Are We There Yet?

This is the July edition of the print version of After the Bubbly, an award winning family humor column. If you’d like to see it in a local publication, let me know and I’ll do my best to get it there!

Are We There Yet?

This year I bought airline tickets for August in April, which made me wonder when summer vacation changed from a time of pure freedom to just another set of squares on the calendar to coordinate. After a frustrating afternoon working out travel details, I realized there is a life cycle to summer vacation.

When we were kids the last day of school and the first day of the next year may as well have been decades apart. Life consisted of trips, reading lists, and sleeping in. We lived for waterslides, watermelon, and trout fishing. The end of summer was too far into the future to imagine. Just like those long car trips where we simply could not help ourselves from asking, are we there yet?

By the time we hit high school, we’d traded jumpers for bikinis and a day at the lake included a spray bottle full of cancer, aka baby oil and iodine. We lived on corn chips and Diet Coke, doused our hair with Sun-In, and watched All My Children or The Young and the Restless until our eyes bled. And once we got a little older, we drank margaritas late into the warm evenings. That was the real summer, the one that lasted forever and overflowed with freedom.

Then we grew up and went to work and there was no more summer vacation. Sneaking out of the office early to hit happy hour didn’t even come close to the wild abandon of childhood. The lucky among us got a week off, maybe two. Even when business was slow, summer behaved pretty much like the rest of the year. Stolen days in the sun passed quickly.

Then we had kids. Their summer experience translates into a lot of work for us. Working parents scramble for childcare, while the ones who stay at home scrape at their own fragile sanity in a house overrun by children. One thing’s true: summer passes very, very slowly once again.

Then the kids get older. There’s tennis practice and drama camp, junior botany school and trips galore. Weeks zip by on the calendar faster than we can pencil in a day at the lake and a visit to grandma’s house. We secretly wonder what life will be like when our children spread their busy wings and fly away from the nest. Perhaps then we will recapture that beautiful summer freedom.

Not even close. When our kids go to college we’ll spend precious summer hours working to pay for all their fabulous freedom. So basically, the next time we can expect to have anything resembling the carefree joy of our youthful summers will be sometime after 2030. Meet me at happy hour and we’ll gum some corn chips and suck down a margarita.

Are we there yet?