Amberly McAteer’s perfect family summer vacation features a singular backdrop: a cottage on a lake.Melki N images/Getty Images
When I picture the perfect family summer vacation, there is a singular backdrop: a cottage on a lake. I’ve insisted on renting one nearly every summer of my adult life because cottages epitomize everything I think a getaway at this time of year should be: swims before breakfast, long afternoons with no agenda, and meals around a table packed with your favourite people.
So when an old, very rustic boathouse cottage in Ontario’s Kawartha Highlands region unexpectedly came onto the market, it felt meant to be. I imagined the summers my daughters would have – and it pains me to admit – I also imagined the photos we would take and the Instagram posts I would share. I made a mental list of experiences that would surely imprint themselves on their childhoods: cannonballing into the lake, watching the sun sink beyond the treeline, listening to loons call as they drifted off to sleep.
“Core memories will be made here,” I actually said out loud to my very confused realtor.
The reality has been less picturesque. On our first trip, it was too cold and too thick with black flies for an outdoor fire, so my husband tried to build one inside, promptly setting off the smoke alarm – which refused to be quieted and rang out across the lake. Loon call it was not. Idealized memory, it was not either.
Like most moms who spend time on social media, I’ve been inundated by the cultural obsession with “core memories.” Originally inspired by Pixar’s Inside Out, the phrase has become parenting shorthand for the moments that supposedly define childhood, and ones we supposedly are responsible for curating. Add it to the list of things we’re meant to do: create meaningful experiences that will become the highlights of our childrens’ nostalgia.
And summer, perhaps more than any other season, has become the fleeting stage on which this pressure plays out.
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Joanna Marshall remembers that pressure well. Last summer, the Toronto mother had two small boys and was also six-months pregnant when her husband planned a backcountry canoe trip for the family through Algonquin Park.
Marshall says her husband, an avid outdoorsman, was hoping to recreate the camping adventures he cherishes from his own childhood. “In hindsight, he was thinking about his memories and not so much the reality of what it was going to be like.”
The family drove nearly seven hours, then paddled for another hour before setting up camp. The next morning, Marshall says, her five-year-old woke up in tears and declared, “‘I don’t like woods vacations. I only like city vacations.’” Marshall laughs at the memory. “I was just like, ‘Yeah man, me too.’”
They packed up and went home that morning. With no plans and a week off, the family found spontaneity was the best vacation mode for all of them. “My husband and I are very Type A people, so it was actually the most refreshing kind of week, for all of us,” Marshall says.
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The irony is that while parents are working harder than ever to engineer unforgettable experiences, neither we nor our children get to decide which moments will endure.
Ashley Whillans, a Harvard Business School professor who studies time use and leisure, says many of us have started approaching summer vacation the same way we approach work.
“We’re trying to reach for accomplishments through a leisure productivity mindset,” she says, citing research that suggests that scheduling leisure too rigidly can undermine our enjoyment of it. When every beach day, restaurant meal and theme park ride is carefully planned, we begin treating vacations as projects to optimize rather than experiences to enjoy.
Instead of asking whether we’re having fun, we ask whether we’re doing enough to create picture-perfect memories. Did we visit enough must-see attractions? Take enough photos? Get our money’s worth? The temptation is understandable: Vacations have never felt more expensive. At a time when many families are stretched by the rising cost of living, a week away can represent a significant financial investment. Add in limited employee vacation time and the stress becomes almost inevitable: if this trip costs thousands of dollars and uses up a week’s worth of precious vacation days, it had better be memorable.
But Whillans says that desire to maximize every moment can backfire.
She points to research suggesting that when we focus too much on documenting, evaluating or optimizing experiences, we can actually diminish our enjoyment of them. We become so preoccupied with creating memories that we stop fully participating in the moment.
As Whillans puts it, we risk importing “our work mindset into our leisure where it doesn’t belong.” She says she sometimes catches herself “treating my child like an e-mail in my inbox” – hurrying her through a moment she’s enjoying because there’s another moment waiting to be had.
During one of Whillans’s recent family vacations, the moment everyone remembers wasn’t a perfectly executed excursion, but getting unexpectedly soaked in a storm. “The skies opened up out of nowhere,” she recalls, and her family needed to work together to find umbrellas. “The challenge became the memory,” Whillans says, underlining that spontaneity is key to creating memories.
A month into cottage ownership, we certainly have our share of spontaneity as we continue to find new surprises waiting for us, from the dock spider who has taken up residency in the bathtub to the mouse – singular, we can only hope – who runs across the mantel every night.
It’s not yet the idyllic getaway spot I imagined. But it might be the vacation my girls remember – or not.