There are lots of things people warn you about when you have a baby, or get pregnant, or even mention the idea of adding a small human to your surroundings. They tend to revolve around sleep, or feedings, or not being able to ever wear light colours leaving the house. As they get that bit older, it becomes around “tips around separation anxiety” and them starting school, and then, the ever-present question of “Why the hell is Maths different from when we were children so now I am always wrong when I am helping with homework?”. There are a million posts online about “Nobody warned me about…” when it comes to parenting. Half of it is about how BORED you can become, sitting in an armchair, with a latched on baby, having watched ALL of Netflix and definitely getting crumbs in their hair from whatever you’ve eaten over their heads. Some are about the freedoms you’ll feel upon return to the workplace, if you do return to the workplace, along with the ever-present guilt of being a “working mum”.
But nobody warns you about the Summer Camps.
In Irish primary schools, the Summer Holidays run from the end of June to the end of August/start of September. They’re eight weeks long. As a child, that seemed like a forever expanse, as a teenager (with an extra month tacked on outside of years where state exams took over), a time not long enough as an escape from the confinement of a pleated skirt and days in a building I didn’t like. As a mother, it feels like a LIFETIME.
My childhood was very much one where my parents had “a village”. I had three grandparents who were very involved, one who lived next door to us, relatives where I would go to stay for parts of the Summer. My mother was a stay at home mother for a few years while we were kids, because the practicalities of remaining in the workplace with three children under five were crazy. My memories of the summer holidays during those years don’t particularly stick out, aside from the family trip to Kerry to go camping in 1998, or the trips abroad together in the years after. When we got a bit older we would work with my Dad, which was kind of a hybrid childcare/child labor arrangement which has left me with an absolute hatred of cleaning windows.
There were Summer Camps in later years, I have vague recollections of them, stronger ones towards the end of Primary School, in particular an all-day camp held in then-WIT (now SETU) which culminated in a trip to Oakwood (yes, they brought us to WALES for the day on the ferry). Very start-of-the-Celtic-Tiger feels from it.
These are not the kind of camps that are available now. In a post-pandemic landscape, you’re lucky if you get four hours a day out of a Summer Camp that costs you a small fortune and starts long after you’re meant to have started work, and finishes long before you finish. Summer Camps, which are meant to act as a childcare option for working parents, seem to somehow make life harder, unless you’ve got a really chill boss and a very flexible ability to work from the car outside the Summer Camp.
One camp I looked at last year (for my then 9 year old) was saying they would have the children for an hour and a half a day. Starting at half one, ending at three. WHO DOES THAT SUIT? I did spot one Summer camp on the other side of County Dublin which was operating a FREE Summer Camp for the low, low price of indoctrinating your child to whatever it is their church believed in…. and you know what, my heathen child hasn’t been signed up for it, but I did briefly consider just how bad that would honestly be.
Now, I will say this - there are some advantages to splitting custody of your child with your co-parent. The co-ordination of the Summer holidays, absolutely, is one of those. For now it is FOUR weeks that I have to worry about, rather than eight, therefore halving the mental load of trying to figure out how to fill them. Especially when you know full well that your own capacity for hearing the words “I’m Bored” and “I’m Hungry, but not for that” are LONG gone by Day Two of the Summer holidays. I am contemplating monetizing this Substack purely to fund the extra food that will be required for four weeks of him being at home for an extra six hours a day, because for those four weeks, I will be living with The Very Hungry Caterpillar, minus the sleeping for three days in a cocoon. As the majority of parents can tell you, the second you wean your child, you need to set up some form of a fund for the eternal supply of blueberries or raspberries that they seem to live off for several years at a time. How these children survive in school on far less food, I have absolutely no idea, but it’s definitely a phenomenon I’ve seen reflected in other houses too.
I have two camps organised already - one, which is located very close to where I work, so I can work mornings and pick him up at lunchtime, the other, way in the other direction BUT it does give a whole six hours of full-on-outdoors-activity-away-from-screens which will further decrease the Mammy guilt about the increased screen-time caused by the lack of being in school. There’s another week where I’ve the week booked off work and he’s off to stay with his grandmother for a few days at the end of it to discover the joys of farming (as someone who grew up in rural Ireland, it never quite stops making me laugh just how different my very suburban child sees the idea of cows), and I’m sure he will leave there having imparted the Word of Our Lord And Saviour Ash Ketchum to them, repeatedly. Both camps have involved handing over a Monthly Children’s Allowance payment or more, and I can only hope that they work out better than the Lego camp from last year which sold itself as “teaching the children how to build structures, play fun games etc” and in practice was four hours of babysitting them to make the Lego sets as set out on the instruction booklet. I am also still smarting from Summer 2021 when my not-reading-the-website properly led to me signing up and paying for what I thought was an in-person Summer Camp that turned out to be a week long of VIDEOS being sent to the child for them (and the adult with them) to learn a song to, to create a video at the end of the week. (There was a lot of deep breathing needed when I realised that mistake).
I don’t know how working parents with multiple kids manage it. I am far from the only one who is away from my “family village” by living in a different part of the country to grandparents/relatives who are able to pitch in, and honestly, Ireland has changed a lot in 20 years, it isn’t as common to have a stay-at-home parent because the cost of living has increased to the extent that a mortgage requires two incomes, if you’re lucky enough to have one at all. I’m aware costs of everything, including insurance, going up have contributed to costs of Summer Camps rising, or there being a need for two sittings (a morning and and afternoon, instead of one all-day one) for it to become a profitable enterprise.
I’m also aware that this is something that has been made easier by the normalization of hybrid working, that I am able to tell my office that I will be working from home during the afternoons after camp, and not need to find extra childcare in addition to the Summer Camps. I’m sure there will be parents reading this who don’t have such flexibility, who think I’m whinging (sure, I am, this is my corner of the internet for that afterall, welcome), or those who think I’m saying that Summer should be shorter (Nope, honestly, if homeschooling taught me anything, it’s that teachers should be getting paid many multitudes of what they are currently paid and deserve all the breaks they can have). I am however saying, that for working parents, it becomes a complete and utter mess where until your child is old enough to be left home alone for even part of the day, let alone the whole day, unless you have your childcare ducks in a row.
So yes, if you’ve come across a mythical magical camp that doesn’t cost a full rent payment that actually looks after your child for a full work day… consider yourself one of the universe’s chosen ones! (And perhaps let a girl in on it in the comments!)