Happy Hour Hack: Surviving summer vacation and the saddest poem in the world
The Maggie Smith edition
Welcome to the Happy Hour Hack, a weekly Friday post of tips and inspiration to take you into the weekend. I always share one thing from my interviewee of the week, along with any ideas I receive from readers, plus some things that are piquing my own interest.
Hacks
This week I had the pleasure of chatting with the brilliant poet Maggie Smith. Her tips for us are perfectly timed, and they will hopefully help you survive summer vacation. The first one is about how to carve out time to get work done when your kids are running feral:
My kids really want to have a Gen X, free-range, wake up in the morning, go play, come home for meals kind of summer, which my friends and I in the neighborhood call Camp Mom. And the challenge with Camp Mom is that I work from home. So I have to be able to balance my need for time and privacy to do my work with the kids wanting to go do fun things and popping in and out and interrupting constantly and wanting popsicles and wanting to be driven to the pool. So my hack for last summer was I got up really early in the morning, and I came into my office, and I worked for three hours every morning from six to nine. And that way at nine, I could open the French doors from my office and say, “Okay, I’m all yours.”
Usually my daughter slept through my entire work schedule, but my son gets up very early. So he would get up, he could get himself breakfast, he would feed the dog, and he was allowed to watch cartoons. Most kids, if they’re like maybe five and over, are able to, if you put the stuff in the right cabinet, get themselves a granola bar, a thing of yogurt, pour a bowl of cereal without making too much of a mess, and sit down with a book or an activity book, or if you are comfortable with them watching TV and you have parental controls, watch while you get things done. And I just didn’t let myself stress out about like, oh, he’s getting morning screen time. So what, he’s gonna be out playing the whole rest of the day. And first thing in the morning is when my mind is really fresh; that’s peak time for me.
It turned out that Maggie’s kids spent so much time playing outside in the neighborhood that she stopped having to get up so early to get work done. But she has one more tip for how to make this lifestyle work:
Get a digital watch with an alarm for your child if they’re old enough to go out and play on their own. My son is, in my mind, too young to have or need a smartphone or a smartwatch. But I do like to be able to have him come home at regular intervals so he doesn’t just disappear into the neighborhood until dinner. That makes me a little nervous. So we got him a digital watch with a little alarm that beeps, and he would leave the house at 10 and set an alarm for noon, and it would beep at noon, and he’d come home for lunch. And then he’d go back out and he’d say, “What time do you want me to come home?” And I’d say, “How about a check-in at two?” He’d set an alarm on his watch so he wouldn’t get distracted at the playground or whatever, and he’d pop back in, reapply sunscreen, put on some bug spray, get a bottle of water, check in, let me know how his day is going. And then he could head back out or we could go to the pool or whatever. And then he knows to come home for dinner before it gets dark.
You can read more about Maggie, including her wisdom on how to raise children to walk through the world as poets, here.
Poems
If you have ever driven past horses and said “horses,” then you should read this poem (and I know that is every single one of you): “Poem Beginning with a Retweet.” Bonus! You can get a look at Maggie’s process behind the poem on her excellent Substack.
You can find a sampling of Maggie’s poems at the Poetry Foundation.
My favorite poem, “Animals,” I can’t reprint here because of permissions, but you can find it in Goldenrod. It. Will. Gut. You.
And if you want some non-poetry, Maggie also wrote Keep Moving, a collection of quotes and essays about loss. Her site describes it as “a book for anyone who has gone through a difficult time and is wondering: What comes next?”
The Forum
One of TCF’s biggest supporters, Dan Stone, who also happens to be my husband, just launched Hey Pop. Through podcasts and written posts by him and contributors, he’s going to explore parenthood, but especially fatherhood.
Dan’s a brilliant writer and thinker and interviewer, and this is going to be killer. Men talking about feelings and kids! The world needs more of this. So share this with your people, but especially with the men in your life. You can hear his inaugural episode with the badass writer Shea Serrano here.
Now, in case you’re thinking that we, as a couple, are a little too pleased with ourselves as parents—we’re not! We have no idea what we’re doing! Which is why we like to talk to other people about it. And, as Dan describes us in his About page:
[This] might give you the impression that we’re obsessed with parenting, the sorts who can’t stop talking about it, since we each have projects focused on the topic. But the truth is, we’re just waiting for the stroke of 5 o’clock so we can stir up a couple Gibsons and sit out back, pretending we have no responsibilities and an exciting night ahead. Fast forward to 9:30, and we’re asleep.
Book
Maggie talked about the importance of intuition, both in her work as well as parenting. This book, Listening in the Dark, edited by the poet (among other things) Amber Tamblyn, was transformative for me. Amber is raising awareness that intuition, specifically female intuition, is a real thing, and it should be nurtured instead of snuffed out. Our society often gaslights us into thinking that our intuition is silly and inconsequential and tells us from an early age not to trust our gut. This book offers a collection of essays by incredible women about their moments of meaningful intuition and about how to harness it in our day-to-day lives.
If you want more from Amber, check out her Substack:
Perspective
In my intro to Maggie’s interview, I wrote about my own inability to truly settle down anywhere, about my need to move and search for my geographical destiny. I keep this advice column bookmarked on my computer. Megan O’Grady breaks down why some of us move around, for better or worse, and how we can make it work for our families.
In the piece she mentions this poem, which is a dagger to the heart:
Home Is so Sad
By Philip Larkin
Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft
And turn again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.
Song
In 2018, Maggie tweeted:
Photo essay that won’t happen: Divorced woman drives her rumpled c. 2005 wedding dress across the country and takes photos of it in various locations. It’s a metaphorical “Weekend at Bernie’s” sans stapled-on toupee and sunglasses, because the dead thing is the marriage.
And The Mountain Goats responded:
this would be a song called “Picture of My Dress” imo
And then The Mountain Goats wrote the song! The song is on their album Getting Into Knives. Once in a while, the internet is good.
Just wonderful Kimberly.