The Door Just Opened: Summer Holidays Then and Now

I was born in 1988. My childhood soundtrack was the Spice Girls blaring from a boombox while I rollerbladed round the green, and my curfew was the street lights. That was it. That was the whole system. The door opened, my mum said don't talk to strangers, and I disappeared until the sky went orange.

Nobody packed me a bag.

This summer, six weeks in, I am the entertainer, the snack distributor, the taxi service, the human events calendar for two small people who have informed me, more than once, that a day at home is "boring." I have become fluent in a kind of guilt I didn't know existed before I had kids — the guilt of a home day gone wrong, and the guilt of the club day too, because the clubs run 10 til 3, which is not a school day and is not a work day, it's just a gap dressed up as childcare, and I'm the one standing in it.

Before we leave the house now there is a list. Water bottle. Suncream. Snacks, plural, because one snack is never enough and running out is a crisis. Hats. A change of clothes, just in case. My mum's entire pre-departure checklist in 1994 was: have you got your key.

The gap is the story

I keep thinking about that gap. Not with resentment towards my own kids, and not with some rose-tinted lie that the 90s were better — plenty about that decade wasn't. But the gap itself is the story. Somewhere between rollerblading unsupervised round a green and now, the expectation of what a mother is meant to provide, anticipate, and protect against every single hour of every single day went from "be back before dark" to a full logistics operation with snacks as line items.

And I don't think it's only external. Some of it is other people, other mums, other-mums-on-Instagram, the club timetables that were clearly built by someone who has never had to also earn a living. But some of it is in my own head now too, a voice that formed somewhere in the scroll, telling me that boredom is a failure state I need to fix rather than the exact thing that raised me.

Boredom used to be weather

I remember being bored constantly as a kid. Bored on the green, bored in my bedroom, bored enough to invent an entire imaginary shop out of my nan's spare buttons. Nobody rushed in to fix it. Boredom was just weather. You sat in it until you got restless enough to go and make your own fun, and that restlessness was, I think now, the whole point. It was the bit doing the actual work. Nobody was optimising my afternoon. Nobody was worried I'd remember it as the summer nothing happened.

Now if my kids say they're bored on a home day, some part of me hears it as a review. As if I've been assessed and found wanting by a seven year old with no context for what a Tuesday used to look like. So I scramble. I pull out the paints, or I promise a trip to the park, or I cave and put the TV on and then feel guilty about that too, because now I've swapped one guilt for another and there was never a version of the day where I simply got to sit in it.

A gap dressed up as childcare

Even the clubs don't quite solve it. Ten till three isn't long enough to get a real stretch of work done and isn't short enough to feel like nothing, so August turns into the school run again, minus the school, plus a bag that's grown its own personality. Suncream on before we leave, then again mid-morning. Two water bottles, because one always goes missing by 11am. Enough snacks to feed a small platoon. My mum's version of all this was a key on a shoelace and a vague instruction to be sensible.

I want to be clear that I'm not saying any of this to have a go at myself, or at other mums, or even really at the clubs and their odd little hours. I think it's more that I keep noticing the size of the gap between what was expected of a parent then and what's expected now, and nobody seems to be talking about how enormous that gap actually is. We didn't get a memo saying the job had changed. It just quietly did, generation by generation, headline by headline, algorithm by algorithm, until "keeping a child alive and reasonably happy" became "curating a childhood," and somehow that became the mother's job specifically, mostly invisible, mostly unpaid, mostly done while also trying to hit send on an email.

I don't have a neat ending for this one. I don't think there is one. I just know that when the street lights used to come on, that was the whole plan. And now the plan starts before we've even got our shoes on, and it doesn't really stop until they're back in bed and I'm lying there running through tomorrow's version of the same list.

🖤