As an 11-month employee at a high school, I get one full blissful month off every summer, from June 15 until July 15. And every year, I head into that month with grand visions. Lazy mornings sipping iced coffee on the porch! Meaningful family time where we all put down our respective screens! A picnic for just my husband and me by Lake Pontchartrain with really good cheese and moderately good wine! Maybe even a DIY home improvement project or two! But here we are, July already, and I’ve come to accept the truth: Summer with two teenage girls at home is less about “unplugging” and “unwinding” and “reconnecting” and more about refereeing fights over who stole whose hoodie and a trying to stay on top of a Google calendar that somehow still is overbooked even when I am free of work obligations.
My younger daughter, Georgia, 13, is spending her days as a counselor-in-training at a local summer camp. She’s not really a camper and not really a counselor – just as she is in real life, she is in an awkward “in between” stage. She comes home sunburned in weird patterns where she didn’t apply enough sunscreen, asking if she can quit or at least just take one mental health day. “Kids are hard, Mom,” she whines at me, and then asks me why I can’t stop laughing.
My older daughter, Rowan, 18, is also in an awkward in-between stage: pre-college limbo. She graduated in May and is heading to New York for college in August, which means we are currently suspended in what feels like an endless transitionary period: We are both anxious and excited about the next phase; we are both constantly annoyed with each other and yet deeply attached to each other; and we can’t quite seem to strike the right balance for how independent she can be. “I know you’ll be on your own in two months,” I snapped at her when she forgot to check in with me one night, “but right now, young lady, you’re still living in my house.” And then I wondered how I became such a freaking mom! Rowan alternates between crying over how much she will miss me and hating me for breathing too loudly, and she also swings back and forth between being wildly sentimental about things like “the breakfast nook” and “the Fly” and “coconut sno-balls” and wanting to firebomb the entire city of New Orleans for how dysfunctional it is. (To be fair, I think many residents swing back and forth on the same pendulum.)
And me? I’m over here thinking, “Didn’t we just finish school?” while also realizing we’re now closer to starting school. All those summer plans – organize the upstairs closet, go berry-picking, turn the landing on the stairs into a cozy reading spot – are either half-done or never even started.
I’ve learned after a certain number of summers that July is the truth-telling part. June holds the promise. August brings the scramble. But July? July is where the wheels come off. Georgia’s bedroom is full of snack wrappers. Rowan has probably 16 dirty bath towels hoarded in various corners of her room. The dogs both badly need to be groomed. Everyone is tired of sunscreen. We’re all squinting toward the new school year just enough to panic but not enough to actually prepare.
Still, it’s not all bad. There’s a certain magic to this middle stretch of summer that I’m trying to hold on to, especially with one kid on the brink of leaving home. It’s watching a summer storm roll in at 11 p.m. and long car rides to nowhere with the music turned up. It’s Georgia practicing her “camp counselor voice” on the dogs. It’s Rowan offering to buy me breakfast with her graduation money. It’s my husband cooking a delicious dinner with fresh produce from the farmers market. It’s the quiet moments when I catch my kids both lying on the sofa, not screen-free but scrolling companionably, legs intertwined, not bickering over who liked Big Thief first.
Halfway through this summer, I’ve accomplished nothing on my original to-do list, but I’ve gained something a little harder to pin down: the awareness that these in-between moments, just like July itself, are both fleeting and carry their own value.
And that might be enough.
