Summer vacation

Yesterday was NYU's commencement so for the past week or so as exams finish and the students start to leave, I have been seeing parents parked on the street loading up the cars full of stuff and preparing to take their kids home for the summer. Seeing this makes me wistful. I had to fly to get home from college so I never had that experience of being "picked up" at the end of the year. But I remember that feeling of packing everything up, saying goodbye for the summer and looking forward to spending the next few months hanging around my mom's house, working some summer job that paid enough for gas, food and maybe a little bit of savings for the next school year and just generally taking it easy. 

Seeing all these kids going home for the summer made me wish that my mom or dad would just come pick me up and take me home. I miss that time when I was done with school for the year leaving me with a limited amount of responsibility - no papers, no exams, no projects and reading only books I wanted to read. But most of all, those summers were a time when someone else was the grown-up. Someone else worried about bills, groceries, meal planning, housework. Sure, I did my share to help around the house but for the most part my summers were so easy.

Now I'm the grown-up. I have a child to raise, a house to keep clean, laundry to do, a marriage to tend, bills to pay, ambitions to sort out. It all happens and it's all a part of becoming the person I am now and the person I am growing to be, but it sure would be nice to have the summer off.