Keep Your Months And Weeks: Here's What The Mom Calendar In My Head Looks Like

A new year is around the corner, which means calendars of every color are in display windows. I’ll admit to buying more than my fair share over the decades: monthly planners at my desk, pretty ones with seasonal wildflowers or loopy curlicues on my kitchen wall. I’m charmed by watercolor illustrations and bold graphic patterns, but above all by the concept that the chaos of daily life can be contained within tidily numbered squares. There remains an untapped corner of the calendar market, though, and it’s for parents like me.

Sure, motivational quotes and photos of calming streams have their place, and I like to be vaguely aware of seasons and holidays, etc., but mostly I identify times of year by their accompanying stress levels. I want a calendar tailored specifically to someone whose home has been taken over by rolling backpacks and stray socks. Realistically, it will mostly revolve around camp sign-ups.

Granted, this is not an aspirational lifestyle. If you don't get frazzled by parenting to-do lists, count yourself lucky. (Also, tell me all your secrets.) For the rest of us, my true mom calendar would go something like this.

January

Dust the confetti off your NYE party hat, drop the wine-stained skirt off at the dry cleaner, and grab an extra large coffee on the way home to begin the most eye-twitch-inducing spreadsheet of them all: the dreaded list of summer camp options. Set alarms on your phone for each camp’s early March registration date while wishing a pox on the broken childcare system that makes these alarms necessary. Color-code your spreadsheet columns: green for your kids’ top faves, blue for the ones that won't make you default on your mortgage, yellow for the camps closest to home. Know fully well no color coding will make this horror show palatable.

February

Stand in the seasonal section of Target explaining to your third grader why they can’t buy candy grams this year in accordance with their school’s new “no-food” policy. Unsuccessfully try to convince them that pencils with red and silver hearts are a perfectly good substitute. Spend several evenings of your one wild and precious life helping your first grader address 24 notes to their classmates, in which the teacher encourages them to “appreciate each person specifically for their contribution to the class community.” Consider asking if he can opt out of this homework assignment, but realize midway through the eighth card that forcing a 6-year-old to say something nice 24 times can be a very good thing.

March

Play summer camp registration Tetris and hate absolutely everything and everybody. Resign yourself to the fact that you are yet again paying thousands of dollars for glorified babysitting by high school camp counselors who will definitely show your child questionable Tiktok videos in the breaks between craft time and the slip-n-slide, all just so you keep your job and maintain a semblance of sanity when school is out. Cheer up because you also know what a wonder said videos will do for their sense of humor. Is anything better than a child that makes you laugh?

April

This is usually when the bunny with a larger overbite than most makes its appearance. While the neighborhood kids prowl the grass for plastic eggs incomprehensibly filled with candy, gaze at their little heads and realize time’s running out to book a summer vacation so your children don’t grow into joyless adults with no cherished memories to look back on. Wonder if daily drives to Taco Bell and the neighborhood pool would make them just as happy as a humid stay at Great Wolf Lodge. (Spoiler alert: Yes, yes, always yes.)

May

Take several deep, cleaning breaths upon realizing that school is almost out, and your child hasn’t made nearly the academic progress they should have this year. Buy a few workbooks and vow to make them spend 30 minutes each week working on them over the summer. Stubbornly refuse to think about the workbooks you bought last year that remain unused.

June

Schedule the extra minutes needed to make a few novelty pancake breakfasts this month to celebrate the end of a school year. Then panic because the end of a school year means gifts for teachers that hit the exact sweet spot between cursory (another coffee mug) to overindulgent (how big of a gift card feels too big?). Does it count as "buying a teacher’s love" when the year’s over anyway? Will any of it even matter? Birds are chirping, the weather is glorious, and soon, the snacks in the pantry will begin disappearing at near-illegal rates.

July

Curl up on a park bench and scroll Instagram to poll which of your friends are taking better vacations than you at prices you can’t afford — or worse, which ones are posting endless stories about their month at a bucolic midwestern lake that’s been their annual summer destination for three generations. Curse your decision to emigrate. Get a brief reprieve when you work out that your younger child’s midsummer birthday releases you from planning a huge party for them since everyone’s on vacation and all they want is a cake and balloons at home. Consider advising all newlywed couples to conceive their babies in October.

August

Worry about the school year about to begin and the summer slide that your kids have most definitely experienced. Worry if the uniforms you ordered the night before the deadline will arrive in time. Worry whether your kids will make new friends and feel like they fit in and stop messing around on their district-provided laptop. Worry about the fact that you once again need to begin packing lunch, and why does a world exist with advancements in every arena except reasonably leak-free lunch box design? Unearth the stack of workbooks you bought a few months ago and thumb through them to find a total of three pages worked on. But realize as you scan the many intricate doodles of one-eyed monsters in the margins that you may be underestimating your child’s artistic talents.

September

Low-grade stress about the fact that you know the best Halloween costumes are conceived this month and No Inspiration has struck you or your family yet which means you will once again be consigned to raiding picked-over offerings two nights before the school parade. Side-eye the email from the PTA looking for new board members and question if this is the year you’ll finally wave the white flag and join a committee. Tamp down your annual mild annoyance at Costco for having 12-foot-tall pre-lit Christmas trees on display in September because everyone knows they can do no wrong. More people would benefit from having their sh*t together the way Costco does.

October

Fall extracurricular activities are officially in full swing, so prepare for a higher-than-usual quota of passive-aggressive text messages with your spouse while you play the “who’s picking up whom from where at what time today and why must it always be me” game. Buy the aforementioned uninspiring, overpriced, and utterly threadbare Elvis costume that you’re aware you could have bedazzled yourself if your child had decided on a costume idea last month. Watch the kids traipse adorably around campus at the parade letting their individual quirk flags fly, and know that even if the local Spirit Halloween store aisles smell of dust and death, you’ll gladly do it all over again.

November-December (Aka 2 Straight Months Of Holiday Activities)

Attempt to dodge the utter scourge that is spirit week but wind up coaxing your son’s too-short hairs into the faux-hawk he decides is essential for Crazy Hair Day at 7:58 am. Launch the customary large-scale panic over planning a Thanksgiving menu that both adults and children will want to eat. Begin the hunt for holiday gifts for your family’s Secret Santa enterprise. Have your annual identity crisis while decorating the Christmas tree, wondering if you’ve sacrificed too much of your personal cultural traditions to Western commercialism. Hear the collective gasp when the tree lights up, and decide this problem, like so many others, will just have to wait for next year’s calendar.

For now, someone pass the box of peppermint bark.