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Community Corner

Opinion: It's Limbo Time

Moorestown parents, get ready: Summer's right around the corner, and you better have something to keep the kids occupied.

In Southern California, there is a peculiar weather pattern the natives refer to as “June Gloom.” Each June day typically starts out gray and unpromising, chilly. When I resided there, I would wonder how to occupy two toddlers in the house all day. LEGO towers were built by one son then knocked down by the other, followed by the trail of tears. Blanket forts were erected then dismantled. Whining was a constant, as was, when all else failed, the television and one huge moronic purple dinosaur.

Miraculously, the sun would break through the gloom at around 4 o’clock and the world was suddenly a eucalyptus-scented paradise. Off we’d trundle to the mountainside nearby: me, one son in the stroller, the other marching along with a stick, a Lab named Elvis and a cat named Pip. There, at Mount Clef, we would spend what was left of the afternoon, walking the dusty paths, on the lookout for snakes and broken glass.

The following morning would begin the same way. Gray, chilly and foreboding. Again, the sun would wait until the very end of the day to put in a teasing appearance, when it would burst forth, warm and inviting. Again, I would have spent the day indoors with toddlers, Eggo waffles and way too much Barney.

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In Mo’town, June is a time when we all go into a holding pattern, a sort of limbo. Once we get past , the countdown to summer begins. All pretense of higher education falls by the wayside. The kids have pretty much given up on learning, the teachers on teaching. There are still tests to be taken, but the seniors in don’t care. They’ve gotten over the college hurdle and are now 90 percent sure of where they’ll be heading in the fall. Actually, any parent will tell you their high school senior checked out after the winter holidays. Like a bad sci-fi movie, their bodies are present but their minds have been telepathically removed to ivy-covered walls and the promise of college, freedom and beer pong. Sure, they pretend to be engaged, but really, their facial expressions never change anyway, so who’s to be sure they're still with us mentally instead of miles away at Penn State or TCNJ?

Parents of seniors: If you’re just now thinking about how to fill your empty nest, you’re too late. I started thinking about it at least 10 years in advance and I still wasn’t ready to be smacked across the face with the realization that my years of being the center of their world were now over. When my youngest went to college last fall, I closed the door to his now-clean room, determined not to open it and most definitely not to cry. My husband found me there later that week, my son's pillow pressed to my face as I inhaled like a junkie, desperate for some stray fumes. My baby was gone and so was that part of my life.

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Even in Moorestown, bastion of a blue-ribbon education, nothing much is happening in the classrooms toward mid-June. Once the finals are given and taken, the teachers break out the DVDs (and I’m not talking about “Wordsmith” either). If this is how our kids spend the last few weeks of the school year, what’s the point?

I’m pretty sure the point is that moms all over town are preparing, like Navy Seals, for total mayhem when the structure of the school year gives way to summer’s lack of routine. Moms need that time in June to lay in supplies from numerous trips to Costco and BJ’s. They need to get in that last leisurely ramble through Target without multiple kids hanging on to the cart begging for hula-hoops and Froot Loops. Like logisticians, moms need the month of June to prepare mentally and to start booking play dates and day trips, signing their kids up for the Reading Game at the and making sure the Chardonnay is plentiful.

Working parents always feel anxious when summer rolls around because they have to come up with plans A, B and C to fill their children’s days. There have to be stand-in caregivers on call and reliable neighbors who will pinch-hit if necessary. Moms employed outside the home are especially vulnerable at this time of year, and must work very hard at keeping the guilt at bay. They would much rather be hanging out with their offspring at , gabbing under an umbrella with all the other moms, than hanging out under a pile of paperwork.

Ah, Sunnybrook! A small oasis of summer fun, it is Mo’town’s only swim club. When we first moved to town almost 20 years ago, we belonged to the OTHER swim club, Pheasant Run, where we soon made friends with other refugees from Moorestown who preferred Pheasant Run’s swim team or the relative anonymity of joining a pool in another town. But in the end, it was all about the kids. As they got older, they wanted to hang with their pals from school: to ride their bikes down Camden Avenue to Sunnybrook and a heated game of wiffle ball. So for a few years, Sunnybrook became our drug of choice and we were all happy with our afternoon trips to the pool.

It was there that I noticed another odd Mo’town phenomena: the August disappearance of practically every person in town. Raised on The Twilight Zone, I at first envisioned a forced exodus of Mo’towners. They were walking robotically towards spaceships manned by anvil-headed aliens, destined for a planet where everything was coated in artificial turf, including their mayor. The reality is much more banal: August is vacation time. Tournament teams have wrapped up, rec programs are done. You are now free to pass GO, collect $200 and skedaddle to .

A parting word of advice to parents of boys: If you want to disappear in August with the rest of us, do NOT let your son play football!

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