The hot sun beat down on my back. The playground did not have enough shade, a fact I had once again forgotten until I got there and realized I had left my hat at home. Nearby, my children improvised a game of hide-and-seek with two other kids they had met a few minutes earlier. One of them counted laboriously to 60, fingers splayed over her supposedly closed eyes, while the others scattered in search of the perfect hiding spot. Next to my feet lay my tote bag, heavy with library books, and the aluminum water bottle I carry with me everywhere. I leaned my calf against the water bottle, relishing the relief of the cool metal touching my skin. Together the bag and the bottle represented two prongs of my three-pronged strategy to the fine art of spending a summer doing nothing. The third prong, I found, was a willingness to suffer.
The idea for a summer of nothing came to me earlier this spring, when my kids, overtaxed with swimming lessons, martial arts, piano lessons, Scouts, and gymnastics, started getting weepy every time I told them it was time to leave the house. While each activity was something they loved, together it was all too much. Add in MCAS testing, end-of-year parties and performances, and the stress and excitement of finishing another year of school, and by June my kids were begging for a break. Nothing was starting to sound like something we all would enjoy, so we hatched a plan. July was going to be our month of nothing: no camps, no classes, no schedules to follow, nowhere in particular to be. The goal was to have adventures and make our own fun without overscheduling or resorting to endless hours of screens. After nine months of schlepping kids from class in Westford to practice in Boxborough, the idea of doing nothing felt as cool and refreshing as the ice-cold water bottle.
Flaws in the plan
Like any desperately conceived escape strategy, the flaws in this plan became apparent almost immediately. Though the kids were excited to shed the shackles of daily routine and just wing it, I noticed immediately how much I rely on a predictable schedule. As a writer, my work is flexible and can be done almost anytime, but without a regular routine, anytime can quickly morph into never. The same could be said of my exercise regimen and even my grocery shopping habits. After just four days, in which I got no work done, failed to exercise, and the kitchen ran out of milk and sandwich bread, I started to worry. Would this be the summer the wheels came off the wagon?
Clearly, tweaks were needed. While I was willing to suffer in support of our pursuit of nothing, I was not ready to send the household into a full downward spiral, so I quickly instituted some expectations. Making rules felt like it was against the spirit of our plan, so I bartered with the best currency I had: video games. In exchange for completing some basic chores as soon as they got out of bed, the kids could earn an hour of Minecraft each morning. Adding these extra tasks encouraged the kids to stay in bed later, so I stopped finding them sitting on the couch ready to be entertained at twenty to six in the morning. I gleefully watched my son devour whole chapter books in a single morning as a way of putting off his chores. I’d pass by his room at 9 a.m. where he was still in bed reading and think, joke’s on you, kid! Altogether, the resist-surrender-reward chore cycle earned me hours of uninterrupted time to go running, do yoga, work on projects, fritter away my time on Facebook, and write. It wasn’t enough, but it was something.
Next, I started practicing a controversial parenting practice one of my friends calls “benign neglect.” I told the kids that keeping them entertained was no longer my main job as their mom, and part of the deal with not signing up for classes or camps was they had to figure out their own fun. I’ve read that boredom is a key component to nurturing kids’ creativity, but according to my children, it also feels like torture. Knowing that I’d end up on the receiving end of a lot of whining if I didn’t give them some tools, we sat down together and made “summer fun flashcards,” which listed all the things they could do if they found themselves bored and out of ideas. It gave me great pleasure to watch a child, sick of wallowing in her suffering on the couch, pick herself up and start to shuffle through the cards until suddenly, something fun popped out.
Something from nothing
I’m not going to lie; my kids endured a lot of waiting this summer while Mom did boring adult stuff at the grocery store and car dealership. But they also enjoyed hours of board games and Uno, and they built fleets of Lego spaceships. We went on family adventures, explored local playgrounds and ice cream shops, rented kayaks, collected treasures. My son started writing and illustrating his own comic book series. My daughter caught, named, and built houses for all the frogs in our backyard pond. We took our first family trip, a long weekend in Washington, D.C., and because we now understood the importance of doing nothing, we split our time between the memorials and the hotel pool, instead of trying to pack in as many tourist experiences as we could.
When August arrived, our summer of nothing came to a close. The kids restarted weekly tae kwon do, and my son now attends an afternoon camp. In just a few weeks, school will start. But we are moving into this next season changed by the nothing that came before it. The kids seem centered, calm. The circles under my daughter’s eyes have vanished. My son, in front of all the other kids, hugged me goodbye when I dropped him off at camp yesterday. I find myself reflecting, in these hyperconnected, hyperscheduled times, on the gift of a season slow enough to get bored. And I have remembered an important truth about myself, which is how well I can endure, and even enjoy, anything—even nothing—if I carry a water bottle and bring a good book.
