No. It is the summer vacation she dreads. Her children are involved in so many activities, she fears for her health. She is not overstating the fact. Although the lilacs have just bloomed, her family’s agenda is set, and she recites it from memory, sounding like a field marshal preparing for this seasonal enemy. The military analogy is too close for comfort; her summer sounds like a 10-week stay at Camp Lejeune.
When the mother begins a perplexed reminiscence of last summer, I cannot tell if she is gloating or complaining. Her “Bo Jackson of a son,” 10, would have to leave his swim meets early to change into his baseball uniform, arrive just before the national anthem and pitch no-hitters (7-0 for the season).
This on top of the lessons and tutorials. She has two children, both of whom have been labeled gifted and talented by the school system, and after all, she can’t very well let them lose those skills over the summer. Throwing a sneaky left jab, she tells me to count my blessings that my children are in regular classes. Like a not-so-bright prizefighter who didn’t see it coming, I smile.
As usual, I’m left with the uncomfortable feeling that I am in the presence of a parent who sacrifices her life for her kids. My neighborhood is replete with them, parents secure in their role of molding champions for the world, whose bumper stickers proudly herald MOM’S TAXI, whose conversations never stray from progeny. Realizing I am not in her league, I go to end our conversation, when she deftly turns and asks, “So, what are you going to do to supplement summer?”
Supplement summer. I thought it an inspired phrase–two words that pretty much sum up the new mathematical language of parenting in the ’90s. Supplementing summer is code. Translation: “Tuition is paid and car pools have been formed. My kid will spend July and August immersed in gymnastics, pottery, piano, basketball, lacrosse camp and flute. There, that’s six. I’m busy, they’re busy, we’re all incredibly busy, but never too busy to tell people just how busy we are.”
Wouldn’t you know it. Just when the Woodstock Generation begins to talk about somebody other than ourselves, the bad news is we can’t stop talking about our kids. Their accomplishments, their trophies, theirs. We decorate refrigerators with schedules, compose and photocopy holiday letters to our friends telling them, in eerie detail, exactly how successful (and did we mention busy.?) our children are. Instead of being embarrassed by this obsession to have every waking moment of their lives filled with a skill acquisition, we brag about it. The litmus test of parenting is being on the run.
What ever happened to those young adults who sat around in the ’60s and preached about how we’d never push our children? We’d name our babies after constellations and spices. Man, those kids would be free. Twenty years later and those kids are spending those lazy, hazy days in computer day camps.
The term “late bloomer” has been extinguished from our lexicon. We figure if Joshua Bell can do justice to the Brandenburg Concerti at the age of 10, why not my kid? Gabriela Sabatini has nothing on my daughter that intensive tennis camp might uncover. If my child “fails” at violin or tennis, there are plenty of other musical instruments and sports.
It’s the failing part that’s troublesome. Children shouldn’t be washouts at 13. Nor should a child be programmed to be a champion if her arms and legs say second string. What’s so bad about dancing in the chorus? Or getting B’s in school? Or being a kid–a real kid, not a small adult?
A bookmark came home from school with my daughter today. For such a small item, it may be the most telling piece of literature about this decade’s children I’ve ever seen. It made me believe that for a generation hell-bent on not ending up like our parents, we missed the mark when it came our turn to be the grown-ups. We’ve managed to create iron-clad itineraries through which we impel our kids-no hang time-but a gaping hole in the heart of it all.
Promoting a new homework-hot-line number in bold print, the bookmark asks children, “Are you lonely?” If the answer is yes, there is a person on the other end of the receiver who will talk to you. Until 6 p.m.
In the summers of my childhood, it is the late-August afternoons I remember most clearly. Thirty years later, whenever I smell salt air or eat a peach, I still taste the delicious slowness of those days leading into September.
We spent summer vacation going to the beach, playing tag and trapping unsuspecting, slow-moving lightning bugs in jars when it got dark. My parents took us on a yearly vacation in August to (we now kid them) every historical site on the Eastern Seaboard. We alternately asked, “Are we there yet?” and “Why do we have to look at this stuff?”
Even on our best days, my parents and brothers and I would not have been mistaken for the Cleaver family. There were no French lessons. I will never play first violin nor dance “Swan Lake.” A true late bloomer, I learned those things I do well long after the seeds had been planted by quiet afternoons, laughter and lazy days.
Mine was an unremarkable childhood. Summer didn’t kill us, and I never felt lonely.
