Jane’s video is a recap of her accomplishments. It’s the summer that she:
Read thirty-three books
Attended seven soccer camps
Was named Most Intense by her club soccer team, the Northern Mites
Ran her first 5K (and won her age group!)
It does not include that, of Jane’s seven soccer camps, none started before the workday or ended at the lunch hour, and all required me to get to work late and leave early every day for seven consecutive weeks.
Her club soccer team members, who just last year were more like a collection of girls in matching outfits aimlessly chasing a soccer ball, suddenly gained full control of all their appendages and shot to the top of their league. They won game after game after game, and with every congratulatory trip to the Dairy Queen for twist cones, we watched our hope for any relaxing summer weekends dissolve into a series of weekend soccer tournaments in far-flung suburbs where the dads seem to be legally required to wear cargo shorts.
The video montage includes Jane triumphantly scoring goal after game-winning goal. Our real-life montage would include that, and the rest of us baking in the hot Midwestern sun for seven hours on a Saturday, so desperate for shade that Mike and I became the parents who started bringing a pop-up “sun shelter” with us to every game so we could at least see our phone screens without straining our eyes. One day, as the temperature hovered in the mid-nineties, with no cloud in the sky, I prayed for the first time in years.
“Dear God,” I whispered, “please let her team lose.” The Lord refused to hear my prayer and punished me with an undefeated season and a child who was now officially addicted to winning.
While I was trying to plot with God against my daughter, I should have been thanking him for Dylan. Sweet, sweet Dylan. His video was a challenge, because it’s hard to make dynamic content for someone whose summer was like one extremely long weekend. He slept late. He stayed up late. He wore a small groove into our couch, just the size of his skinny little butt. He will go back to school with a skin tone that’s lighter than it was before summer started, and with a possible Vitamin D deficiency. The only clear memory I have of him from this entire summer was the day after he started coding camp, which I’d signed him up for thinking it would be a creative and productive way for him to explore his love of video games. “Tell us about camp,” I said excitedly that night at the dinner table, sure he would absolutely ooze with enthusiasm over how I’d found the perfect activity for him. In so many ways, Dylan is an exact replica of his father. Of course, an actual boy child is supposed to look boyish, but looking at Dylan and Mike together you can see that Dylan’s future face will have the same charm it does now, even when it’s lined with light wrinkles and his hair sprouts a few strands of silver.
“Well, I wanted to talk to you about that,” Dylan said, leaning back in his chair the same way that Mike does when he is about to say something particularly annoying.
“I resigned today.”
Resigning isn’t usually something one does from a fully voluntary activity that one’s parents paid two hundred dollars for, but Dylan seemed undeterred when I questioned him about his word choice.
Dylan continued. “I think that with the limited resources we have for the summer—namely, time—it would be a better use of those resources for me to just stay home with my Xbox. Plus . . . it’s free.”
“Good thinking, bud,” Mike agreed. “Plus, if you get good enough at this shit, you can make a Twitch account, and livestream your little game thing, and actually make us money.” Mike winked at me, though I know him well enough to know when he’s serious. “Think about it, Amy. This kid could go from a cost center to a profit center for us. By doing this shit!”
I know that I’m supposed to be limiting the kid’s screen time. And you know what? I did limit his screen time, by taking the Xbox controllers to work with me, which meant that he downloaded his favorite game to the iPad, which I then limited with a special app that he was somehow able to circumvent, which is when I gave up. That explains why Dylan’s video is three minutes of Dylan spooning on the couch with Roscoe, Dylan conked out in the backseat of the car on the way home from one of Jane’s tournaments, or photos of Dylan staring slack-jawed at the TV with Roscoe tucked in next to him. I did the best with what I had and titled the video “Dylan’s Summer of Snooze.” Not bad, right?
Is that the bar I’m trying to meet? Not bad? I know from Instagram just how much summer the other mothers have squeezed from these past few months. I know whose kids went to language immersion camp (the Koehlers), and whose kids spent time learning to program their own video games (the Wenners), and I’m pretty sure one of the eighth graders gave a friggin’ TED Talk about climate change.
It’s late, and I should sleep, but I’ve been watching these videos over and over on my iPad, and with every view it’s clearer that I need to be better. Be more present. Be more organized. I need to do what all those old ladies in the grocery store checkout line would pressure me to do when Dylan and Jane were tiny monsters, squawking and screaming in the cart. “Enjoy every minute,” these women would say, blinking their watery eyes at me. “It goes so fast.” I would smile and bite my tongue, because those days refused to go by. A single Monday could take three years to get through.
Tonight, while the crickets are singing their end-of-summer song outside our windows, our kids are sleeping down the hall and Mike is burning the midnight oil in his home office. I feel like he needs to take a productivity workshop, because even I don’t work that much after hours, and I’m at a startup.
I’m way too tired to wait up for him, so I iMessage him the links to the video, waiting for his thumbs-up emoji before putting on my sleep mask, my hand cream, and my mouthguard. Mike calls my nighttime routine the Boner Killer.
It’s just cool enough for the breeze to feel like autumn tonight, and I sense that changing of the seasons more sharply than I used to. As of this evening, my thirteenth summer as a mother is officially over. How did I do? Not bad. And not great.
The CSA vegetables have all turned into a rotting soup in our fridge.
Dylan is not yet a profit center for our family but has probably developed a repetitive stress injury from pushing controller buttons all summer.
I’m already late for everything on my calendar tomorrow, and tomorrow isn’t even here yet.
I HAD EVERY INTENTION OF BEING EARLY FOR THE FIRST DAY of school.
I left Mike snoring gently, his phone still in his hand from the night before, and snuck downstairs, letting Roscoe out for his morning pee, filling his water dish, and grabbing my keys and one of the million reusable water bottles the kids always leave on the counter.
I suppose men can attend my gym, but it’s marketed directly to moms. The lobby encourages you to remove your shoes and “center yourself” before entering, but since most of us are running five minutes late and want to get to “our spot” in class, it’s really just a pile of ballet flats and flip-flops cast off on the way to class. The windows of each classroom are covered in sheer drapes that diffuse the outside light into a warm glow. The overhead lights are strictly prohibited, but the teachers pretend to light the flameless LED votive candles before each class.