Mourning My Not-So-Vanilla Summer

A riff on end-of-summer blues

The past two, three weeks have been an emotional whirlwind. I am someone more at ease with action than emotion because with action, there is at least something I am supposed to be doing. With emotion, I don’t entirely know where to put my feelings. Where should all this grief go? Where should all this love go? Where should all this hope go? 

I wish I knew.

One of my favorite spots, Mirror Lake near Lake Placid in Upstate New York.

When my daughter first left home for college on the east coast, I traveled and finished a novel and landed an agent and felt a ton of momentum. I took pride in moving forward on my own. I thought I had prepared well and was stepping into my new life with equilibrium and focus. Curveballs followed, doing what curveballs do. Their lessons? That what I didn’t know would humble me. An empty nest is still an empty nest no matter what I do for myself, and children growing up is a seismic shift in a parent’s identity, shifts that unfold over years, not months or semesters. Plans, goals, drive and vision were no longer enough to carry me through. Grief found me after all, and wanted me to sit down and have a face-to-face chat in this quiet, empty nest. “This, too,” Grief would say, over and over and over. “You can chase dreams, make plans, manifest, drive forward, but there’s this, too.”

I commented to several people in the past few weeks how liminal and weird August is. I realized I felt profound grief every August even when my daughter was growing up and I was needed for all kinds of things, so feeling sad in August isn’t new. The end of summer camp performances. The pool floaties being deflated and packed away. Suitcases being emptied and returned to the closet. The sun slipping into the horizon a little earlier. Darkness filling the room around 8 p.m. 

I noticed these shifts more in the Adirondacks in Upstate New York where I spent many August weekends. In the mornings, I would go out alone and paddle board or kayak a small lake while the rest of the family slept, my cappuccino carefully balanced in front of me, and as I crossed the water, I would spot that one tree in the distance that was starting to turn. Autumn making itself known. A speck of orange emerging in the thick of all that forest green. Summers are deceptive; they feel languid but are remarkably fleeting. Autumn also indicated the return of my seasonal affective disorder symptoms. I thought moving to Los Angeles would make August feel lighter, literally and figuratively, that I would escape the darkness, stay in the forever hopeful sunshine.

Not quite.

Kayaking the Adirondacks, where I spent many summers.

Nothing makes the passage of time feel so acute than watching your kid grow up and the seasons change. Nothing stops for anyone, and time fucks with us all. A few days ago, I read this New York Times article by Cody Delistraty that captures this. I never left Los Angeles and had anything but a vanilla summer, and end-of-summer sadness still showed up. This summer, the quotidian became amplified, and therefore even more meaningful. Three weeks ago today, my daughter called me while I was in the frozen foods aisle of Vons wanting to know where in our apartment she could find a facial mask because she was in the mood for tweaking her nighttime skin care routine, all of her 20-year-old impatience barreling through the phone in real time. Life being lived with all those small, immediate requests that fill our days. This phone call three weeks ago took me back to being constantly interrupted, which is part of parenthood, an ongoing series of interruption and disruption as we try to finish work while our children ask for something, or we try to get from A to B and our children repeat their requests, and there in Vons in front of the frozen pizzas, I’m suddenly a thirty-something mother checking my Blackberry for the umpteenth time while my toddler splashes in the bathtub. I’m wearing a skirt and a blouse that needs ironing and I’m in a hurry as I strap her into her car seat because I need to beat rush hour traffic and be at the office early. I’m holding her tiny hand as we make our way through another art museum. I’m telling her to take her Crocs off and place them in the bin as we inch through a TSA line at the airport. I’m in a pink bedroom reading her The Runaway Bunny even though she’s outgrown The Runaway Bunny. I’m eating the giant, perfectly-shaped gluten-free chocolate chip cookies she’s baked for the gazillionth time because it’s two months into the pandemic and my daughter is one of those pandemic bakers and there’s not much else to do. 

I’m driving her to summer camp. 

I’m driving her to work.

I’m driving her to a sleepover. 

I’m driving her friends.

I’m driving her to the orthodontist, the pediatrician, the acupuncturist, the eye doctor, the orthodontist again.

I’m driving her to swim practice. 

I’m driving us to Shake Shack.

I’m driving and I’m driving and I’m driving, and then I’m alone on a kayak and in the distance, a hint of orange on a tree that’s getting ready to let go. 

August messes with our sense of time, a sunny, hazy signal that things are ending. Middle age has its own sounds, and the pace is simultaneously fast and slow, but often, too fast. Now that it’s September and the autumn equinox approaches along with the return of pumpkin spice lattes and sweata weatha, I am eager for equilibrium and focus, to just do, even if Grief is eager for another chat, which I’m sure will happen. The Adirondacks is nearly 3,000 miles away and here in my apartment on the westside of L.A.—motherhood now something very different, something far less urgent, far more quiet—I can still feel the hard plastic seat of that kayak from years ago. I am alone on a gray lake surrounded by mountains, balancing an oar on my lap, a few loons gently bobbing on the surface of the water. There is no rush to be anywhere. No one asking me to do anything. And, not too far away, that one tree with just a few flickers of orange surrounded by green, heralding change.

P.S. To pile onto the nostalgia vibes, here’s a song that hasn’t been on a repeat but does capture my current mood: Molly Drake’s “I Remember,” which feels like sitting in your grandmother’s living room while she’s in the kitchen cooking or pouring you a glass of saccharine-sweet powdered lemonade. I bought this album two weeks ago, not because I needed more vinyl but because I was deep in my end-of-summer sadness. Retail therapy works, and I savored the focus and chase of hunting down a rare find.

I feel one hundred percent better now.

Actually, I have zero buyer’s remorse about this particular impulse buy, and while this was an emotionally-driven transaction, I love having this album and I know I’ll hold onto it. Vinyl is curated, never purged, which I can’t say for my clothes. Reliving memories is a longing for time travel, and Molly Drake’s vocals here beautifully convey an ache to go back to a few perfect summer moments.