“So, are you ready for summer?”

This is the classic greeting these days as the school year winds down.

In the U.S., I was always ready for summer, ready to shift gears, slow down, do something different.

Here in Belgium, I always pause for a long time before I answer. I have to confess: I hate summers in Belgium.

Why?

Because I’ve never found a summer rhythm here.

In the U.S., summer had a nice shape to it. At its center was the library reading program, which offered weekly events and prizes and programs that my kids loved.

In a typical summer, they’d also attend several week-long day camps—Camp Creepy Crawly (an educational camp on amphibians, reptiles, and insects), Junior Rangers (a nature program at a local state park), Art Adventures, Vacation Bible School, and/or Scout camps. I tried to schedule a week of camp and then a week off all summer long.

Day to day life was easy. We had a yard larger enough for them to play soccer in, trees to climb, and places to dig and plant. We lived within walking distance of the neighborhood pool, and every day around 4 p.m. I’d take them there for an hour or two of swimming. It was a place for kids to play and moms to chat. Ditto the lake in my subdivision, which had a sandy beach and a huge covered pavilion on the water with picnic tables. Both my kids loved to go swimming and fishing there and would drop hooks with their dad and see what was biting.

We’d go hiking occasionally, we went on hay rides, we visited a local berry farm on a regular basis and bought whatever fresh fruit was in season. We often drove 25 minutes to a beach near the mouth of the Potomac River and had breakfast on the beach, collected shells, dug in the sand. We usually made some weekend trips and visited with family members—cousins, aunts, and uncles. There were also cookouts with friends and neighbors.

In short, summer was rich with opportunities and places to hang out and to learn, to socialize and to rest.

Belgium has been so different for me. My children attend a school that caters exclusively to English-speaking expats, and it’s the heart of our expat community and a social center. The school plays a much larger role in our life than it ever did in the U.S. and when it shuts down for summer, everything changes.

Life flattens out quite a bit. Many people go back to the U.S. for the entire summer or are tied up hosting endless streams of visitors here in Europe. Moms don’t get together and it can be hard to find playmates for my kids. Most of our Belgian neighbors disappear on extended holidays of a month or more. It’s like a social wasteland.

We don’t live close to an outdoor pool, the nearest one being at least a 35 minute drive away, an area I can’t reach by bus. And while my kids have access to an indoor pool that’s closer, it caters to adults swimming for fitness and has two swimming lanes set aside for kids to use. Not exactly fun. We don’t go there very often.

When I took my kids to the library reading program here, I discovered it’s an entirely different experience. In my old community it was very popular and very dynamic with masses of kids participating. Here, there might be five kids (two of them MINE) who would show up. Not the same.

No more camps either. Because of the language barrier, we can’t participate in the Belgian sports and camps or the community programs. The English-language camps are a bit exclusive—both in price and accessibility. Once again, my reliance on public transit also cramps us and puts some locations out of our realm.

So I compensate by doing cooking and art projects with the kids, buying them books, getting to the parks in our area, encouraging them to be creative, and structuring some educational activities into our weeks. This works overall, we have a good time, but we all burn out and start getting bored before the summer is over. By August, I’ve exhausted all my ideas and I’m just waiting for summer to be over. I never used to feel that way in the U.S., where I’d mourn the end of summer as much as the kids did.

This summer will be dominated by our 5-week trip back home to the U.S. We have loads of business and social commitments on our schedule and I vacillate between thinking we’ll have plenty of time to do everything to thinking we might be run ragged. We’ll be staying in a one bedroom apartment so I worry about us driving each other a bit crazy and tripping over our suitcases. One thing for sure, boredom won’t be a problem with so many people to see and places to go. We’ll just have to keep moving.

So, yeah, I guess I am looking forward to summer, even if I am just a tiny bit nervous about how it will all play out. I know it will be an adventure, a trip to our past and to our future.

Are you looking forward to summer? What have you got planned?

May 25, 2007