You must remember this

Parents can’t pick and choose what memories their kids make. That’s a good thing.

Ah, the 1970s. My dad, holding my baby sister and smoking. My brother and me on folding chairs sans life jackets. Lake of the Ozarks, 1974.

I did not grow up in a family that took regular vacations. Maybe that’s why the few vacations we did take loom so large in our family lore. In 1974 and 1975, we drove three hours from Fort Leavenworth, KS, to Military Park Fort Leonard Wood Lake of the Ozarks Recreation Area. (LORA for short. The Army really has a way with words, doesn’t it?) I was two. My siblings were six, four, and one. We had to bring our groceries and our linens from home. “It was a nightmare of a vacation from my standpoint,” says my mom. “But you guys loved it.”

It would be more than five years before we took another family vacation. In 1980, my mom returned to work when my little sister started first grade. That made it possible for my parents to eventually afford a $375/week rental in Brewster on Cape Cod, about 2.5 hours from where we lived in Connecticut.

This was a very big deal. It’s the kind of trip today’s parents post about on social media, complete with a precious caption and hashtags (#BeachBabies #MakingMemories #TinyTravelers). Do you know what I remember from that trip? Two things: 

1. Playing “horseshoe tag” on the beach with my siblings while my parents enjoyed a cocktail on the patio at Red Lobster. The game consisted of my oldest brother swinging a horseshoe crab by the tail and flinging it at our heads. The goal, of course, was to avoid getting clobbered. (To be clear, this is a happy memory, not a scary one. My apologies to the horseshoe crabs.) 

2. The waitress at the same Red Lobster teaching my sister and me a trick that I thought she called the “He-man Claw.” She showed us how if we squeezed our brothers’ shoulders in just the right spot we could make them howl with pain and cry uncle. (After doing a little research, I think what she taught us was the signature move of Clawful, another character from the Masters of the Universe series who was one of Skeletor’s henchmen. Check out the right hand on this half man-half lobster.)

My mom’s fondest memory from that trip is my dad getting up early every morning to buy a newspaper and donuts. The donuts were for us kids, but until we woke up, my parents enjoyed a quiet coffee on the screened-in porch while they read the news. 

“Our life was so determined by outside forces in those days,” she explains, referring to the regimented nature of military life. We all loved the change of scenery, the change of pace, and the fact that our father — who usually worked 12 hours a day — was with us the whole time. 

But it wasn’t all sweetness and light. “We were moving all the time,” she explains. (My parents moved house 19 times during the 30 years of their marriage that my dad was an Army officer.) “So traveling for fun was kind of a leap for me. It was a huge amount of work.” 

Me, on the beach at Lake of the Ozarks, on my very first family vacation in 1974. Right: My mini-me on her first trip to Europe in 2010.

These days, #MakingMemories is an even bigger effort because we have more options and more information. Not coincidentally, expectations have escalated. The pressure to plan the perfect getaway is very real. Some people enjoy the logistical challenge. Others outsource it. But, as my recollections of one night at Red Lobster at the exclusion of the rest of the week on the Cape shows, there’s one thing you can’t plan: which moments your kids will remember. 

My experiences as a mom have confirmed this. My children are incredibly lucky. They have traveled all over the world in addition to enjoying countless local adventures. Curious about how much they could recall, I asked them about their happiest childhood memories this week. 

My 16-year-old says his favorite childhood memory is scaring people on Halloween. In our own front yard. Halloween is a huge deal on our street. The Wall Street Journal even did a story on it in 2016. We get 4,000 trick-or-treaters in four hours. We spend days decorating. We host an open house and serve homemade tortilla soup and spider-shaped sandwiches and other ridiculous food inspired by Pinterest Moms with more talent. And the thing this kid will always remember is climbing the Japanese Maple and using it as a perch from which terrorize unsuspecting passers-by. 

My daughter, who is 20, says her happiest childhood memory is from a time when her older brother was home from college and he walked the two younger kids through a snowstorm to a local movie theater. They saw Home Alone and had a huge snowball fight on the walk home. Apparently, it was epic. 

“It’s funny,” wrote my 23-year-old son via text, “when I look back [on my childhood] what I really think about are the small moments.” At the top of his list? The day I took him to pick out a pet cat from a litter of abandoned kittens. He also remembers playing cops and robbers with family friends at a beach house rental. “I remember one day the whole street flooded and we were trapped inside their house and we played Mario Kart and watched the rain from inside. When it stopped, we tried to skimboard on the flooded street.” It didn’t go very well.

My husband and I have spent countless hours making memories for our family (even if we have never used those exact words). We have tried to strike the right balance between adventure and downtime, education and entertainment. We have planned overseas excursions and backyard adventures. And they were all pretty great. And yet, my kids’ happiest memories are of “smaller” moments. Moments for which there is zero photographic evidence. Moments that live on in my kids’ imaginations, not on Instagram. 

Of course, that doesn’t mean that all the time and effort we put into planning happy holidays is a waste. Travel and adventure help kids develop — even if they don’t remember every stop on the itinerary. New experiences spark curiosity and conversation, empathy and imagination. But they don’t manufacture memories like some sort of fun factory. 

As summer approaches and I think about how we’ll make the most of longer days and looser schedules, I find that liberating. I hope you do, too.

Also on my mind

1. This bit about a father and daughter who work for the same org is the sweetest thing ever. My dad would do the same, but he would use “reply all.” 

parentsarehuman

A post shared by Parents Are Human® (@parentsarehuman)

2. Missed deadlines happen. This post from The Harvest Blog offers great insight on why they happen and what to do when they happen to you.

3. These are my new favorite running shorts. They have a four-inch inseam and run true to size. I hope to log a lot of miles in them this summer. My favorite feature? The phone pocket in the back. 

   

   Photo: Oiselle.com

4. On Wednesday, NPR became “the first major news organization to go silent on [Twitter]” when it announced that it will no longer post to its feed on the social media platform. And last week, Twitter censored links and blocked searches from Substack writers like me after Substack introduced a rival microblogging service called Notes. It will be interesting to see how this all shakes out. In the meantime, if you want to try Notes, here’s how:

   Head to substack.com/notes or find the “Notes” tab in the Substack app (see below). As a subscriber to Skin of Our Teeth, you’ll automatically see my notes. You can also share notes of your own. I’m still getting the hang of it, but it has potential. 

5. Jane Pratt, the editorial genius behind Sassy, Jane, and other publications near and dear to my GenX heart, is back. But I’m still trying to understand what her latest venture — DeeDa — actually is. 

6. Are abortion pills safe? Working with medical researchers, NYT reporters took a closer look at 101 scientific studies, spanning continents and decades. (The plaintiffs in the lawsuit against the FDA, on the other hand, cited five studies—two off which didn’t even address safety.)

7. As a woman who has been married nearly 27 years, I really appreciated Ada Calhoun’s Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give. I tore through this book in a couple of hours. One of my favorite lines: “One of the biggest challenges of marriage is to acknowledge that your own feelings aren’t the end of the story. We have to hold so many realities at once: here’s me, here’s you, here’s us, here’s the rest of the world.” 

8.  What would you put in a COVID culture time capsule?

   nytopinion

   

   A post shared by New York Times Opinion (@nytopinion)

9. LinkedIn is usually a cesspool, but this story about a viral post written by a Google product manager who was laid off is pretty cool. 

10. In Germany, parents are legally entitled to an approximately three-week health retreat to prevent or treat burnout every four years. Doctors write a prescription for the Kur (German for cure) and it’s usually covered by insurance. Wunderbar!