Summer’s Almost Over, and All I Got Was This Stupid Sunburn

By the time you read this, the countdown to Back to School will be on. Summer Official, nearly kaput.

I don’t know how it happened, though of course I do.

Summer is a swirl. A hectic scramble of long days and who is getting what kids to which camp when and where and who is getting them home (and hosting the requisite ice cream stop), and spontaneous play dates springing forth from nothing and growing into “can so-and-so sleep over”s like so many midnight-fed gremlins. Late dinners, deferred bedtimes. And sunscreen and sunscreen and sunscreen. Packing, schlepping, hurrying, waiting, unpacking, packing it in, packing it out, schlepping again, hurrying again, waiting again, more sunscreen. And why is the car so sticky and how did sand get there and who is to blame for the sunburn and sweet Jesus if the kid doesn’t shower tonight that dread is going to become impenetrable and oh my god stone fruit season is passing me by and I have yet to bake a single galette and it’s the Olympics — somebody find the remote!

The juggle is real, and I have no idea how working parents like us whose kids aren’t completely stoked about summer camp (a k a a necessary expense and hopefully fun place to plunk our kid so we can earn our paychecks so we can pay for summer camp) or are without a robust village of similarly stationed families do it. Merely pondering a life without carpools and Lobster Jo’s gives me the flop sweats.

And yet: A life so full is a life so fast.

But even beyond the very critical schedule of a camp for every week, we can’t help ourselves from piling more on. There’s too much fun to be had. The stuff that has to go? Merely the essentials.

Beachside barbecues, yes. A stop by the market for a pack of hot dogs is easy enough. But a proper grocery shop? ’Tis but the stuff of distant, dirty fantasy.

Sometimes, while attempting extract the sand from the backseat’s deepest crevices or wiping away the sticky remnants of the cotton candy twist (that’s thanks to you, Dave’s Drip House), I wonder if this ravenous life of good times and Why Nots is making time move too quickly. If I should be striving for some sort of platonic grown-upedness, making time to stock the fridge and wash the clothes, hewing more closely to schedules and bedtimes. Devoting my Sundays to batch-cooking great pots of beans.

Recently, we took a trip with another family we’ve gotten to know and become friends with through our kids — hashtag #blessed! — and at some point, the other mom and I took a break from desperately waving our tubes of Sun Bum at our swimming spawn to lament, as is so cliché as to be not worth mentioning, how fast the time is going. What happened to the squishy baby days, were they ever even squishy babies at all, and how long will they want us around, and they’re getting so big. The years, we meant. The years were passing too quickly.

Surely some life-optimization bros have figured out a hack, I said. To make it feel like time is passing slower. (That I was out if this imagined hack involved cold-plunging went without mention. That I am violently repulsed by the great majority of optimization-bro self-aggrandizing mortality denialism was merely implied.)

The irony of lamenting the crackpot passage of time whilst languishing unhurriedly on a shaded chaise lounge on one of the precious, few, absolutely, positively unscheduled days of our collective year was, in this moment, lost on us. Likely swirling somewhere in the dregs of our margaritas.

“I’ve read that new experiences make time feel like it’s going slower,” she posited.

“So, skydiving one day, Mongolian camel riding the next? Seems expensive.”

“And they have school….”

“And they need some sort of routine….”

“You have to do life!”

“The grocery store,” I said.

“The laundry,” she agreed.

“Besides, doesn’t boredom make time feel slow?”

“And that’s the opposite of novelty!”

We donned our hats and resumed the fruitless derby of SPF cat-and-mouse. There would be no solution.

Back in Santa Barbara, we remembered that we’d scheduled the boy for a weekend of surf lessons with a small group of kids and a couple of outstanding instructors. Here were two whole days when he’d be happily occupied and professionally supervised and I might crank it all out: Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods and the washing machine and perhaps even the laptop.

Or. I could drive down the coast and sit on the beach with some delightful people and eat a takeout Greek salad made crunchy with sand and cheer for my kid as he popped up and rode a wave into shore, and then run after him with the sunscreen as he ignored me, gleefully barreling back into the surf.

You can guess what I chose. Time may not have reconfigured itself, but we had fun. And I have the sunburn to prove it. 

---

A Pushcart Prize nominee, Shannon Kelley’s work has appeared in Elle, The Washington Post, Vogue, Aeon, and others. When not busy momming or working her day job at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, she can be found cooking, reading, or putting the finishing touches on her debut novel. She writes about books very irregularly at shannonkelley.substack.com.