“Mom,” my 10-year-old said to me the other day, “for the first time I know what summer is all about.”
I knew exactly what he meant. And I felt both glad—he should know what summer is all about—and guilty. Did it really have to wait until he was ten—almost eleven?
Well,
yeah, actually, it did. Because what he’s talking about is freedom, and
hanging out with friends, and playing outside and sometimes losing
track of the time and being late for dinner. And until this summer,
that option just wasn’t available.
Until this summer, as a mom
who works full-time for a salary (there is no good buzzword for any of
this. WOHM just doesn’t work for me), I put the kid in camps. I had an
amazingly complicated multicolor calendar representing a
patched-together summer of sports camps and art camps and drama camps
and carpools.
Last summer, I left one week open as an experiment.
It was a week during which I had no business travel plans, and he had
siblings around to keep an eye on him in case I had meetings;
otherwise, I’d be working in my home office. I thought we’d fill it
with playdates. It was a disaster; all his friends were fully booked or
out of town; he was bored and miserable and spent way too much time on
the computer.
This summer, things have changed. For one, he’s going
into sixth grade. That means I regularly leave him home alone for bits
and pieces of time without worrying that he’ll wreck the house or
starve to death. It also means he has a longer leash—he’s now allowed
to go to a nearby playground on his own and to go downtown on occasion
(during daylight and with a friend; and yes, I know not everyone agrees
with this long a leash). (Of course, that usually means a stop on the
Apple store where, again, he spends too much time on the computer.)
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