Lila Mackay is very misunderstood by Gill Sims

We have a funny blog today from author Gill Sims, one that many parents will relate to!

‘You only have eighteen precious summers with your children, so make the most of them’.

We’ve all seen variations on the quote about only having eighteen summers with our children, and we’ve all felt the guilt about what if we aren’t doing enough to make the most of them? What if the memories created aren’t golden enough, sun drenched enough, happy enough? Why have we never run laughing through a cornfield on the way to the beach, all of us dressed in spotless white linen, with glowing skin and shiny hair, before scampering with glee through the sparkling blue waves, and building perfect sandcastles? What if we have failed utterly in our parental duties and have not created magic for our children? In short, why do our summers not look like a carefully curated, cunningly filtered Instagram highlight reel?

The main reason why is real life. Cornfields are generally full of bitey things, sandcastles inevitably involve sobbing from one sibling because the other has knocked down their creation, and sparking blue waves mean at least one person will fall in the water fully clothed and be crying before you have even put down your adorable, vintage and very heavy wicker hamper that you regretted before you even left the carpark.

And it doesn’t get any easier as they get older. As the pressure of the eighteen summers ticking by increases with the passing years, so too does your child’s embarrassment at being seen in public with you, and refusal to do anything at all that ticks those ‘happy memories’ boxes (my children still remind me of the many times I yelled ‘Well, just look like you’re making happy memories for the photo then!’)

After many years of lugging picnic hampers, and trying to get ketchup stains out of white linen after giving up and stopping for a McDonald’s on the way home, I eventually came to the conclusion that despite what we are led to believe by social media- not just the ‘influencers’ but looking at our friends’ apparently joyous and blood-and-tears-free days out- we would all enjoy the summer holidays more if we didn’t try so hard. If we simply accepted that we don’t need to spend every spare minute doing something with our children in order to make the most of one of those eighteen summers. If we didn’t feel pressured to spend money we can ill afford on expensive days out, because surely you have to be doing something with them if you are with your children? The realisation that sometimes it was all right for the children to be bored, to be at home with no planned activities, to have to find something to do themselves, actually turned our frantic summer holidays into much calmer and enjoyable times. We started to spend days at home where they were told to go and read a book, or handed some rather battered craft supplies from various bargain stores with the suggestion they ‘made something’, but without me hovering and getting involved (top tip, send them into the garden to do this, if you have one, unless you want your house to be glitterbombed and smeared in glue). Sometime I even instructed them to just go and find something to do (it was extraordinary how quickly they found a way to entertain themselves when the alternative offered was to tidy their bedroom). All of this meant the days out we did have were much more special and more likely to result in those elusive Happy Memories, than when I was frantically chasing an idea of perfection that only existed on Instagram. After all, no one ever arranged activities for the Famous Five, did they? They had to find their own criminals to foil!