| There’s a quip seasoned parents say to young moms and dads as the travel season begins.
“When you leave town as adults, it’s a vacation,” they say. “Leaving town with kids? That’s a trip.”
The implication, of course, is that it’s hard to relax or lounge by the pool when your children need a snack, or to go to the bathroom, or for their floaties to be adjusted. Poolside readers who used to pack a suitcase full of books before a beach trip may only make it through a few pages once kids are in the picture.
In “When Summer Vacation is Hard,” author and mother Amy Julia Becker reflects on her childhood memories of the beach and how they shaped her expectations for summer trips once she became a mother. After her first beach trip with her young children left her disappointed, Becker had a realization.
“I'm beginning to suspect that what I think of as ‘childhood’ really began around age seven or eight,” she writes. “Which is to say, the age of my oldest child. I've spent almost a decade expecting summertime to feel like my memories, when instead it has often felt like a disappointing set of unmet expectations.”
Becker encourages parents of young children not to make the same mistake she did: expecting summers with tiny children to feel like the magic of catching a lightning bug in a Mason jar. The days for that summertime feeling will come. For now, set your expectations low, as an offering of grace both to your children and to yourself. |
