Your Sixteenth Summer Prepares You For Life

In the before times - the world before the quarantine - I was one of those moms who spent a large chunk of my time every January desperately filling out the kids summer plans with camps and family visits and activities. Part of this, of course, was the necessity of child care in the ten weeks of the year where school doesn’t fill the time I need to work during the day. I would be lying though, if I didn’t admit that my pride was involved in summer planning as well. It was a big deal to me to be able to send the kids to two weeks of sleep away camp (at a modestly priced place within driving distance), plus arrange for them a week or two on a local college campus for Lego robotics or a week making pottery or whatever other arts and crafts I could manage to find and afford. The husband and I would cobble together intricate pick-up and drop-off plans that often required help from others as the kids bounced from one side of the city to another in June and July, with the idea that exposing them to everything would cause something to stick. They had fun, and I got to feel like a super parent for eight weeks a year.

Of course, 2020 and 2021 were the years of no camps, because they weren’t open. By the time camps did reopen last year, the kids had largely aged out of the affordable options, and now everything left is massively expensive. It’s also time for real college summer programs. I spent about an hour walking my older child through an application to a summer program last week in the hope that she might qualify for a scholarship, only to find that the “scholarships” offered for the program amount to coupons. I was crushed, and the kid was confused. In a way I’m glad this first experience happened with just a summer program and not the real college application process. It was good experience in understanding that we can’t afford the elite higher ed institutions that are now targeting the older child due to her high SAT scores. 

If you were wondering which summer college program I’m referring to, it’s the National Student Leadership Conference. This program offers a taste of dorm life on campuses like Duke and Yale to high school juniors, and says scholarships are available. To find out if you qualify for a scholarship, you must first give them three hundred and fifty non-refundable dollars, after which eighty percent of applicants will get a discount on the main sticker price of their two-week summer programs. NSLC like real college that way - there’s the sticker price, and then the real price, but you won’t know the real price until you commit, and even then, the price of the place is so much that you need to be wealthy to attend.

The summer between junior and senior years of High School were quite different for the husband and I in the early 90’s. He was from a WASP background and did time in Harvard dorms studying classical mythology and other things he loved. I read an article in Sassy magazine and applied to the baby peace corps (Student Conservation Association), and spent time living in a tent and working for the National Park Service for no pay. The summer between junior and senior year of high school really did prepare both the Gen Xers that the husband and I were for the rest of our lives. I went to work and got covered in bug bites and lived like a homeless person while trying to make America’s resources more accessible to the public. The husband learned that nothing he really loved to read or do would ever make any money, so he better choose to do something else. This is how we prepared to be the adults we are today.

This whole year has been a re-adjustment, a grieving period, really, for the kind of higher education preparation and experience we all thought the girls would have. I suppose I thought that when I married a WASP that the kids would automatically be able to attend undergrad somewhere in Boston, or at least New England, just as a default. It’s now impossible for me to even take them on tours of campuses in Boston as I had always dreamed. This change in the vision I had for the kids might not be a bad thing; no one really knows what anyone is supposed to do after High School anyway. Among our friends, those who finished a higher education seem to make just as much as those who didn’t. The difference seems only to be debt and bitterness about the degrees we were told were the way ahead.

I’ve told the oldest child that if she wants to just work her job at the pizza place all summer that’s fine, but she needs to work at least thirty hours per week if that’s the case. She doesn’t seem motivated to work beyond her normal three high school shifts of five hours each. There are affordable state university summer programs, many of which offer real scholarships, and maybe she’ll go to one of those and practice living in a dorm away from us and maybe she won’t. I don’t know if working or gaining college credits is a better path either way. I just know we have no money to help her out with either plan.

Weather damage and clean-up continues to happen all over Atlanta. The only good thing about this is that I know it will continue to stall Cop City construction. The roads are being resurfaced between the capitol building and Peachtree Center, the site of so much smashing two weeks ago. We all seem to be in a pattern of cleaning up one mess after another, waiting on decisions from insurers and lawyers, personally and politically. I don’t know what will happen. No one does. Nobody seems to know when the broken cell phone towers will be restored, so we all just have spotty reception. Nobody seems to know when the broken higher ed system will be fixed, so we’re all just making guesses with our kids’ future. 

I was talking about all of this with one of my best old college friends today - talking to them through the shitty connection the towers broken a month ago provide between our two locations. My friend said, “It’s not so much that I mind living through the apocalypse, it’s just that I wish we could get to the part where I don’t need a job anymore.” I laughed, and mentioned not for the first time that I didn’t think the apocalypse would be so slow, this rolling thing where everything seems to just get more and more broken gradually. “There will always be work.” I replied, “It’ll just be different.” My friend wished the different part, where we live in a more communal way would happen. It seems most of my friends think about that a lot lately, but the overculture being what it is, no one has a clear path forward.

I was prepared for this, after all, by living in a tent and working for the National Park Service for free between my junior and senior year of high school. People will always need things built, and repaired, and made accessible. I also learned that living in a tent for an extended period of time sucks. I hope whatever my daughters learn this summer serve them just as well.