On My Own (Summer) Terms

Tetyana Denford - 31 Aug 16

So, as it inevitably happens every year, summer draws to a close and I’m sitting here calculating how hard it’s beaten me. Kind of like having a brawl and seeing how many scars you end up escaping with. 

Chipped nail varnish, hair that’s been washed only once a week (I do brush it though, give me some credit), flip-flop-shaped burn lines into my feet. I have scrapes on my hands, the house isn’t as tidy as I normally like it, and there are WAY more bottles of rosé and Gavi chilling in the fridge than normal. 

I’m brown, but only weird bits like my chin, my shoulders and the parts of my knees that show through the “fashionable holes” in the jeans I’ve been wearing ad nauseam. There is barely any sunscreen left in the house, my handbag has sand and Starburst wrappers in it and my throat is raw from shrieking disapproval more and more frequently at my feral kids that are trying to use garden toys to beat each other.

The Playstation controllers have been well-worn of late, because the past 2 weeks I’ve been trying to get back to a writing schedule so I’ve just given up entertaining the kids and let their brains melt a bit in front of video games. Oh and I have no idea where, but along the way, we’ve lost 2 pairs of shoes, a dress, an entire box of nappies and a sofa cushion. 

I do this kind of “cataloguing”, on a smaller scale, every day after bedtime: I go through a list of the moments that I feel like I’ve failed as the mother that I feel like I “should be”. Normally a glass of red in a quiet house exacerbates reflection; I see the moments of the day play out in front of me as if I’m rewinding a movie. And then the wine kicks in and it takes the edge off a bit and you realise that there are mothers sharing the exact same moment that you are, sighing and finding a happy, semi-stable middle ground in the abyss of rhetorical questions. 

At the end of the summer however, the questions feel a bit more heavy because school schedules hover and tease my anticipation, the weather turns inwards, stores slap me in the face with Halloween and Christmas sales, and all of a sudden I blink and I’m starting January with my head in the toilet from too many Jaegerbombs, facing the start of another year. I see it so clearly: a handful of sunny days, and it all begins again. 

Have I told them ‘I love you’ enough?  

Have I encouraged them in their play, have I done more YESs than NOs?

Have I helped them make their own little magic memories of summer?

What will they remember? Will they remember be rolling my eyes because they put ice lollies in the washing machine? Will they remember me shouting ‘YOU ARE DRIVING ME CRAZY!’ too often? 

Did I wish it all away too quickly before the school term starts up again? What if I didn’t slow down enough, make it *important* enough?

The danger of asking myself all these questions is that I always come up short on answers. I can never know what memories they’ll hold onto, and whether they actually had fun despite my endless pleas to get them to stop arguing. And also, as a mother, I’m not *supposed* to know the answers, right? If I did, I would be the Queen of Perfect Parent Land, and my brigade of Type-A mothers would rule the world. 

I could be post-rationalising here, but maybe summer is *supposed* to be feral and crazy and annoying and messy. Maybe it’s supposed to be the antithesis of all the organised, scheduled, panicked routines that happen the other 9 months of the year. Summer is supposed to be a slightly hazy, eye-rolling, spontaneous, mildly-alcoholic blur of days where I have to force myself to let go a bit (which I hate doing) and say “screw it, yes have an ice lolly in the bath and draw with soap on the walls, I don’t care”. 

I will never know what memories my kids will take with them into their adulthood, and I hope they’ll edit out my meltdowns, but I’m pretty sure that the sand encrusting my lipstick, the irregular tan-lines and the scraped hands from blackberry-picking means that they’ll be good ones. 

Tetyana Denford

Tetyana is a Ukrainian-American mum of three, married to an Englishman, living in NY. She's written for Elle and Vogue magazines, and her first novel 'Motherland' is available at Amazon. She hosts a YouTube show called The Craft and Business of Books, translates for Frontline PBS news, and writes freelance.

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