That Me

I walked into Deseret Book and a nice employee approached me with a big smile and a clipboard and said brightly, "Hi!  Have you heard about our summer reading program?"

Without so much as thinking, I chirped cheerfully, "No, but I don't care."

I'm already working on my summer project: Summer.  The Dopps are not doing reading charts.  We're not having goals.  We're not taking any classes, and math worksheets are strictly forbidden.

I'm sorry, but I deep six'd the papers and workbooks and anything the kids brought home from school with the word "program" in it.  Even if there's a free ice cream cone at the end of it, we are not doing anything academic until school starts.  It's not that we couldn't just spend some time each day on something scholastic.  It's that we don't want to.  We don't think it's important.  You can get ahead of us, it's OK.  I've always been happy to be in my own comfortable spot along the imaginary continuum of Worst to Best, somewhere around Just Right.

The truth is, I miss my kids sometimes during the school year.  They work hard to get those grades, and it's a slog.  I miss them, and I miss myself.  I miss That Me that lounges by the pool and says, "Sure we can. That sounds fun."  I'm more often the Me that says, "I know it's late but you have to finish this," or "No, because you still have practicing and homework to do," or "We don't have time."  The rat race has a finish line, and we are there.

Way back before I had kids, That Me worked and studied very hard, but also had fun.  I saved every penny and spent summers in Europe, and I didn't take homework with me.  I can't abandon That Me.  She has experienced life beyond formal education.  I invite That Me to visit every summer.  She's wise and she's grounded.  She knows that not all the learning comes from textbooks and classic literature.  She knows that if a kid "falls behind" the other children in little ol' Davis County in math or reading, it's no big deal.  Yes, I said it.  I'll even capitalize it. It's No Big Deal.

What would be a Big Deal is if I got to the end of my kids' 18 years of growing up and we had never driven up to the lake, slept under the stars, turned the front yard into a water park, gotten bored and sunburned at the pool, taken off at 3 in the morning to visit a national park, and completely lost track of what sun-drenched day it was.

That Me knows that childhood summer is an ephermeral, sacrosanct time of hazy glory.  I want my children under summer's spell so that when they grow up and life gets oh-so-serious and competitive and regimented, That Ruby, That Araceli, That Freestone, That Xanthe, can come visit and whisper in my children's grown-up ears, "Remember when we didn't care about any of this and everything still turned out just fine?  Come on, let's run away for awhile. It's summer."