Richmond Parents Monthly | Richmond magazine for families

After many years of motherhood, two dueling visions of summer time play together in my memory.

In the first, my three children frolic in the sun. They cavort, roll in the grass, play catch, and laugh, but only after sleeping late, really late—like so late that I get to drink two entire cups of coffee uninterrupted. And after the happy cavorting—or better yet—before the cavorting, the children do chores (the hard ones, like toilet scrubbing) without me prodding, and then we all skip around the clean house and the freshly mowed yard.

In this vision, sometimes it rains and we cuddle in a crisply made bed with matching sheets and throw pillows. And I read intellectually stimulating yet wholesome stories aloud. And the children listen, wide-eyed, and there are smiles. This vision. Such a lovely homage to my days at home with the little ones.

In the second vision, my children only sleep late when we have to be somewhere early, like the dentist. Otherwise, they are up at dawn, yawning at the sun, gauging the upcoming heat index and whining that we don’t have a pool. If I’m lucky, it rains and I get to take them to a movie theater so ushers can enforce my most earnest wish: that my charming children be quiet for two hours in a row. We don’t even try to read together because they can’t agree on a book, and they never will—not unless Dr. Seuss rises from the dead and writes a horror story about famous sports figures wearing Victorian period dresses. That might suit all their tastes at once. Chores are only done after tedious, union-like negotiations. And the lawn is never freshly mowed because my son mows so slowly that by the time he’s done with the back yard, the front has grown five inches.

Which vision is the true one?

Well, I’m certainly not going to tell you. What kind of mother would I be if I admitted to anything even close to the second description? And envy would require you to either disbelieve or despise me if vision number one is an accurate depiction. And I’m not going to cop-out and say that most days with my three young children home all summer fell somewhere in the middle of the two visions. They didn’t.

Remember those old Staples’ back-to-school commercials? The ones with the parent skipping through the store, tossing pencils and notebooks into the cart to the tune of “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” as two forlorn kids trudge behind? Did anyone else notice that the parent in that commercial was the Daddy? I wonder: would America have still thought it funny if Mommy led the shopping trip, gleeful that the little ones would soon be leaving her care every day?

I myself only laughed on the inside when I saw that commercial. I felt too guilty to express the inner guffaw.

The point is: The truth is not one or the other vision, and it’s not in the middle; the truth is there in the extremes of both visions. Both are spot-on, and not even necessarily on different days. Summer motherhood for me back when all three were little could be that schizophrenia: one moment nirvana, the next nervous breakdown.

But we all get our perfect Disney family moments. And we all go to Domestic Dysfunction Land for at least a few hours. Summer vacation is just the time when you find out where your family goes most in any given twenty-four hour period.

Consider this: There were a few years when we lived overseas, in a place where I had to home-school. Beforehand, I didn’t stress over the academics I had to teach; I only worried that I would go batty with no break from my children. But my experience was quite the opposite of my expectation: I had to labor to relearn history so I could teach it to my then eighth-grader, but having the kids home all day actually improved my sanity, because it meant I had to lead full-time. I had to create very clear boundaries. It also meant that we were free from external schedules. I was in charge of homework and vacation times. And I took that charge, and set a schedule to suit our emotional needs as well as the educational ones. And life was (mostly) peaceful.

We relate to the opposing visions of motherhood I offered partly because they portray an emotional truth. As columnist Anna Quindlen said: “The world is full of women blindsided by the unceasing demands of motherhood, still flabbergasted by how a job can be terrific and torturous.”

Still, I think the visions are dodgy. One makes motherhood a dream, and the other portrays it as a prison; but really they’re just different sides of the same coin. They’re both constructs wherein Mommy is more an object acted upon (by either angel children or little devils) than a mature subjective woman taking care of business. Whether you sigh wistfully or smile ear-to-ear when you watch that school bus cart Junior away in September, real mommies understand the complexity: this is the work of our hearts, our most profound attachment, and it’s damn hard too.

Leigh Rastivo Nolan writes fiction and nonfiction, and teaches writing and literature at Old Dominion University and TCC. She is also on staff at Port Folio Weekly in Norfolk, VA