Adjusting to new realities for March Break

All my planning is going out the window as my kids now have their own ideas

It’s almost that time of year again — no, not tax season, though that is coming up pretty fast, too. I’m referring to March Break.

Whether you have kids or not, March Break is pretty hard to miss. You may wonder why the mall has gotten so packed during the week, why the train is empty all of a sudden or why the movie theatre is full for weekday matinées.

Back in CEGEP, I remember the break meant hearing about friends going off to tropical destinations to party. That was never my jam, though I knew it was and probably still is a common way to spend the week as a young adult.

How you look at March Break evolves as you move through different phases of life. It goes from being all about yourself, having fun and living it up, to trying to manage miniature versions of yourself and their time off of school.

As we move through the motions of planning playdates, enrolling kids in day camps, roping in available family members and then guiding kids into making plans for themselves, we learn a little bit more about ourselves along the way.

Gretchen Rubin once said that the days are long but the years are short. Never did I think that was truer than once I had kids. The helter-skelter madness that can be parenting slows down all too fast.

This could be my inner mother of a teenager speaking, but all of a sudden, the need to try to do something meaningful and memorable with my kids seems to intensify. The need to give

It took me some time to come to grips with the reality that planning March Break, like parenting, is a fluid and dynamic experience.

them that fantastic trip they’ll look back on with fond memories when they’re older, or to plan out activities and outings that will knock their socks off seems to get bigger and bigger with each passing year.

I find myself overwhelmed with the realization that I’ll only have these years with my kids once, and that I should make enormous sacrifices to give them these experiences while they are still young. So I start planning out trips and activities, weighing one against the other late into the night, my browser history filling with flights and destinations, museum details and whale-sighting dates. I stay up doing this until the wee hours of the morning, all while their little heads slumber soundly on their pillows.

It isn’t until the days that follow when I, with all the fierce pride of a victorious mama bear about to show her cubs the massive cache of honey she’s discovered for them, ask my kids what they’d like to do for March Break that I find out they already have plans of their own. Ones that involve hanging out at the local mall, playing video games and watching movies with friends.

I feel crushed. All my planning of family activities and trips is being thrown out the window for outings to the mall with friends. All my late nights researching educational excursions and enriching experiences are to be not so magically replaced by whatever the newest movie is.

It took me some time to come to grips with the reality that planning March Break, like parenting, is a fluid and dynamic experience. I am confident that there will yet be times when my kids and I will connect and take those meaningful trips and have those fantastic shared experiences, but I now understand there are times when they want just to be left alone with their friends to be kids. It can be challenging for a parent to accept that, and to know when to step back.

So I’m going to relax at home while the week passes, knowing full well that my kids are getting exactly the experience they want.