Dispatch #38: The Mommy Experiment

Divesting from the summer camp industrial complex

Tuesday is the last day of school for my kids, and the day after that we begin what I’ve been calling—in my head—the Mommy Experiment. This experiment entails me being a full-time parent for approximately nine weeks, from the moment school ends on Tuesday to when the new semester starts in August.

Did I count the weeks? You bet your ass I did.

Unlike my husband, who has a salaried 9-5 job with benefits and a 401k, I am a writer who works for myself. I primarily write novels (which take forever years), but I also publish the occasional book review and essay, and I write this newsletter—weekly for paid subscribers, plus a monthly one for all. I also teach throughout the year. None of the teaching is full time, though, which is how I prefer it. I like to focus most of my work day on my writing, and I also like the luxury (and it is a luxury in this country) to get my kids by 4 pm every school day.

Way back in December, I crunched the numbers and decided it didn’t make sense to pay for summer camp for Bean, who is almost 13, Ginger, who is 8, and, Mickey, who will be 5 in August.

In the past, we’d nab the Early Bird special discount ($100 off) for Bean’s coding camp, and then, when the art camp announced its schedule, we’d enroll Ginger; if we waited more than three hours after receiving that email, the camp would be full. From there, we’d collage together the more affordable park camp along with the less affordable boutique camps. During all of this, Mickey, who is about to graduate from TK at a public elementary school, attended preschool.

If you’re a parent of young kids, or if you know a parent of young kids, you are aware of how fucked the summer is for most families. Once daycare and preschool are over, you’re on your own trying to balance work and parenting—ha, as if you weren’t already on your own in this country! But it gets worse in elementary school. School hours don’t line up with typical office hours, and the summer schedule is not designed for working parents.

On the one hand, I like that school does not mimic work. Kids have the rest of their lives to work! I don’t want my children in school until dinner, and I also want to give them a couple of months off to goof away the days and detach from the clock and academic expectations. What is childhood if not long afternoons of sunshine and fun, your backpack cobwebbing at the back of the closet, homework a far off concept as you burnish an image of your brand new, back-to-school self? What paradise!

On the other hand, it’s challenging to maintain a professional life and raise children; my family benefits enormously from my flexible schedule. When both parents work, summer in particular is a puzzle and a financial strain. What do we do with our kids over those nine weeks of unscheduled time? As my friend Lydia Kiesling writes, “Households with two working parents are the norm; there is no beatific mother to open the screen door and let the kids in after a long day roaming free.”

I guess, this summer, I’m the beatific mother?

As Scooby Doo says, Ruh-roh.

Then again, the fact that our family can even attempt this experiment underscores our privilege. We’re lucky I can stop working and still afford life. That is, we can afford life…without camp.

*

Here’s exactly how much last summer cost our Los Angeles-based family:

Mickey attended preschool all day, four days a week. That cost $1300 a month—so let’s say $3000 for the summer.

Ginger’s art camp was $450 a week, from 9 am to 3 pm (it’s now $550 a week!), and she attended for two weeks, for $900.

Her theatre and dance camp, for the same hours, cost $475 a week (and now is $500). She went for one week.

Bean went to coding camp for two weeks, at $500 a week, but with the $100 off for the early bird discount, so it cost $900.

Ginger attended a throwback outdoor camp (friendship bracelets, cooking class, capture the flag…) for their two-week module, from 9 am to 3:30 pm, which cost $1000. (It’s now a whopping $1200 for two weeks!)

Ginger went to a week of parks and rec camp for $260.

Bean was at his fancy sleepaway camp in Cambria for $1850.

Oh, and Bean went to his role-playing sword camp for two weeks, at $550 a pop (now it’s $595) for $1100.

That, ladies and gents, is nearly $9500. This is for one summer—and not even the whole summer! That number doesn’t include the cost of our roadtrip to Tucson to see my in-laws for two weeks. Plus, I took off another week and change so my kids could chill at home.

Of course, there are other options, other choices. We knew, for instance, that the sleepaway camp was a major splurge. We told ourselves that Bean wouldn’t go every year, and that it would be worth it because he would get the chance to make lifelong friends and learn to be more independent before entering junior high. (You can imagine how upsetting it was to learn that he’d been mercilessly teased all week by a cabin mate. Gee thanks, Tristan. Can I have my $1850 back? Can I sue Tristan’s family for this money?)

And there are cheaper camps. Maybe. I always hear, after the fact, of these unicorn camps that are very affordable, very fun, and very available. I never find them in time. The local park ones are, as I mentioned, $260 per week, per child. So, cheaper, but not cheap. The subsidized $10 a week park camp in my neighborhood always sells out in seconds (if the website doesn’t crash on you), so good luck getting into that one.

There is free LAUSD summer school, but whenever I try to sell it to my kids, they respond with legitimate screaming. They howl. It’s my fault; they’ve already been spoiled with bespoke camps (the private school of summer, if you will). And, anyway, I don’t actually want them in school. As I said, summer is not for school!

I remember the Rancho Park Y camp of my youth: the songs, the heat, the endless hours outside, the desperation for 45 minutes in the pool. It wasn’t terrible, but I also didn’t like it; I distinctly recall my older sister Heidi complaining about the camp to our (at the time, working) mother, and then me telling Heidi to be quiet. I didn’t want my mom to feel guilty. She had no other choice.

It’s my distaste for that camp that got me to splurge on the boutique camps in the first place. It’s not that these camps are nicer, per se, it’s that they’re more in line with each specific child’s specific interests. I wish I’d had those opportunities when I was young.

*

The brutal truth is that I used to earn more money. We could afford to spend $9,500 on summer childcare. My feeling was, I’d spend whatever it took to continue to write and teach over the summer as my kids pursued their interests. I was making great money, wasn’t I, so why not spend it to support making more?

My income, like that of any writer or freelance creative person, can be unpredictable, and unfortunately I’m earning less money than I used to. And now I have three kids, instead of two, instead of one. Whoops.

I’ve written about this tricky topic before. Although my finances have improved since that newsletter, I could have easily written this very sentence today: “The fact that any money I make will disappear immediately into the great maw of childcare makes me ask: why earn any money? If I didn’t write, I wouldn’t need childcare.”

Such a sentence, such a thought, gives me a crawl-under-a-rock-and-weep feeling.

If I’m honest, I’ve felt guilty for sending my kids to camp so I could do my cute little writing, and that’s why I sought out the most appealing ones. I always knew I could afford to do the Mommy Experiment. Other mothers, mothers with real jobs, might leap at the chance to pause work to hang with their kids. So why didn’t I?

For one, it was important to me that I write year round, and that my job not seem optional. Daddy’s job isn’t optional, so why should Mommy’s be? Also, unlike most people, I love my job. On Mondays, when my kids go off to school, I look forward to working. Writing and teaching enrich my life. It is through writing that my days become not only comprehensible, but beautiful. I know no other way to be.

It’s easier to tell your young children they have to go to aftercare, to the babysitter, to summer camp, so that Mommy and Daddy can make enough money to live. “I wish I didn’t have to work, honey,” a parent might say, “I wish I could stay with you, but I can’t.” That makes it sound like, if given the choice, you’d always choose to be with your child.

After this summer, I guess my kids will know the truth: that I can always drop writing to take care of them. And, that, usually, I choose not to.

*

It’s here that Patrick would likely cut in to say, um, actually, we do need Edan’s income.

When the kids are in (free) school, what I earn keeps us in the black. Life just gets more and more expensive, doesn’t it? I can’t afford to pause work forever.

Forever, no. The summer, yes.

In the end, camp simply isn’t worth the expense. Our money can go toward the million of other things we’re trying to pay for. Our house and groceries, yes. But, also, we’re fixing a bathroom shower (it’s been unusable for nearly a year), and after decades with one car (in Los Angeles! with three kids!) we bought a second one. These feel like bills worth paying. Thousands of dollars for my kids to be gone for six hours a day—not even the length an actual work day? Nah. You can have your 9 am to 3 pm camp bullshit. What a racket!

*

Patrick remains nervous about the no summer camp plan. He doesn’t like the parenting scales tipping so heavily to my side. He and I are happily married in part because we practice domestic equity; we are truly committed to the fair distribution of household and parenting labor. But what happens when childcare becomes primarily my responsibility? I think it’s good that we’re talking about it and both feeling a little hesitant. This conversation will stretch all summer.

Patrick also knows how much I love to write, how much I need it. Will I be okay taking care of three children, week after week after week, instead of working on my novel? Am I going to…run away?

I tell him not to worry. It’ll be tolerable because there is a clear beginning and end, and because this was my decision. The last time I was in this situation, it was foisted on me by COVID. Now, it’s different. It’s my choice to be with my kids over the summer. I like that agency.

The truth is, making this summer plan in January lit a fire under me; in the last six months, I’ve written a lot. I chiseled away at my project every weekday, and on three separate occasions I left my family so that I could work on the book intensely for days at a time. My goal was to get as much of my novel draft completed as I could, and ideally, to reach a point where two months away from the manuscript would help the project rather than hurt it. I’m happy to say that I got to an appropriate stopping point. The book could use the marinading it’s going to get. To write with this pause in mind has been the greatest motivation I could ask for.

I am also very clear on what work I will and won’t do this summer, beyond being with my kids. I won’t look at my novel, I won’t accept any freelance assignments (unless, I don’t know, The New Yorker calls me…), and I won’t teach.

I will, however, continue to do this newsletter. It’s a nice (if small) revenue stream, and it’ll help me stay sane. I like writing something that I can immediately share, and I can do it in interstitial moments—during TV time, or in the evenings or on a Saturday. I know Patrick will be accommodating.

I’m also going to try my hand at morning pages, which I’ve never done before. I may abandon the plan right away…we will see. I do like the idea of a daily writing practice that has zero goals, zero interest in progression toward a final product.

*

Now that the Mommy Experiment is almost upon me, I feel dread and excitement. I am curious about it, and I am also already bored.

I always say that parenting and writing are logistically at odds but existentially symbiotic. That is, it can be a logistical headache finding the time to write when you’re a parent, but what you learn from parenting—about other people, about your own gifts and flaws, about connection and humanity, about noticing—feeds your writing. With the logistical knot of writing-while-parenting temporarily removed, only its gifts will be left. Can I savor them, save them, for when I re-open my book document? Once I remove the expectation of writing from my day, what space will open up for me and my life as a mother?

The fantasy is that I become the mother I’ve always want to be: attentive, wholly present, calm.

It’s also the nightmare. What would that mean for my writing?

*

When I think about the Mommy Experiment, I think of breastfeeding, of the doing-nothing of nursing a baby.

The thing about nursing—if it works for you, and I realize that’s a big if!—is that all it takes is sitting. As I fed my kids with my body, I sat. That’s it. Occasionally, I’d watch TV. Usually, I’d read a novel. A lot of the time I’d stare into space, or I might inspect my baby’s ear or their neck, or pick at their cradle cap.

A baby can suck down a bottle much faster than they can nurse, and so, by comparison, breastfeeding is inefficient.

But as a baby nurses you can just…be.

As many will tell you, breastfeeding is a privilege because it isn’t free; that math doesn’t take into account a mother’s time. And it’s true, nursing did take up my time. But time away from what, exactly? From doing something else, something productive, something valued, and by valued, I mean something that can be monetized.

Nursing offered me the opportunity to bow out of everything but a single task and this single task was by turns essential, mundane, dull, tender, annoying, and profound. It wasn’t more important than my writing, but it wasn’t less important, either.

What I write does have a monetary value in the marketplace, but its value does not begin and end there. That isn’t why I write. My writing does not need to be created efficiently; it only needs to be attended to, nurtured, taken seriously.

And, parenting, like my writing career, is work. It’s impressive and important and powerful.

I’m not giving up one for the other. It was never a binary.

*

Here’s the summer schedule for us:

For the first two weeks, Bean will be in Costa Rica with my mom; Super Grandma takes each grandkid on an international trip when they turn thirteen, which is just so cool. For a week after he returns, he will be a junior CIT at the coding camp—after five summers, he earned a FREE week of camp. Be still my heart!

For the final week of summer, Ginger is going to one week of her theatre and dance camp.

Mickey has zero camps.

In July, the entire family will go to Tucson for two weeks.

And that’s it.

We will spend the summer going to the beach, the park, the arcade. I will drop my oldest at the mall with ten bucks and his flip phone. I will let them explore the canyon behind our house. We will watch a ton of TV, make some slime, go out for croissants, swim in Grandma’s new pool (she just moved into a new house close to us!), go with Grandpa for chocolate rugelach, and meet the cousins to play. We will visit museums. We will ride bikes and the train in Griffith Park. We will go out for pancakes. We will visit the library, the bookstore, the Huntington Gardens, find the best splash pads, check out the pinball games at the comic book store near us. Maybe I’ll take them to Knott’s Berry Farm. Maybe I’ll drive us to Ojai for the day. Maybe we’ll go ride a ferris wheel as the sun sets over the Pacific Ocean. Maybe I’ll realize how lucky I am.

If only mothering three kids over the summer were as tidy and idyllic as writing a paragraph about it.

*

If you enjoyed reading this, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support my work. Thank you!