake up, or
• we never have an hour of screen-time until we’ve had breakfast or
• we’ve made our beds and
• done the chores for the day or
• something like that.

See? You decide. You be the boss. Your children will be happier that way.

Routines also enable those pesky negotiable things like

• play-dates
• appointments
• outings
• projects

When my children were in middle-to-late grade-school and early-middle-school and I was teaching full-time, our summertime days quickly began to fill up. My children were going in three different directions (because I have three children), and as a result, so was I. Invariably, some-two of them had play-dates on one day and another had play-dates on three other days, and before I knew it, I was never seeing all three of them together.

So I established a routine: Wednesdays were “Mom-days.” They could have play-dates on any other day of the week, but Wednesdays were reserved for the four of us. Then I pulled out my laptop and found Interesting Things To Do all over our town, and I planned accordingly.

Sometimes we just went to the pool. Sometimes we visited a heretofore un-visited historic site.  The library. The museum. The movie-in-the-middle-of-a-summer-afternoon-at-home-and-it-wasn’t-even-raining. Whatever it was we did, that was our day to do it.

It gave them time to do their things, and it gave me time with them together.

I’m pretty sure none of us regrets it.

***

Another perfectly splendid thing about a routine is that it can incorporate things that need to happen.

Example? Summertime assignments, reading or otherwise. I have a daughter in high school, and every summer it seems she has some assignment or two that she is expected to complete during the summer months.

We all know how this can go. Summer brings its own demands and pleasures, and it’s easy to continually push deadlines away in favor of fun. The problem can be that August arrives long before you expected (have you noticed how that happens?), and suddenly everyone is miserable because the workload is too heavy compressed into that time-frame, and the mother IS the heavy, trying to ensure the work gets done.

Everyone is unhappy.

Enter the routine. “We” work on it every Monday afternoon for two hours. Or Mondays and Wednesdays for one hour. Whatever works. The project gets underway (which also magically often makes the assignment less daunting) and then it gets underway some more, and it’s well in hand–even finished–at the end of July.

***

Routines can also meet the need for REST.

What’s that?

You know. Remember? Peace and quiet. An hour or two during which Mom can get some work done or even think her own thoughts for a space.

When my children were young, we had a resting time every single afternoon. Sometimes they had to read on their beds; sometimes they were allowed to play quietly in their rooms. But the quiet and solitude were sacrosanct. And also tremendously helpful. I can’t recommend it enough.

***

I know, I know. Not everyone is a “routine” kind of gal, and that is completely fair. But the beauty of a routine is that it’s a general expectation. You can keep it as carefully or loosely as you choose.

You might be a dawn-to-dusk planner. You may be a one-day-a-week planner. You may need your kids to Just Be Still for an hour every afternoon. So build a routine around those needs and then gently and oh-so-lovingly Stick To It.

Your children will learn to expect the pattern and then– guess what??– you have yourself a routine.

***

Here’s the thing: whether you are a routine-sort of person or not, you want to enjoy your children. And you are also a person, which means limited energy, limited perspective, and demands on your life that may or may not include, be enhanced by, or involve your children.

At the same time, you know what’s coming: Your children are growing up fast. You’ve been observing this already out of the corner of your eye. You know that the days– even the ones that creep by in the present– are going.

So consider building yourself a little schedule. Decide what you and your children need in order for you to have a healthy summer together. Make a routine out of those things you need, want, and hope for.

That routine will be “a net for catching days”–these fleeting days of summer that will be over before you know it. Yes, you can be sure that your summer will slip by, but maybe it will do so while you enjoy it. And your children.

The post How We Spend Our Days appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

When Will was only four years old I read him Farmer Boy; this is the third in the eponymous Little House series penned by the real Laura Ingalls Wilder. And recently, I’ve begun reading Little House in the Big Woods to Emma, delighting in the familiar episodes and illustrations, marveling over the earnest hard work of those settlers’ lives, admiring the clean simplicity of Ms. Wilder’s prose.

It was an impulse buy there at the end of a harried pre-Christmas trip to the store: I bought Emma Grace the first season of Little House on the Prairie: six discs and more than fifteen episodes in all, starting with the Very First One, in which the Ingalls family comes to Walnut Grove. Emma Grace seemed pleased enough with the gift, but she didn’t know, of course, what she was getting into.

I did.

Oh, how familiar it all is! The cheerful music held down by an electric base playing something out of The Brady Bunch , and here come Laura and Mary and Baby Carrie, running down a grass-covered hillside in a landscape that looks nothing like Minnesota. And there’s Ma smiling in her indulgent and restrained way, and there’s Pa, looking merry, the apples of his cheeks aglow. Such Goodness is here, such Virtue. The values of church and the values of home and the values of an honest apology. In episode after episode we are reminded of the meaning of community or the importance of obedience, the wisdom of our elders and the benefits (they are legion) of Holding One’s Tongue.

Of course I find that my suspension of disbelief shows the wear and tear of intervening decades of irony: Who are they kidding? This is So Obviously Not Minnesota! I’d recognize that California landscape anywhere. And Mary’s hair. Really? She looks as if she plays an afternoon role at the aforementioned Brady Bunch set, stringy locks replete with uneven trim. She could trade her pinafore for a mini-skirt and voila!

But no. No. Those thoughts, while present, scarcely have time to register. I’m drawn in; I’m too far gone. Nellie Olsen is Just So Mean, and Miss Beedle is Just So Gentle. Laura and Mary in their plain, homemade dresses represent all that is Good and Right and True and resistant to the Abercrombie and Fitches and Uggs of the world. Now Ma is scolding Pa for plowing the field on a Sunday and Laura is crying because she broke Her Only Doll (imagine!). The episode we watched tonight really moved me: Pa was headed out to the barn to shoot Jack (Jack!) because he was sure he was rabid and everyone in the house was waiting for Laura to show signs of rabies, too, because they were bitten by the very same racoon, don’t you know. And my children were devasted at the thought that Jack would die (“He won’t die, will he, Mom? He can’t die, right? Because he’s one of the Main Characters!”), and I was moved (so deeply) at the thought of waiting (only waiting) to find out if your child had rabies and knowing (how awful) that, if she did, there was Nothing Anyone Could Do.

And then (and this is why we watched, isn’t it?), it was all made Beautifully Right in the end. Jack did not die. And neither, of course, did Laura.

That, my friends, is Good Television.

My children are really enjoying it. What a delight! to pass on to them something that was a mainstay of my childhood, and to watch them be drawn to it in the same way.

My mother-in-law suggested, when I told her I’d bought this, that I’d really bought it for myself, but I didn’t. I really and truly bought it for Emma. I’m so glad she likes it.

Nonetheless. I’ve noticed something this time, something I never noticed before when, at ten or eleven or twelve years old, I switched on the television at 8 p.m. on a Monday night. I don’t think I could have noticed it then; I think it was Beyond Me. But it is Not Beyond Me Now. No.

I’ve seen it. I’ve noticed. When in the first episode Doc Baker had to wrap his chest because he broke his ribs falling from that giant tree that he climbed to fetch the girls’ kite. When in tonight’s episode he went out to the barn in the dead of the night in only his breeches and suspenders. It was a fact that I really wasn’t alive to “back in the day,” as they say. Michael Landon is- er, was- only two years older than my father, after all.

But here’s the Truth of the matter, O Reader, and I never appreciated it before in all my years of Little House viewing: Michael Landon was Hot.

There it is. It’s out there. I’ve said it.

Maybe it’s just that I’m older now, so that fathers of youngish children appeal to me. Maybe it’s that I’ve moved (far) past the appeal of immature youths. Or maybe it’s just one of those things that I couldn’t have known before.

Well, I know it now. Yes, I do.

The post Who Knew? appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.