Those Suhhhummer Niiheights.

Summer is finally here, it seemed like it would never come this year, although considering it’s only the first week of June I’m not sure what I’m complaining about (we usually get a few more tastes of summer in May I guess). Summer always makes me wish I were a kid again, I was talking with some friends the other day about our best childhood memories, and we found that most of them occurred during the summer (the summer and Christmas seem to be the big winners). I remember those summer days as a kid that seemed to last forever, and stretch into a big blur where you don’t know one day from the next and it really doesn’t seem to matter. Jake and I had a water fight last night while I was washing down the side of the house (note to all interested, those new “color stream blaster” water guns are lots of fun but WAY messy), and there is still something so awesomely freeing about summertime.

The other thing I remember about summer as a kid was that very distinctive feeling of absolute boredom you would get around the end of the summer that made going back to school so darn exciting (at least for the first week). That boredom, along with the unique freedom of summer when I was a kid, are the tag team things that as a parent I’m finding it really hard in today’s world to recreate, but are things that I think are fairly essential.

I was reading an interesting article last weekend, in Reader’s Digest about how important boredom is to humans. (Slight digression, but I recently read that the day you admit to yourself that you are never going to read Proust is the day you recognize you have officially reached middle age, but that is complete hogwash, after all who reads Proust young or old now days? The day you START reading Reader’s Digest is the day you reach middle age.) The article made some excellent points, boredom in humans, akin to sleep is where we are able to have an interior life, instead of focusing on the exterior life, it’s the point where we focus on who we are rather that what we do. We, to some degree have to have a certain level of boredom (or call it time “doing nothing”) to really allow our imaginations to take flight, which is infinitely harder for adults than children, but imagination like anything else is a skill that you learn, and develop, and you have to have time to do it. I remember feeling that tug of boredom as a kid, the one you never said anything about (if you said you were bored at our house, mom made up a chore for you to do), but I look back on very fondly. It’s where you learn that as long as you have a brain, you have a world of entertainment at your disposal. I think boredom and necessity are the two parents of invention, and the world is a much better place when everyone has an hour here and there to just lay on our back staring at the clouds until they become more than clouds.

We live in a world though that doesn’t respect boredom much, we are expected to be “plugged in” at all times, and our kids that are being raised with all of this around them as the "normal" human state, they are constantly getting input from all these sources, but I don't think they are being given a lot of time to think about and process all this input on a deeply personal level. When I was a kid our “organized” summer activities where few and far between, and most days involved mom saying “go find something to do”. It’s not an “I walked 10 miles in the snow to school” thing for me, because I don’t think the “old” way is harder at all, that sense of boredom, and being able to entertain myself has made my life easier not harder, much easier than I think my child's is, because he doesn't do well with down time. As long as I have my head, I always have something to do and somewhere to go (I’m a big fan of daydreaming), if I told Jake to go out and look at the clouds, I'm pretty sure the response would "what?". We have all kinds of things planned for Jake for the summer, but I think we’re also going to make sure there are lots of days without anything planned at all, where he (and hopefully some friends and cousins) can just figure it out for themselves.

Which leads me to the second thing that is really hard to recreate in our world today “childhood freedom”. We will never again experience anything in our lives like the freedom of childhood. It’s kind of sad that day you realize that, the day you realize that you will never again have days upon days stretched in front of you with absolutely no responsibility, nothing you absolutely “have” to accomplish, and no one depending on you for anything. Days and days stretched out where you have absolutely nothing more important to do than to just "be" alive. I know most adults would pay really good money to have just one of those days, and they do seem a bit wasted on the young. I want my son to really enjoy some of that freedom, but like most parents in the modern day of the “helicopter parent” as a norm, it’s really hard to figure out how exactly to give that freedom. Jake and the neighbor kids ran around to various houses for a few hours last Saturday evening, and they did great checking in, and running back and forth, but I thought I was going to jump out of my skin not knowing where he was every second, and not following him around. When I really look at it, at my “gut” feeling, it’s not that I really fear something is going to happen to him, I don’t think it will, it’s that I’m afraid of what all the other parents will think if I allow him to do something that falls outside the “norm” of what we consider o.k. parenting these days. For example, when I was growing up, it was expected (esp. for boys) to have a few broken bones as part of growing up, now if a child has a cast, people seem to say not so much “oh that is part of growing up” but instead “why weren’t that child’s parent’s watching closer?”. Circe posted a couple weeks ago that we should parent based on “what we know, not what we fear” but I find that is really hard to do. It’s one of those things that I think I need to ask my parents, I “remember” childhood with an awful lot of freedom, but for all I know mom was following behind us hiding someplace we couldn’t see her the entire time, just to make sure we were o.k. I do suspect my parent’s generation, not constantly bombarded by media images of all the scary things in the world, did exactly as Circe suggested and parented from what they knew much more than from what they feared, but hey maybe they just let us believe that.

So my plans for the summer, aside from allowing some boredom, are that we’re going to live on bit on the edge and I might actually let Jake go across the street to the park alone at some point. (I’ve let him go home alone a couple times to pee, now they took the public restrooms out, but that is more about curbing his enthusiasm for peeing in the great outdoors than a statement of freedom).

Me?

Well I’ll be standing at the edge of the yard the entire time, poised to run out screaming “get away from my kid you freak” like a crazy woman at any second.