The Magical Promise Of Summertime and Love

While every season contains beauty and adventure, there’s something magical about summertime. I adore unstructured afternoons, impromptu drinks with neighbors, and taking a walk at 9pm in just-fading daylight. Summer memories feel more free and easy somehow, the thought of them filtered in buttery light.

Tonight, on the final evening of my son’s fourth grade year, I feel peaceful, and at ease with the fact we haven’t scheduled camps or activities for him yet, perhaps a testament to finally understanding we’ll figure this out as we go. It hasn’t always been that way. The year Tucker turned four, I wrote a farewell letter to summer at its end, realizing only then that I’d panicked about work and writing and ensuring childhood magic for my little boy. That year, I only found summer’s magic at its end. Sure, there were moments of profound appreciation for the progress he’d made, peppered with memories of previous summers when I wondered whether he’d ever talk. But the initial panic on how I’d ever possibly do all the things I felt back then have faded for now. Instead, I look forward to the special magic that comes with this season.

This is the year my ever-growing no-longer-little little boy turns ten and it both delights me and breaks my heart. His questions and conversations have evolved from four years ago, when I wish I’d known there will be times to come when I will breathe deeply against the endless stream of “WHY?” and questions like “Where is a bird’s butt crack?” and “Why would fish die in soap?”

Such progress we’d made since then, when I knew I’d miss the summer.

Today, we have conversations I’d never have imagined and he’s getting to the point of seeing me as “cringey” when each morning, I wake him by saying “It’s the last Tuesday (or Wednesday, etc. you get it) of fourth grade!” and repeating myself when I wish him a good day before school. “Enjoy the last Thursday of fourth grade!”

Tomorrow is the final day of my son’s fourth grade year, and, as in years past, we’ll host a water gun and water balloon birthday party for him, knowing his school friends will be traveling, as will we, for is actual birthday in July. I admit to not feeling peace about the lack of RSVPs earlier, but I think I’m there now, having reset expectations to having only moved here this year. Plus, since then, more have RSVPd and I ended up inviting a few more kids to be sure.

Looking Toward The Magical Promise Of Summertime and Love

While summer doesn’t begin officially for a few more weeks, I want this to be the summer I learn to speak to myself as I do to my son. I fairly recently (re)started therapy, and it’s a hard lesson to learn when realizing how much ugly talk we (or I) do to ourselves. It may be a bit ambitious to think I’ll accomplish this goal in the next few months, but if I start now, I think we’re on our way to a better summer. A better self.

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We’ve come so far, my son and I. It wasn’t very long ago when I was terrified of kindergarten, and felt thankful for that summer. That year, I wrote “It’s been more than enough, and has been full of little moments and big ones. Ones that will help to prepare Tucker for school, and ones that will help prepare me to have the faith that I need to watch him fly.”

Oh friends. I continue to watch him fly. If I could know something then that I know now, it’d be to have faith that flight happens, individually. Not on a milestone chart, and not in our mama heart worry chart.

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Here’s to this summer being full of magical, buttery light-filled moments, laughter, and not worrying about life passing too quickly for each of us. I vow to hold the moments and the days as they fold, while giving myself grace for mourning the best ones even as they happen. Here’s to the magical promise of summertime and love. For each of us. <3

This has been a Finish the Sentence Friday post, with the prompt “The best part of summer vacation is/was…”