Summer time and single parenting can be challenging (to say the very least)! With school out, we single parents have to coordinate child care, summer camps, visits with family and other parents and all sorts of other summer-only details. It is no surprise that we might be clinging to May and hoping against hope to delay the advent of summer just a little while.
As my children have gotten older, summer has become less of a stressful three-month period than it used to be. I hope this will provide a little encouragement to those of you who are still wrestling with day care and summer camps and other summer activities. I remember so well how stressful and expensive it was to make sure that my children’s summers had structure. In fact, my three kids tease me about it now saying “Summer is coming, we need to have structure!” “Structure” was my big catch phrase for making sure that everyone was accounted for and I didn’t get a dozen calls a day at work.
I know that I do not need to lecture the average single parent about all the options and activities of summer—you know well what sort of resources are in your community and you have probably been working on figuring out where your child will be week by week since Christmas! Still, I do want to provide a word of encouragement and support—after all, who but another single parent would understand how the coming of June could cause a grown person to break out in a cold sweat and a case of the hives? Yes, if we could only hold back the hands of time! Instead, it is time to get out the calendar and the checkbook and get ready for another summer of well-planned and well-orchestrated structure.