How To Manage The Summer Shifties
Longing for summer whimsy
It’s June - summer is here! The days are long, the school year is over, meals on the grill are the norm, and the temperatures are nearly perfect. The carefree days of summer are upon us. Or they should be, at least. From January on, I long for the days of summer. I long for the warm temperatures, dinners outside on the patio, unrestricted bedtimes, and less rigor. But most of all, I long for the whimsy of summer: the relaxed state of mind. Unfortunately for me, once it’s here, I start to suffer from a condition I like to call the Summer Shifties.
What are the Summer Shifties? It’s a term I’ve come up with to describe my state of being during the summer. I’m constantly shifting - sometimes minute-to-minute. Plans are continually shifting, so my priorities move to keep everyone else’s intact. I consistently sacrifice my work or priorities for the sake of others. At the moment, I shift willingly, but often I feel exhausted and, sometimes, resentful after the fact. During the rest of the year, I have similar demands on my time, but they are confined to certain hours of the day, or I have more hours to manage what I need to do. I can shift the needs of others to the more condensed time frame, leaving a more significant chunk of time available for my priorities. I’m still serving others in my life, but it feels less shifting, draining, and more manageable.
Please do not take this as a rant about being burned out on parenting, not appreciating my family, or being overprivileged. I know I don’t stand alone in this. I’ve had many conversations with women/caregivers who feel precisely the same way. Finding a little time for yourself that doesn’t involve waking up at an insane hour feels monumental. Trying to connect with a friend for an hour is challenging. In the last week alone, shifting schedules have forced a friend and I to punt our brief coffee date several times. Having coffee with a friend may seem like a luxury, and it is, but it’s also a sanity check. It’s a way of filling our cups when we feel overwhelmed. It’s a connection we desperately need when demands on our time are significant. It’s a way of staying in alignment. It’s a preventative measure in managing the Summer Shifties.
As a mom/caregiver, you know how sacred even the slightest bit of alone time is in the summertime. It’s almost a guilty pleasure if you can swing it. For me, my guilty pleasure takes place early on Wednesday mornings. My daughter has her weekly visitation with my ex-husband on Tuesday nights. On Wednesday mornings, I take some time to set my daily intentions, engage in a longer workout, and maybe have an extra cup of coffee in solitude. Sometimes, my husband travels for work, so I am home alone on Wednesday mornings. It’s a bonus and another preventative measure. It’s not that I don’t love seeing my family, but that uninterrupted solitude is the anecdote that helps manage my Summer Shifties. That extra time in the morning to just be A-L-O-N-E is heavenly. Don’t get me wrong; there are other days that I love having an additional couple of minutes with my husband in the morning. I also embrace some rainy mornings when summer camp is canceled, which leads to snuggle time on the couch with my teenage daughter. Those are anecdotes to the Summer Shifties as well.
The Summer Shifties are brought on by the constant accommodations we make as moms/caregivers. This is what we are expected to do. It’s part of the job description. Women have been conditioned to abandon their own needs and take on excessive responsibility for years and years. It has been ingrained in the mindset of all of us - women and men. It’s not chauvinism or sexism. It’s an unconscious expectation of society and ourselves regardless of how far we have evolved. It results from years of societal and self-imposed patterns deeply embedded in our unconscious. This takes individual and collective shifting to change.
I was listening to a podcast by Alyssa Nobriga called Healing the Mother-Daughter Relationship (EP 35), where she called this pattern “over-responsibility.” She defined over-responsibility as “taking (take) care of others without taking care of myself.” This resonated with me as this is a symptom of the Summer Shifties and an everyday experience as a mom/woman. A default behavior is to self-abandon, sometimes leaving us frustrated, exhausted, or resentful. When I experience the Summer Shifties, many of my responsibilities feel aggravating and heavy. Everything seems more complicated than it needs to be. I feel exasperated, edgy, and snippy. These are not the feelings of summer I want to invite in for an extended visit.
The response I get frequently from my husband is to do what I need to do. While I know he has the best intentions, a slight shift for me isn’t a simple change in my daily calendar. He doesn’t see how shifting one day doesn’t change the trajectory of the next two to three months. There are things he can’t see. He can’t see the invisible balls in the air containing the emotional energy of those I love. Those can’t be dropped. As caregivers, dropping those balls is something we can’t fathom. Keeping them in motion is what we do. Good, bad, or indifferent, it’s hardwired within us.
Maybe the Summer Shifties aren’t exclusive to having time to oneself. Maybe it’s a combination of symptoms. Perhaps it’s a combination of needing time for oneself, “over-responsibility,” and managing a busy summer schedule. It’s a finite period, and the pressure is on to cram it all in. Some of those pressures aren’t even put upon us by ourselves. It’s the rigor and demand of the activities of those around us.
I’m dating myself, but I had LAZY summer days when I was a kid. Sleeping in, watching soap operas, hanging out with my friends, sleepovers, playing in the basement late at night while my mom ironed and watched Johnny Carson, playing kickball with the neighborhood kids until it was too dark to see the ball, going to the pool or beach, working on my tan, having taco salad in the basement because it was too hot to eat upstairs in our un-airconditioned house, and the list goes on. It was never long enough in my view as a child, but it was leisurely. It was fun, relaxed and whimsical! I’m sure it was work for my mom, but it was also a different time. She could send us outside for hours and not worry about where we were and what could happen to us when she needed a break. She didn’t need to track us on an app on our phones—a much simpler, safer time.
Maybe that’s why I suffer from the Summer Shifties. It’s that I long for the simpler, quieter days of summer. Those days my fond memories are made of. Times have changed, and some simplicities that once were won’t return. Perhaps, if we try, we can manifest at least one simpler way of being into our lives this summer, thus releasing some of the Summer Shifties.