You Only Get 18 Summers With Your Kids

Everyone is talking about the 90s summer as if we could just opt back into it. As if it were a setting on a time machine: press a button, select “1997,” and suddenly your days smell like sunscreen and VHS tapes, your biggest responsibility is not losing your house key on a lanyard around your neck, and your mother calls you in when it gets dark and that’s the end of it.

I am too prone to nostalgia, but, for once, not dreaming of the 90s summer—not because I am “not like other girls (moms),” I very much am, but because my baby is too small to reap the benefits of it. It’s not like I can let a one‑year‑old out of the house by herself to roam around the streets. But let’s talk in a few years.

This is my first real summer with my baby. Well, technically the second, because she was born in the summer - but that summer, the summer of her birth, is all hazy. I was still bleeding through all of August; I was in a bubble, in the trenches, and summering was the last thing on my mind.

The End of Summer

There have been a lot of amazing things happening, and some soul-crushing ones too, which is, I suppose, to be expected—this is life, and what is life if not a healthy mix of both.

But things are mostly good, and I am in great spirits. I spend a lot of time with my baby. I sleep well. I drink a lot of water. I eat a lot of stone fruit and berries. My blood must be half cherry juice at this point.

I try to savour the summer. Half of it has gone by in the blink of an eye, and the other half is about to go by even faster. Time is a cruel mistress.

Next week we are going back to Sweden, where I hope for lovely weather, a lot of swimming and BBQs, late evenings with friends, chilled rosé at the beach, and maybe some sailing. My father-in-law is coming from Japan to work on his boat, and perhaps we will take Symphony out. I must buy a life jacket for Bean, just in case.

I feel this urgency to do things: to go out, churn ice cream, bake pies, swim, have picnics, watch sunsets, play in the sand. As if the season is something I could miss if I sit still for too long.

You only get eighteen summers with your kids, they say. I disagree. You get maybe five. After that, they are no longer quite children—not in the same way. The baby fat softens into angles, the endless questions about why the sky is blue an the grass is green (because I said so) give way to more private worlds. It will still be wonderful, of course, it will even be more fun, I believe, but it will not be the same.

This summer feels almost suspended outside of time. The days are long and elastic, measured by naps, snacks, and the slow drift of light across the floor. Everything is immediate, physical, close: a sticky hand in yours, a damp curl at the back of the neck, the weight of a small, warm body falling asleep against your chest after a day in the sun. What an unbelievable luck all of it is.

This fullness feels almost unbearable at times. Not because it is difficult—though sometimes it is—but because you can feel, even as you are inside it, that it is already slipping away. And still, you try to hold it. Five summers, maybe. Five bright, overflowing seasons where you are their whole universe.

(But also five autumns, five winters, and five springs—must not forget that.) And then the whole life ahead. Must not forget that too.

I think this urgency, this desire to freeze time comes from the fact that my daughter is turning one next week, and, for some reason, it feel monumental. I am one year a mother. Wow.

I shouldn’t be this sentimental. I don’t know why I am. I am happy in the present and excited for the future—for the time when we can all play board games together, when I can read by the pool again, for the first love (not the first heartbreak), and for everything else that makes up the magic of life. Maybe it’s not really sadness at all, just an awareness of how layered it all is. How nothing replaces anything else; it shifts, expands, becomes something new. One kind of closeness making way for another.

Things I try to savor: outside pram naps, for instance, and overwhelming urge to squeeze my baby’s impossibly chunky feet, peonies, indulgent and necessary at once—so beautiful, so fleeting, so unapologetically chic, sweet potato fries, crisp and warm, cherries, eaten by the handful, by the bowl, the sandwiches with juice-bursting tomatoes, evenings with girlfriends, a glass of prosecco in hand, and, of course, swimming, the full-body reset of it.

Thank you, universe, for this beautiful life. I will never take any of it for granted.

Some very good things:

1. This wonderful essay by Annaliese Godderz about the hardships and pleasures of personal style. Loved it. Gorgeous outfits, wonderful books.

2. Another wonderful essay by Charlotte Stephens about the inadequacy of “just you wait comments.” I am waiting!

3. These perfect DOEN jeans are on sale for $99!!!

   

4. The chicest dress to exist by Sezane.

   

5. I am currently reading The Night Swim, and so far it’s really good. It does tackle heavy topics, like rape and rape culture, so go in prepared.

6. Tangled Webs by Callie Coles is an absolute delight.
   

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Love, Alena