You Can't Have a Nineties Summer

Because we don't live in a nineties world and we aren't nineties parents

Hey all! First things first THANK YOU to all of you who sent me contacts for bartending on Watch What Happens Live. They asked me for a copy of Parisian Heist and are hopefully reading now. Fingers crossed. Now let’s try to hive mind me onto Kylie Kelce’s wonderful podcast. I think the two of us have a shit-ton to chat about when it comes to motherhood, wife-ing and THE BIRDS.

And don’t forget to SMASH that order button for Parisian Heist today. Your future self will truly thank you. If you’ve already smashes tell five more friends to smash too! Word of mouth is queen for books these days.

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Here are a few shots of my fam’s feral first weeks of summer in the Catskills. I’m eating pimiento cheese for lunch. The kids are running naked (which they call nudey) through the garden hose. I don’t think anyone is drinking out of it though. They’ve pulled every imaginable object out of the garage and used it in ways they should not be using it. I saw a snowboard used as a wagon last night.

They’ve caught toads and frogs and salamanders and fireflies. Some of them have survived. They’ve built fairy and bird houses. They’ve roller skated on the neighborhood Medivac helipad.

I am exhausted by this. Because a lot of this freewheeling fun for them also includes labor for me—suggesting the activities, turning on the hose, finding the nets to catch the things, driving them to yet another local pond, washing out a jam jar to catch fireflies in and putting said jam in a weird random bowl in the fridge.

I’ve let them make all the forts. And then I’ve had to clean up the forts (yes, I make them clean, but let’s all admit they’re shit at it).

But they’ve also been bored to which I’ve replied: Good. Figure it out. I’m proud of this. Left to their own devices most children WILL figure out how not to be bored. But most parents’ Pavlovian responses to boredom these days, or the mere threat of it, is to leap up and fix it.

And that’s one of the reasons we can’t really have a nineties summer. Gen X and millennials weren’t trained for it.

We’re trained to occupy, to fill up every imaginable gap in a schedule, to play with our kids even when we don’t like playing with our kids (I am not a play mom) and to battle boredom at the cost of our own sanity.

All of the many, many nineties summer lists suggest things like stocking up on cheap popsicles, as if all parents can just drop their biases against bonus sugar overnight.

I am all for the idea of a nineties, try less summer. But we don’t live in a world where that is actually possible any longer. We can take elements of a nineties summer and embrace the vibe, but the majority of us are still working at our full time jobs through the summer months. In real nineties summers where kids ran free and feral there was usually at least one parent or a teenage babysitter at home (sometimes barely teenagers themselves). Teenagers can’t babysit these days. They’re also wildly overscheduled and unavailable for low-paid labor that won’t shine on their resumes.

When I think of nineties summer I often think of movies I watched in the nineties like Sandlot and Now and Then and Stand by Me.

In those flicks kids rode their bikes everywhere without a care in the world. That’s because those movies were set in the sixties and seventies well before the invention of mega-bloated trucks ripping down every street at 60 mph, particularly streets with no sidewalks or bike lanes.

I would love for my almost nine year old to ride his bike three blocks to his best friends house solo in Philly. My only worry in this scenario is cars. It isn’t even possible here in the Catskills where there are no sidewalks and trucks barrel down our small valley lane at 60 mph.

So kids often get stuck in one place, unable to freely move about without parental involvement and that’s taxing on working parents even if they’re working from home.

Nick and I have more flexibility than most parents do in the summer months. We run our own company and we make our own hours and can be anywhere doing it. But we are both still working amidst the kid madness.

The nineties summer wasn't actually about popsicles or garden hoses. It was about kids having more freedom to move on their own without parental supervision (and also parents who had looser ideas about parenting). It was about the lack of phones keeping parents tethered to jobs they’re terrified they’re going to lose.

It was about liability culture not yet having sanitized every sharp edge and unsupervised hour.

So we’re probably not going to have a full-blown nineties summer, but we can try for a little bit of the vibes. I’m trying!!!! How’s it going for y’all?