Pertinent to my Interests

We are packing for a big trip and I am feeling some angst about the whole thing.

I’m not a good traveler. I don’t like doing new things or meeting new people, and I definitely don’t enjoy the uncertainties inherent in the act of traveling.

I like to be home. Home is reliable. Home is comfortable and safe.

It occurred to me recently that this desire to be home may be the root of my impatience. Maybe I hate waiting in line at Starbucks because it just prevents me from getting home sooner. The slow cashier at the grocery store is cruelly delaying my reunion with my cats and my piano. The waitress who takes forever to get us our check is diminishing my evening reading time.

I begin anticipating my return to my house pretty much as soon as I depart, and I’m starting to think this is maybe less cute quirk and more… clinical diagnosis?

I also had an insight recently about my travel style and how it differs from my husband’s travel style.

When I am flying I want to get to the airport as early as possible. I plan my airport arrival time based on the assumption that things are going to go horribly wrong. The Uber driver won’t show up. Construction will prevent us from taking the shortest route to the airport. The bag drop line will be a mile long. The precheck line at security will be two miles long. This is why we aim to get there two hours early!

My husband plans his travel based on the assumption that everything will go smoothly. The Uber driver will zoom down the highway at record (but safe!) speed. Bag check will take five minutes, security will take three. With this sort of math we really only have to arrive at the airport maybe forty-five minutes before our flight departs.

So here we are, a pessimist and an optimist trying to travel together with two kids. And what if we have to get Starbucks?!

We went camping this weekend for the first time in almost four years.

Well, we went camper cabin camping. This is significantly easier than tent camping, in my opinion, but I do believe it still counts as camping.

I felt like a camping noob, even during the packing process. How many bottles of propane do we really need? What about the clothesline, can that stay behind? And we made some beginner mistakes too like leaving the chairs out overnight and therefore having wet chairs in the morning. (To be fair, the forecast said no rain, but experienced campers know that everything gets packed up under the picnic table every night.)

I brought a coffee maker, and my husband rolled his eyes but sure seemed to appreciate the fresh, easy coffee every morning. I made an effort to make decent breakfasts on the camp stove, and they actually turned out pretty well and were worth the extra dishes.

The kids found a hidden fort area near our site but out of sight, and spent a great deal of time just hanging out down there. I remember doing the same thing as a kid, exploring the forest and finding secret spaces.

All of our children are old enough to walk to the outhouse by themselves, even in the dark, and that was a major improvement to our camping experience.

We ate Pop-Tarts, the best camping snack.

My oldest fell out of a tree. He thought–for a moment–that he was going to die. Another tree broke his fall, scratching the crap out of him on his way down to the ground. If that second tree hadn’t stepped in this would probably have been an emergency room situation, so I am very grateful to that other tree and grateful that he came out with only a ton of gnarly, superficial scratches. He did appear to be in a little bit of shock when he climbed back up the hill to find us. I made him sit down and drink some cold water while we cleaned up his scratches.

The bugs weren’t great, but they weren’t as bad as I expected. I dislike the permanently dirty feeling of camping, but washing my face in cold water from the bucket every morning really helped.

Camping made me really nostalgic. As I lay awake the first night (sleep is a struggle for me all the time, but especially in new places) I entertained myself by reviewing all my camping memories. There are so many! Camping–in many forms–was a very formative experience for me. Scrubbing dishes in cold water on the ground and attempting to cook over a fire and playing card games at the picnic table reminded me of my parents and my grandparents, a long line of camping enthusiasts.

And we only needed one bottle of propane but I’m glad I brought the extra just in case!

I have been battling acne for more than twenty-five years, and I only recently discovered something that really works: Lush’s Cosmetic Warrior face mask.

I have to give my sister credit for this find. She has the same skin as me but is more adventurous about cosmetic products. I was amazed the first time I tried Cosmetic Warrior. Just one fifteen-minute session per week and my acne was cleared up!

But.

Cosmetic Warrior is one of Lush’s “fresh” face masks. It has to be made fresh, kept in the fridge, and it expires quickly. I cannot order it online, and it was often inexplicably sold out in stores.

My sister may be adventurous and that is to her advantage, but I am very committed to never leaving my house and that is also to my advantage. I decided to experiment with my own recipe for Cosmetic Warrior, and after months of interesting results I think I’ve just about perfected it.

Casey’s Cosmetic Warrior Face Mask Copycat
1 egg white
2 tsps honey
2 tsps garlic paste
1 tbsp vegetable glycerin
2 tbsp Fullers Earth Powder
20 drops tea tree oil

Whisk all the ingredients together, place in a sealed container in the fridge for at least a few hours before applying. Apply to your face twice a week for fifteen minutes each time. This recipe makes at least four applications.

Not only does this recipe allow me to skip the mall, it’s significantly cheaper to make it yourself at home!

This was a very niche post, but I hope it helps someone out there on the Internet who has bad skin but doesn’t have great access to a Lush.

We are going camping this weekend for the first time in almost four years.

This is what happens when you buy a cabin. The cabin is all the good things about camping (catching frogs! morning campfire! drinking beer outside all afternoon!) and none of the bad things about camping (dealing with coolers for days! never feeling clean! having to go outside to pee!). But the kids miss camping and have been begging to go camping again so we are going with friends this weekend.

I am not excited.

I grew up camping, and will probably write an exhaustive post about that someday. We used to take the kids camping at least once every summer, even when they were babies. I do not recommend this. For me at least the combination stress of dealing with toddlers around the fire all day combined with the frustration of trying to get my baby and two-year-old to sleep in the tent while the sun was still up was not worth it. If could go back and do it again I would wait until they were older.

In the summer of 2020 the pandemic was in full swing. My kids were five and seven years old. I spent this entire summer fretting about whether or not schools were going to open in the fall (spoiler alert: ours didn’t). This was also the summer that none of the public pools opened in our area, most summer camps and programs were closed, and for a while we weren’t even supposed to use the public playgrounds.

I think we hit every nature center and every hiking trail within an hour radius of the city that year. There was literally nothing else we could do.

I decided we should go camping a couple times that summer, but when I went to book campsites I realized that everyone else in the area had the same idea. Every weekend, every site was booked. I was irrationally annoyed. Who were all these new campers who thought they could take up space in a campground on the weekend? I had been camping my entire life, and every year since becoming a parent! I had a right to those spots!

I did not have a right to those spots, but that didn’t stop me from grumbling about it.

When I looked more closely, I realized there were a good number of spots available mid-week, particularly Tuesdays and Wednesdays. But… my husband wouldn’t be able to come on those days. I looked at my kids who were currently in the backyard having a swordfight with sticks. One of them was in his underwear and the other was wearing a banana costume. Could I handle these two kids camping by myself?

I decided it was worth a shot as long as the banana costume stayed home. I booked some mid-week trips.

That’s how we ended up spending one night each that summer in William O’Brien State Park, Moose Lake State Park, and Jay Cooke State Park.

It turns out that a one-night camping trip is just about right from the packing perspective. I brought a change of clothes for everyone, but mostly we just stayed dirty for the full 24 hours. I only had to plan one dinner, and I went back to the basics on that: hot dogs roasted on sticks accompanied by a can of beans warmed directly on the fire. Pop-tarts for breakfast.

This was back when my youngest was in his Yoshi phase, so a rainbow of Yoshis often accompanied us on these trips. The Yoshis would perch on the picnic table and judge me while I drank cold instant coffee in the morning. I let the kids do all sorts of weird stuff with the fire and the food. We almost ended up sleeping in the car one night due to thunderstorms. We hiked to an old cemetery at one park and there was an eeriness to the air that made me uneasy. I ushered the kids out of there as fast I could trying to hide the fact that I was a little freaked out.

And it was in one of these state parks that I realized my youngest had somehow learned to read when he started reading out loud from a wayfinding sign on one of our hikes.

“Hey! Are you able to read that?” I asked him, surprised.

“No, I can’t read,” he insisted. “I just know what it says.”

In the past we had almost always gone camping with another family; this was very fun, and we made a lot of good memories that way. I did miss having my husband on these trips. but in some ways it felt much easier to be the only adult. It felt like the kids’ camping trip and I was just along for the ride. We did what they wanted to do, ate when they wanted to eat, stopped to check out all the rotten stumps that they wanted to investigate on the hike. There was no schedule, no pressure.

It was actually kind of great.

Those were the last times we went camping because we bought our cabin in May of the next year. I know the kids miss camping because they have told me so many times since then. I suppose it’s a good thing we’re going again this weekend, even if it means I need to inventory the cabin supply bins and figure out meals and find all the sleeping bags. In fact, now that I’ve gone on this walk through my memories, I am feeling much more positive about the coming weekend, and might even let the kids bring the banana costume this time.

1. A tired-looking woman reading The Family Guide to Getting Over OCD: Reclaim Your Life and Help Your Loved One.
2. A harried mother yelling at her preschooler “Hurry up! We have to go straight to hockey now! No, put that book down, we don’t have time for that! Hocky starts in fifteen minutes!” Lady, what wrong turns have you taken in your life to end up in this predicament at 7:45 PM on a Thursday night?
3. A child weeping loudly in the changing rooms and repeatedly declaring that “everyone is making me sad! everyone is making me sad today!”
4. Me, wearing my Chip N Dale Rescue Rangers t-shirt and my Beauty and the Beast Loungefly purse, reading Bob Iger’s memoir like the ridiculous Disney Adult that I am.

The start of summer has gotten me all nostalgic about the many summers that have come and gone in my life.

The summer that I was fifteen I worked at the local resort as a housekeeper. I had worked at a local pizza place previously and not enjoyed the intense customer service experience (especially when one customer was so angry she made me cry, but more on that later). Surely I, an introvert who enjoyed clean spaces, would do much better as a solitary, silent housekeeper.

There were three white people in the housekeeping department at this resort: the boss lady, me, and another girl my age who was married to a Mexican-American man. Everyone else was from Mexico; some very recently arrived, but many had lived in this town longer than my own family had. Spanish was the common language of our crew, and I was the odd one out with my meager ability to count to ten and name the colors. The other white girl my age was kind enough to translate for me and try to include me when she could despite our extremely different backgrounds and life situations (married at fifteen!!!).

Working as a housekeeper at the local resort was a good job, but it was a hard job too. They were understaffed and most of us worked six days a week all summer long. Every morning I would wake up, put my hair up in a bun and pull on my regulation resort polo and black pants. I would walk down the hill a mile into town. We would all receive our work assignments on clipboards in the morning, and take the master key for our particular hallway and building. Then we headed out.

I usually worked alone, which was how I preferred it. The boss lady and assistant boss lady would circulate with their walkie-talkies all day checking our progress which we all dutifully recorded on our clipboards.

My days that summer were defined by “make-ups” and “check-outs.” Make-ups were easy: wipe down the bathroom, replace towels and toiletries, make the beds, take out the garbage, vacuum. I could easily complete a make-up in fifteen minutes as long as the guests hadn’t trashed the place. The difficulty with make-ups was in the timing, and I became very adept at noticing when people were leaving so I could rush over and do their room immediately. Often I was assigned the same hallway all week and I would learn the habits of the guests and know which families were going to already be at the beach at 8 AM and who wasn’t going to leave their room until lunchtime.

I got tipped less than five times the entire time I worked at this resort, and I don’t know if this is a regional thing or what, but I was very surprised to learn that a lot of normal, middle-class people tip the hotel maid when they check out. They definitely weren’t tipping in my town! One time I went into a make-up with a kitchenette and found a twenty dollar bill along with a note asking me to do all the dishes. I was happy to oblige.

The resort had five big buildings full of hotel rooms and suites, but there were a few special buildings too. The resort owned an older building in town that had several apartments, all un-updated with beautiful wood floors and cabinetry and cool vintage kitchens. I cleaned those a few times and was delighted with the layers of age in those places. There was a big multi-story cabin in the center of the resort and I recall thinking that this cabin was the height of luxury, a rich person’s dream. I am pretty sure I could afford to stay there now and that blows my mind.

If a maid finished her hallway early she would then be assigned to help someone else who was still struggling to finish their hallway. It was in these afternoons when I was working with the other housekeepers that I finally started to learn some useful Spanish. My coworkers always turned the television to El Gordo y La Flaca when we were working, and the ones who knew enough English would translate the especially funny parts for me, teaching me new words along the way. I learned the word for clothes hanger in Spanish, and still remember that each room was supposed to have ocho ganchos in the closet. I vacuumed each rincon very thoroughly.

I don’t remember ever getting yelled at in this job. I think I had an advantage as a white teenage girl because when I knocked on a door and a very tired young mother “on vacation” answered to tell me to please come back later we could easily determine a better time for maid service together. All of my coworkers knew enough English to have the same conversation, but it was stilted and stressful for the white vacationers.

“One o’clock!” I would hear a white lady practically yelling at my coworker down the hall. “You understand? Uno! Uno o’clock is bueno!” The guests weren’t necessarily trying to be rude or mean, they just assumed the brown-skinned lady with the cart full of tiny shampoos didn’t understand a word of English.

I don’t mind cleaning, but cleaning up after other people can be its own special hell. Some guests were extremely messy, and navigating our big heavy vacuums around piles of clothes on the floor made make-ups more difficult than they needed to be. We never wanted to touch a guest’s items so we would very carefully push dirty clothes a few inches with our shoes and then do our best with the vacuum. Some guests totally ripped apart their beds and left wet towels in random places. A lot of people left garbage all over the room, and sometimes it was difficult to determine what was meant to be thrown away and what was being saved.

Overall, the housekeeping team worked well together. The boss lady wasn’t too good to jump in and help make a bed if we were hustling to finish a check-out in time, but there were some… issues. They did not give us toilet brushes to clean the inside of the toilet. I was taught on my first day to spray the inside of the bowl with the usual cleaning spray and then use my hand and a rag to wipe it, getting my bare hand down into the water if needed. I was horrified, and to this day I wonder how common a practice this is in hotels. If I didn’t want to do it, I was told, I could bring in my own toilet brush and carry it with me every day. I didn’t want to do that either, and somehow I managed to put my hand in toilet water only once that whole summer.

I got very efficient with hospital corners and I learned lots of neat tricks for making the bathroom look more clean. Even today I still wipe a little glass cleaner in my bathroom sink after cleaning it to give it that even shinier, cleaner look. I got a lot of practice with always going from top to bottom, cleanest to dirtiest, strategies I use almost every day in my current life. But I also learned that hotels almost never change out the comforter and that any glass cups in the room were probably just wiped down with glass cleaner and not actually cleaned before you showed up.

The summer ended on a sour note when I developed a terrible hacking cough that just wouldn’t go away. I went to the doctor, who was not surprised at my cough once she heard about my summer job.

“It’s that cleaning spray they use,” she explained. “We’ve seen a lot of the resort housekeepers here with the same thing.” My mother was horrified. She wrote a letter to management about their negligence in forcing the housekeepers to use these harsh chemicals, and she bought me a bottle of Soft Scrub so I wouldn’t have to use the harsh green spray. But I continued to use the spray (it was so efficient!) through the end of August at the resort.

I went back to high school in September with a solid start to my savings account and a hacking cough that did eventually go away. It had been a good job, a great learning experience on a lot of levels, and I’m glad I did it. I still think about those old apartments regularly, and that $20 bill I got for doing ten minutes of dishes.

I know you are all wondering: do I tip the maid when I stay at a hotel now? I do not. Having cleaned hundreds of rooms and been tipped so infrequently it still strikes me as odd to tip the maid. But I don’t let my kids scatter clothes all over, and I try to make it obvious that yesterday’s paper is supposed to go in the garbage.

And I try really hard to not touch the comforter. Ew.

I did not realize I was writing a three-part series until I arrived here at part three and the question which troubles me every day.

How busy should kids be?

No, wait, that’s not quite right.

How busy should I make my kids be?

My kids are mostly uninterested in extracurricular activities. They are currently both participating in piano lessons and swim lessons. They tolerate these activities, mostly. We’re really limping to the finish line on piano lessons here, and absolutely nobody was excited to perform in the piano recital last weekend. I sat in the audience and clapped for my kids when they bowed and even though I was proud and happy to be there I still wondered if it was really worth it to force them to do this.

We had an unusual experience recently in that my youngest found an activity he wanted to try, an obscure martial art that I hadn’t even heard of before, but we found a dojo and got him started in the spring. I have never had a kid sign himself up for something before, and it was so refreshing to have him excited to go to the practice sessions and proud to come home and show his brother what he had learned.

But all good things come to an end, and this particular good thing ended around the six-week mark.

“It’s just not for me!” he protested when we told him it was time to go to practice that week. “I tried it, and I decided I don’t like it! Don’t make me go!”

“You can’t quit on a bad day!” I told him. “Keep going for now and we can talk about this again next week!”

That line bought us one more good week of practice, but the next week I found myself sitting in my car in front of the dojo in a stalemate with my nine-year-old who refused to get out.

“I don’t even care if you take away screen time!” he insisted. “I’m done! I’m not going anymore! I don’t want to go! You can’t make me go!”

So what is the point of signing our kids up for extracurriculars they don’t want to do in the first place? The best-case scenario is that they just needed a little push to discover some new activity that will bring them joy and a sense of satisfaction in the years to come. The worst-case scenario is months of resentment for being forced to do an activity, and massive battles to get them to actually get their asses in the car and go to these activities every week.

A high risk, high reward proposition if there ever was one, and I am no ambitious entrepreneur. I’m just a mom who is still grieving the fact that they both quit chess club years ago and refuse to go back.

But I also try to remember that childhood is not forever, and adulthood is full of new opportunities. Sure, my youngest refuses to do Lego Robotics League now, but maybe in his 20s he’ll take up embroidery. Maybe it’ll be scuba diving or cross-country skiing. Maybe my oldest will write really great One Piece fanfic and make great fanfic friends and end up in long-term, weirdly fulfilling book club with them. We just don’t know what the future holds.

For now, their futures hold piano lessons. But I would be willing to give that up if it allowed them to find their true passion elsewhere, even if it’s embroidery.

My essay about piano lessons got me thinking about extracurricular activities.

I do not like to be busy. I never have. When I was a kid my favorite thing to do after a full day of school was to go home. So when my mom would gently encourage me to try some new activity or–even worse–force me to participate, I was rarely enthusiastic.

Here is a list of extracurricular activities in which I participated at some point before the age of eighteen: Campfire Boys & Girls, dance, gymnastics, t-ball, basketball, piano, volleyball, cross-country running, track & field, some math competition thing I can’t remember the name of, MedClub, theater, and a bunch of random church stuff like confirmation class and doing reading or ushering.

I only lasted a season for most of these, with some exceptions. I did Campfire all through elementary school (I think?). I believe we only met once a month and mostly did arts and crafts projects and I enjoyed that. I stuck with gymnastics until 3rd or 4th grade (?). But I never played a sport for more than one season.

I just dislike sports so much. I am extremely unathletic, but also unmotivated by the excitement of competition or team spirit (perhaps because I am so unathletic?). And the time commitment was ridiculous. Practice every day after school and we have stupid fucking away games where I’m stuck on a loud bus for hours? No thanks!

Theater worked well for me because there was a cycle to it. I was never cast in a lead role, so for the first couple weeks I would only have to show up for rehearsal once or twice after school. There was plenty of downtime backstage and I could quietly chat with my weird theater friends while also doing homework. As we got closer to showtime my practice schedule would ramp up until the last two weeks when we were all there every day after school for hours.

This would be my breaking point. I would backslide on piano practice, and major school projects would be ignored. I would be stressed out and spiraling a little bit by the time we rolled into the full weekend of shows.

And then it would be all over. We would strike the set on Sunday night, I would arrive at school exhausted on Monday morning and that afternoon I would do what I loved most: I would go home. Every afternoon. For weeks.

Most people are not like me. I think most people like to have a few obligations on the calendar to force them out of their homes. They maybe find the gym tedious and prefer to be on a soccer team. They derive satisfaction from coaching the local middle school debate team or seeing their friends at choir practice. I respect this about people!

A lot of people enjoy the satisfaction of having accomplished something in their free time, but I enjoy the satisfaction of having accomplished nothing.

No, I take that back. I enjoy the satisfaction of playing piano alone in my house for an hour. I enjoy finishing a really long non-fiction book about the Romanov dynasty. I enjoy mowing the lawn at the cabin and not using the self-propel feature even once. I enjoy watching the Marble Olympics with my kids before bedtime, and going out for drinks with the neighbors on the weekends.

I think my personality just doesn’t mix well with extracurriculars. This is a bad look on paper, particularly when it comes to college applications and resumes.

But you know what? If I had another chance to do high school again, I wouldn’t do it any differently. I’m glad so many extracurricular opportunities exist for kids, and I know so many people who have fond memories of all those away games, but I have no regrets about the many afternoon hours I spent on the couch watching old Star Trek episodes on VHS.

Part of my purpose in writing this blog is to leave something of myself behind for my kids to read when I’m gone. As such, there are going to be posts where I just go off reminiscing of the olden days.

Hold on to your butts.

When I was in first or second grade my grandparents hauled their old piano out of their house and delivered it to our basement. This piano was old enough to have ivory keys, but also old enough to be missing several pieces of the ivory keys. I’m not sure if it was ever tuned properly, and it was a beast, but this was my first piano.

My mom was my first piano teacher. We had a beginner book, we had a piano, but we did not have the right vibe. My mom is not a great teacher and I think we both quickly realized this was going to work much better if a professional teacher was acquired.

My next piano teacher was a real piano teacher, but she moved away after my first year of lessons. She was unremarkable, and I only remember that her son was in my class at school. I can’t even remember her name.

And then we get to my real piano teacher, that Ozymandias of my musical memory, Kathryn.

Kathryn was a talented musician who merely tolerated her young students and always used a purple pen to mark up the music. Her studio was in the family room of her house, and she had somehow managed to squeeze in two(!) baby grand pianos, several keyboards, and an entire wall of sheet music.

I still remember the dread of walking into that room on weeks when I had not practiced enough. My sister and I had lessons back-to-back and had a standing agreement that whoever had not practiced enough would get to go second, thus gaining an extra thirty minutes to work with the unpracticed material at the keyboard.

Sometimes neither of us had practiced enough, and those were bad weeks. We would argue about who would be first to disappoint Kathryn. Sometimes I lost the argument and then I would be the one to carefully take my seat on the piano bench, heart pounding. I would start in on the first measure thinking it was going to turn out okay and she wouldn’t notice, and then by the third measure I would have already missed two of the B flats and the rhythm would have fallen apart and Kathryn would be livid.

“Did you practice at all this week?” she would ask, even though she already knew the answer. She would huff for the rest of the lesson, as if I had personally offended both her and Sergei Rachmaninoff with my lack of practicing. My sister and I both got kicked out of lessons early at least once for not practicing enough.

Both of my siblings took piano lessons from Kathryn for years, and for a while my mother did too. This necessarily led to the Era of Two Pianos in our house. My mom found an awesome old upright in the classified ads and that piano still sits in the upstairs living room of her house. It’s not an attractive piano but it sounds amazing despite being tuned exactly twice in the thirty years she has had it. Four people taking piano lessons plus two pianos resulted in a constant parade of music and missed accidentals in our house for a while.

This was before the age of Musicnotes.com, so when choosing what songs to play we were dependent on both Kathryn’s library of sheet music and her limited interest in anything composed after 1965. At some point of mastery there was a fork in the road of sheet music and we had two choices for the coming years of piano: “classical” or “modern.” Modern was just a code word for jazz, it seemed, so I picked “classical” and that is how I developed a lifelong appreciation for Bach and a lifelong distaste for Bartok.

In my last year of middle school, Kathryn took a sabbatical. My mom managed to find yet another temporary piano teacher whose name I do not remember. This teacher worked in a little room attached to the local record store. She had a computer with cool composition programs on it. She gave us more freedom to pick out our own music, resulting in some interesting choices that year.

“Well, let’s hear what you’ve been playing,” Kathryn said that next September when we were back in her family room studio with the twin baby grands. I proudly placed my fingers on the keys and launched into a gorgeous arrangement of My Heart Will Go On from the hit movie Titanic. Kathryn just sighed heavily and closed her eyes as if praying for strength.

Kathryn insisted on memorization of your performance piece for the annual spring recital. There was nothing more shameful than walking up to the big grand piano at the front of the church in your nice clothes and bringing your music with you. I think I only failed to memorize twice in the eight years I played in her recitals. Memorization or not, I was always a nervous wreck about recitals, especially as I improved and my named dropped closer and closer to the end of the program every year. My heart would pound harder with every song leading to mine.

Kathryn was an amazing pianist herself, and really should have been a performer rather than a teacher but I suppose there aren’t many opportunities for profitable performance in my small hometown. I remember one time I watched her perform a piece that I knew pretty well; I was astonished to hear several mistakes! I mentioned this to my mom.

“Yes, but she just kept playing, right?” my mom asked. I agreed that Kathryn had kept playing as if nothing had happened. “That’s the trick,” my mom said knowingly.

I performed in a senior recital with two of my closest friends and we were great. I played Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C# Minor, Debussy’s Clair de Lune, and Telemann’s Fantasia in D Minor, which is the only one of the three I failed to memorize. At the time I thought the Rachmaninoff was the height of my ability, but I’ve since decided that an emotionally tuned Clair de Lune requires a lot more skill than the pounding wide chords of the Rachmaninoff. I still play the Debussy from time to time when I want to challenge myself and feel melancholy at the same time.

I think about Kathryn a lot now because my kids are currently taking piano lessons and their teacher is basically the opposite of her. Their teacher seems to love teaching kids despite the many challenges. She finds fun songs for them to play, and will spend hours searching out a just-right arrangement of whatever weird video game song they have requested. My youngest is interested in composition, and she is happy to shift the piano primer book into the background and instead work with him on chord theory. Recitals are built to be fun, not stressful. Memorization is encouraged but very optional.

I love this gentle approach for my kids, and they have a great rapport with their teacher. But I don’t feel like I missed out in any way. I loved my teacher and I think she loved me despite my flawed practice record. I still own a bunch of sheet music marked up in her purple pen. And thanks to that purple pen I still never miss the high E flat in the eighteenth measure of Clair de Lune.

It’s May and change is in the air. The children are extra squirrely. I’ve had “teacher gifts” on the bottom of my to do list for weeks now. The calendar is full of recitals and graduations.

It’s almost the end of the school year, and as the unemployed parent I both eagerly anticipate and dread the end of the school year.

I used to be really good at having my kids home with me all the time. Even when they were toddlers and babies and they were always inventing new ways to hurt themselves and each other, I rocked the stay-at-home parenthood. We had some built-in routines but also flexibility. I had a running list in my head of potential outings and playdates. I knew what time all the nature centers opened, and which indoor play areas were most likely to keep my kids immersed for hours. I rotated toys like it was my job (I mean I guess it was my job).

I can’t tell if I’m just out of practice or still burned out from those early years of parenthood. I was good at it, but it was hard. Really hard.

Good Things About the Upcoming Summer Break:
1. No more prying my youngest out of bed with a crowbar at 6 AM.
2. No more homework! Even better: no more emotions about homework!
3. Flexible schedule for cabin time, hiking, going to the pool, etc.
4. Three months of not worrying about school shootings!

Bad Things About the Upcoming Summer Break:
1. I am in charge of my children’s entertainment and stimulation 100% of the time.

Now please know that I am a big proponent of boredom in childhood. Boredom is the seed of creativity! Boredom is what gives us space to explore our thoughts. Boredom is amazing!

But how much boredom is too much boredom? And at what point does healthy boredom become social isolation and a harmful lack of parental interest?

This was something I struggled with back when they were little and I was a stay-at-home mom. Yes, I did want them to experience boredom and not be dependent on me for stimulation, but if I had been working they would have been in daycare and constantly entertained by their classmates and the fun art project the teacher was leading. There were things they missed out on by not going to daycare, and I felt the pressure to make up for that by planning regular playdates and constant playground trips.

I think it worked out okay, and my kids are pretty good at self-entertaining, but not all day every day. Even animals in the zoo need stimulation, and my little nine- and eleven-year-old animals do need entertainment.

But maybe I’m overcomplicating things by assuming they need outings and playdates.

My favorite childhood summers were the summers of 1995, 1996, and 1997. My mom was sick of dealing with the bullshit of the high school students she used to hire as nannies every summer. My sister and I were not old enough to legally work yet, but we were old enough to stay home alone during the day. In the morning my mom would write our chores on the whiteboard in the kitchen, drop my little brother off at his cheap summer daycare, and my sister and I would get almost eight hours daily of the house to ourselves.

Those were fantastic summers. We listened to Jewel’s Pieces of You album over and over again while we did cartwheels in the living room and ate dry cocoa mix. We watched The Sound of Music every day one summer, and My Best Friend’s Wedding every day the next summer. I played with my gerbils in the sandbox. This was the summer that the kindly Jehovah’s Witnesses gave us a pamphlet about their religion and by the time my mom got home from work my sister and I had doctored it up into “The Monkey Bible.” We never left the house during the day. We loved it.

Maybe this summer I should bring back the Summer of 1995 for my own kids. Dry cocoa mix will be the only snack option. We’ll buy some gerbils and download the Pieces of You album. I’ll tell the kids they can have as much screen time as they want but the only screen time options are The Sound of Music and My Best Friend’s Wedding. I will teach them how to do cartwheels.

And if we’re lucky the Jehovah’s Witnesses will show up at least once.

But the reality is that I am not a single working mother. I am home all day, I don’t have a job. My kids missed out on daycare in their early years and now it feels like they’re missing out on the glory of the independent summer unencumbered by the presence of a responsible adult. I’m going to be here every day yelling at them about clothes left on the floor and doling out little doses of screen time. I’m going to make them eat apples for snack and go on long, annoying hikes.

Moms truly are the worst.

I gotta get a job.