The Noticing #25

You're allowed to dread summer

Hi! Hello! Welcome to The Noticing, a newsletter that I send out every other week, usually on Tuesday afternoons but occasionally on Tuesday nights or Wednesday mornings during weeks that life is especially lifey, as it has been lately. This is the last week of school for my children and I am all up in my feelings about all sorts of things. Before we get to that, here’s what you’ll find in today’s newsletter.

*Connections: My experience and advice for the transition into summer

*Affilliate Links: Big beginning of summer energy

*Recommendations: A book review and a couple of podcast recs

*Cloudland: The obnoxious maintenance of being a person (home edition)

---

Connections

I know it’s cool to be a hater but it’s too late for me now that I’m on the record for liking Facebook. The other day I was scrolling and searching for the latest neighborhood drama and was fed one of those posts that show up even though it’s not someone you’ve chosen to friend or follow. I have no idea who authored this particular post, it definitely wasn’t someone I know in real life. The post was full of the kind of BS that absolutely enrages me. It was all about how the writer was going to embrace every single moment of the summer ahead, how she was going to soak it all in with all of the wet swimsuits and dirty feet and endless long days with her precious children. She ended it with the reminder that we only get so many summers with our kids (as if we weren’t well aware). I do realize that some people are graced with glorious, peaceful summers with their regulated children and I want to be clear that I am not saying that I think anyone who has this experience is being fake or dishonest. It’s just that, for me, summer has always been a mixed bag.

I am so tired of dragging around the weight of the shame that a lot of my mothering experience has not been easy. School holidays and especially summer used to be so hard for my family. One of my kids absolutely hates trips, the traveling, the unknown, the whole deal. Another one likes to be on the go all the time; you literally cannot fill his social cup high enough. All of the togetherness and overstimulation of the daily everything is really difficult for my anxiety. My body remembers how hard the summers were when I was trying to figure out my own mental health and how it interacted with the needs and personalities and expectations of my children. If you or your kids live with anxiety, ADHD, big feelings, trauma, or a whole host of things I like to call being-a-person, you know that change can be very disruptive. Transitions are difficult. While the idea of a lack of routine can be lovely, the experience of it can be extremely disregulating both for you and for your children.

This year I’m looking forward to summer with a genuine mix of excitement and dread. I love the slower pace of the mornings. I love evenings at our neighborhood pool. I cannot wait for tomato sandwiches and fresh okra. And still, I struggle when I’m overstimulated, I like having a lot of time by myself and I am already anticipating that there will be some intentional nervous system work ahead. Thankfully I’ve got more awareness, tools and strategies than I used to have about what is happening inside my body when I feel overwhelmed by the wide open spaces of summer. I’m planning to share some of those here throughout the summer in case it is helpful for anyone else who can identify with some of these experiences.

Lastly, as we shift gears into a new season, I think it’s important and good to let yourself name the reality that change rarely elicits only one emotion. Beginning the summer means the end of a school year. Time keeps going. It’s okay to feel sad about that. There’s loss for our kids in leaving behind another school year. This is our real, actual life and their real, actual life and as much as I sometimes wish that I could grant myself a peaceful, seize-each-day and love-every-minute motherhood experience just by naming that I intend to do so, that option is not available to me. The thing that is available to me is showing up to my life in an honest, open-hearted way so that I can be present with my children in this particular season of my life as the healthiest and most grounded version of myself. Nothing about that is easy. It is daily work. But it is the work I intend to do for the sake of both myself, my children and a reality that is bigger than a peaceful, easy summer. (Dear Lord, I would still love a peaceful, easy summer if that option presents itself. Amen.)

---

Summer Links

One thing that has helped me is to really try to think through things that make our summer life easier. There are going to be some things that I don’t anticipate, like certain snacks and lunch options that turn out to be what everyone wants to eat every day. Here are a few things that I bought this week to try to get ahead of a few things before we are all home all day all summer.

I’m stocking up on these air fryer liners. We do a lot of chicken nuggets and corn dog nuggets at my house because it turned out that my hopes and dreams of being an organic healthy mother died a very long time ago.

I am very impressed that I already ordered the goggles. I ordered four pairs of goggles for one child, two of these regular kind and two of these masks that keep showing up in my Instagram feed. Why did I ever think I could order one pair of goggles per kid?

I ordered more pool toys. These jewels continue to provide hours of pool fun for all ages. I added the set with the other shapes this year.

I used an Ikea bag for the pool for at least two summers so you might not want to take your pool bag advice for me. The rubbery bags are not for me and my house but I do really like a pool bag that sits flat. I also bought these bags to go inside my big bag for the pool toys and snacks. I’ll let you know if they works as well as I hope they’re going to. They’re so super cute.

---

Recommendations

*Book: I finished a book this week called Sandwich by Catherine Newman. I really loved this book but want to note that it does have a lot of intense subject matter around miscarriage. There was a time in my life when I would not have been able to handle that and I want to be intentional here that it could be triggering or upsetting. I found the writing about motherhood in this book to be really beautiful. One of my favorite quotes:

“Here's what foragers know: Most of what grows is neither delicious nor toxic. There's a whole world between what we call the choice edibles—the hazelnuts and porcini and black raspberries and, say, the destroying angel mushroom that will shut down all your organ systems after a single nibble. You can eat the grass, the lichen, the inner bark of most trees, a thousand kinds of leaves. Not that you would, but you could. So much of privileged adulthood seems to take place here, in the space between the soaring highs and the killing disasters. It's just plain life, beautiful in its familiar subtlety, its decency and dailiness.”

*Podcasts:

I want everyone I know to listen to this episode with Adam Young and Hillary McBride talking about her new book called Holy Hurt. I can’t wait to read it. I love the way she talks about all abuse being spiritual abuse because we are spiritual beings.

I am still thinking about these two episodes of Ezra Klein’s podcast. One is with Jonathan Haidt, the author of The Anxious Generation, (which for the record I have refused to read for multiple reasons, some good and some just my own avoidance and stubbornness) and the other is all about education and AI with Rebecca Winthrop who is the director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution.

---

Cloudland

It has been the weirdest spring weather and combining that with the spring schedule chaos plus getting a puppy plus trying to figure out what I’m doing with the rest of my life has led to a seriously neglected garden. I did get my tomato and pepper plants in the ground a few weeks ago and my herb bed is already looking like an overgrown mess (in a good way). The hydrangeas are gorgeous right now. My zinnias and dahlias are starting to bloom and I think that this is just going to be a year of seeing what happens when you’re paying attention to other things.

---

Well, I think that’s going to do it for now. As always, thanks for being here.