Why can't holiday time actually be holiday time?

The school year has drawn to a close, and it is time to be in 'holiday mode.'

It's when everyone surely gets to do endless days of doing the fun stuff of life; getting to chill out, rest and relax, right?

The littlies in the household currently want to spend days freely reading whatever books they want to read. They want to have copious hours of fun outdoors in the warmth of summer.

They want to be able to freely engage for hours in the making of huts and a range of dreamt up exciting adventures, role plays and games. There is the general expectation and overall unwritten acceptance that routines and timeframes are more relaxed.

There are requests for endless playdates with their best buddies, and ongoing enthusiastic excitement about being free to do all summer that which is relaxing and fun to do.

There is a sense of greater freedom and lightness, even extra energy about, as the schoolbooks are for awhile no longer able to demand as much attention and time as they usually do during actual term time.

How lovely is a child's joy, that it is now 'holiday time!' How blissful is the innocence of childhood!

Whilst going about dealing to a pile of laundry the other day, I realised that I was recalling,
from childhood, memories of my own mother being in 'holiday mode,' and that the 'holiday mode' being remembered was suddenly feeling somewhat too familiar and too close to the bone.

The 'holiday mode' I was remembering and recalling my mother being in, and my own current adult experience of 'holiday mode,' were not as fun to experience as that 'holiday mode' often felt and experienced when once a child myself.

Like my mother, I too am living out a holiday time and a 'holiday mode' that are actually not so 'holiday-ish' in actual reality!

Memories of my mother washing net curtains....... memories of her digging determinedly away with her spade in the garden as she committed to getting it back into some semblance of long forgotten order, before she had to once again go back to work in the new school term......

Memories of the sorting of cupboards... the sewing of work clothes... the working away at tasks that were obviously on her mind's long-overdue-attention list.......

These were just some of the 'catch-up' tasks my mother engaged in during what was deemed 'holiday time,' and which suddenly all came flooding back into my own conscience memory, while I took a-trip-down-Memory-Lane the other day.

These past memories are so like my own experience of 'holiday time,' and the 'holiday mode' being embraced by us both was and is clearly not so 'holiday-ish' at all!

Why can't holiday time actually BE holiday time?

The realisation that I have stepped into that very role of repeatedly, year after year, term after term, living out a 'holiday' that is actually not at all 'holiday-ish' is not such a thrilling epiphany to have!

For the next 8 weeks, while in 'holiday mode' from schooling my children, I need to get things "done" around the house and garden. Yet to be honest, I currently just don't feel one ioata of enthusiasm for getting up and getting on and facing it.

I just feel incredibly weary, with facing front on the knowledge that each and every holiday time for me actually entails a lot of task catch-ups and facing up to doing a lot of cleaning and sorting, which as usual, is desperately seeking some long overdue attention this holiday time.

Sigh.

Yet, there is a sense of underlying pressure, that if I don't get on and get going, the ongoing piles of tasks that have already been without attention for so long, will just haunt me even further right through into the new year, and at some point there will be some form of reckoning time-wise, financially or resourceful-ness wise.

The way to 'eat an elephant,' they say is one bite at a time. So, bit by bit, step by step, during the holidays my 'holiday mode' no doubt will include a good big proportion of what seems too awfully like what I remember my own mother having to knuckle down under and embrace, holiday after holiday.

Still, part of me does keep saying rather louder with each passing day: Why, oh why can't a holiday actually be just that: a holiday?!



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