Around the first week of August, I get a serious case of relaxation anxiety.
This seasonal malady stems from the fact that, no matter how many years I’ve been out of school, the academic calendar has left an indelible imprint on my soul.
Each Memorial Day, I view the summer as ripe with possibilities– a three-month blank check to be filled out any way I choose. But every year at this time, I am yanked back to reality.
The vision of days spent on a front porch, lost in a good book, isn’t my life. Neither is the vision of me languishing on a beach, sugar sand squishing up between my toes.
The one of me and my kids, cycling along America’s bucolic back roads? That’s not remotely close to reality, either–and it hasn’t been for a long time.
The odds of any of this happening are about the same as a first kiss leading to a 50th anniversary party.
Yet, so strong is the pull of these images, so golden are the words “summer afternoon,” that I can’t quite bring myself to give them up. And so the ambitious reading list, the recipe for peach cobbler, the brochures touting bike trips and cottage rentals still sit on my bedstand, a perennial tease, ratcheting up my stress level considerably.
Where does this anxiety come from? Part of it can be chalked up to geography. When you live in the Midwest, soothing temperatures are precious and, like any rare commodity, meant to be hoarded. Part of it is fear that everyone else is living the life of a beer commercial–complete with clambakes, beach volleyball and breathtaking sunsets–while I’m staring into a computer monitor.
Undoubtedly, part of it can be attributed to aging–an acute awareness that there likely are more balmy summer days in the bottom of the hour glass than in the top.
Whatever the reasons, the pressure to wring the most out of the season is palpable, especially if you have children. Instead of savoring these days, though, I shift into high gear: If only I were organized/focused/frenzied enough, I could hold back the boots and gloves and slush; fend off the time when I’m rummaging through backpacks in search of late assignments, teacher’s notes and wayward library books.
By trying to cram an entire season into a weekend to-do list, I sabotage the very serenity I long for.
There must be a better way.
“Today, we worry about time the way people used to worry about money,” said Mary Pipher, psychologist and author. “The issues that overwhelm us on a daily basis are not how to keep a roof over our heads or feed the family. It’s how do I find the time to see a friend whose mother is in the hospital?”
Pipher grew up in Beaver City, Neb. (population 400), during the 1950s. She recalls idyllic summers, lying in freshly mown grass, looking up at the clouds or playing at the municipal swimming pool.
When she regales audiences with stories of small-town girlhood, they invariably tell her they yearn to live in a place like Beaver City. She tells them that while Beaver City is still on the map, it has vanished. Even on the Nebraska prairie, dual-career families are the norm, and residents burrow into their air-conditioned dens, watching ESPN and surfing the Net, not out on their front porch making small talk with neighbors. “Those kind of summers,” Pipher said, “are gone forever.”
She says this not as an indictment but as an undisputable fact of life that nothing short of a revolution will change. Even if you aren’t among the 74 percent of two-income American families with young children; even if you won the lottery, quit your job and simplified your life, all in an effort to re-create a Huck Finn summer–it wouldn’t be the same. In my suburban community–and I suspect in a lot of city neighborhoods too–the back yards are eerily quiet. Few kids today are outside playing sand lot baseball, running through the sprinkler or riding their bikes until the street lights come on.
“It would be awfully lonely . . . everyone is just so programmed today,” said Beth Graue, a professor of education at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
Graue understands the seasonal ambivalence every time she rousts her two boys, ages 5 and 21 months, and takes them to day care on an exquisite morning, but she refuses to pine away for an Eisenhower-era ethos that can’t possibly be met.
“The resources kids can get from good summer recreation and education programs are wonderful,” she said. “They offer an opportunity to experience an incredible array of subjects, from sports camp to science to the arts, that can really enrich kids’ lives in a way that (our generation) didn’t have.”
However, it’s also important to have pockets of time when kids–and adults for that matter–can just hang out. It’s not the scheduling that is detrimental. It’s the scheduling at a breakneck pace “until children are so enriched that they’re pickled,” Graue said.
“The brain is like any other muscle; overwork it and it gets tired and can’t get the benefits.”
Perhaps that is why creative people have always required large expanses of time to do nothing. To just be.
But how to accomplish that? How to recapture those languorous summer days–the ones preserved in the amber of memory–and square it with the realities of modern life?
Piper recommends taking a week and living like a 1950s family. Seek out the wooded tranquility of family camps and state parks, where you don’t use your car until it’s time to leave, “where kids can use their imagination and get a sense of being able to roam freely and safely.”
Jonathan Bloomberg, the father of five boys, emphasizes the importance of taking those very same calendars that hold us hostage and use them as a force for good. At the Bloomberg household, ice shows and DePaul University basketball games are scheduled. As soon as one event is over, he buys tickets for another.
“When you wake up in the morning and ask yourself the question, `What do I have to look forward to today?’ you need to have an answer. . . . It maintains good mental health,” said Bloomberg, chairman of department of psychiatry at Rockford Memorial Hospital.
Reginald Nolin, superintendent of Flossmoor’s schools and also the father of five, recommends identifying the family mission and sticking to it. That way if the goal is “to have more fun” you won’t be tempted to clean out the garage instead of going fishing. “It’s really just another way of saying: `What do we value most?’ It helps screen out distractions and keeps things running smoothly,” he said.
Graue advocates a healthy dose of hooky. Come in late, leave early. Go out for breakfast. Walk to work. Go sleeveless even if your upper arms flap in the wind. Give your child a new set of memories–not less than yours, just different.
