Today, the skies were bluer, the sun brighter and the birds’ chirps sweeter.

For today, my friends, the kids went back to school.

As my children and their compatriots, sweetly arrayed in their first-day finery, trotted into the building, one mom collapsed, sobbing, into a friend’s arms.

“I don’t know why I’m crying,” she said as the other woman consoled her.

I didn’t know why either, but I didn’t stay to find out, dashing off so quickly sparks flew from my shoes. I was rushing home, yes, to write, but also to drink coffee in silence, to sit outside while I ate lunch and to listen to music without having to explain the lyrics in excruciating detail.

“Does the singer know that’s a bad word, Mommy?”

“Yes.”

“Why did he say it then?”

The first day back was simply a relief. You see, in planning the summer, I’d created an extended gap between the end of camp and the return to school. When I did it, I’d hoped to give my kids the kind of unstructured, joyful summers I enjoyed as a child — ones full of swimming and parks and outside play. I had forgotten, though, about The Mother War.

Because, instead of my fantasy idyll, each summer day was a battle, waged entirely inside of me, over which kind of mother I would be.

Mother One followed the digital siren’s song, working on her computer, watching out of the corner of her eye as her children clicked and swiped themselves halfway to blindness. Her kids stopped only to literally run to the bathroom or stagger to the table to eat.

Mother Two forced her kids to turn off the screens. She fielded requests for participation in crafts, helped locate lost toys, listened to complaints about boredom. If she demanded, in increasingly less gentle ways, that the kids occupy themselves so she could do one load of laundry for Pete’s sake, she listened as they ran screaming through the house, injuring themselves and each other, destroying everything their tiny hands touched. Unable to be anything approaching productive, she sometimes sat in a state not unlike catatonia, other times using a vocabulary comprising only the phrases “Stop,” “Put that down!” and “Mister, don’t you DARE!”

There was also Mother Three: She jettisoned all responsibility and took herself and her brood to the wind. Mother Three packed coolers and water bottles and sand shovels and went to the beach and to the pool and to the park. She watched, joyfully, as her kids ran wild and free, jumped in waves and soared on swings. She didn’t wash a dish or earn a dime.

There were times when I was each of those mothers. Each shortchanged something or someone. My husband made the same calculations, giving me a break at his, our house or his work’s expense.

I wanted to be Mother Three, usually, but sometimes I just wanted to want to be her, and sometimes I didn’t even want that.

We marshal troops to different fronts in the Mother War, and parents move their forces delicately.

We can shift away from this front, the finance front, some, but we must pay our mortgage. There’s the front of our involvement, wanting to be present but knowing our kids must learn independence and knowing we don’t have the energy to be constantly “on.” Another front, screen time, tempts, but, without limits, my kids get hollow-eyed, emptied of themselves.

Maybe there’s a Gen. George Washington in the Mother War, smoothly moving from educational activity to educational activity, displaying unflappable benevolence, lightly supervising creative play. But, no matter how much I might want him to, that general does not live in me.

Instead, I move my forces, as the rest of us non-perfect parents do, each day, to achieve the best balance I can find.

With back to school, that changed. Though the balancing didn’t end, there was at least a cessation in hostilities, and with it, a sweet emptying of a bucket overflowing with guilt. The mothers called a truce.

A truce that will last, at least, until the next school break.

Which, as I look on the calendar, doesn’t come until … Labor Day.

To learn more about Georgia Garvey, visit GeorgiaGarvey.com.

Newsletter