This is the midweek edition of Culture Study — the newsletter from Anne Helen Petersen, which you can read about here. If you like it and want more like it in your inbox, consider subscribing. In the days after my very small Thanksgiving, I was thinking about how part of me misses the elaborate holidays, mini-vacations, and weekends of the past, when you’d throw a group of people, usually some conglomeration of friends plus their partner, in a rented house, cabin, a beach cottage, a tent, an RV, and try to figure out how to have planned fun, as a new or old friend group, away from the confines of home and work. If you’ve ever been on one of these trips, you might know that there’s always a figure that I think of as the Vacation Mom — sometimes literally, oftentimes figuratively — also known as the “Cruise Director.”
I wonder if "Peak Vacation Value" is a uniquely American construct, given that as a society we are afforded significantly less vacation time than pretty much any other major industrial nation.
I don't think people *want* to squeeze as many things in to their time away from work as possible--- they just don't have any other choice.
For example, the pandemic is effectively taking valuable vacation time away from me this year because I probably won't be able to use it to travel. I will find other things to do with that vacation time (use it or lose it!), but I'm going to be upset that these 14 extremely valuable days that I am granted by my employer this year are not going to be spent taking a long road trip or flying to a foreign country.
Sand trickles through the hourglass... only so many vacation days left before you die.
Every single paragraph of this speaks to me. I just stayed up until midnight perfecting the damned holiday card (through minted, with foil!) after managing the photographer, the casually coordinating photo outfits, and the kids' damned moods during the pictures. Thank you for naming all of this - recognizing what I'm doing may help me let go of the parts that I don't like.
I'm a young millennial who *loves* going ham on Christmas. And has never had a budget to accommodate that leading to many a year of hand made Christmas cards. I work for a printing company, and last year treated myself to making a very beautiful accordion fold Christmas card (4 panels). Two of the panels were tear away postcards from two trips that I took that year. The other two panels were a card with a quilt I've been working on, on the front and some poems and prose to reflect the postcards and a little missive and picture of me.
So, you know: very simple
But besides the joy of the production and the beauty of it, it was a very nice treat for me not to do individualized letters to every individual on my list (which I'd done until last year).
This year I'm sending a double-sided card. 2020 Doom Bingo and 2020 Making the Best of It Bingo. And a note informing all sendees that if they get bingos I'll donate $5 to a bail fund (Doom) or mutual aid fund (Making the Best of It).
So again, not simple. But it's making my spirit bright. And also as a no kids, yet, single, I report that I haven't felt weird sending it out.
Counterpoint on the holiday card: if I didn't have photos taken each year by a professional photographer, there would never be any (nice, non-selfie) photos of me with my husband or children. I'm sure it's just another gendered job for the mom to do, but I am the only one in this household who will think to take candid photos, and I am definitely the only one who can take photos where everyone's eyes are open and feet aren't cut off.
I do send a holiday card, but I've been doing it for 15 years (long before kids), it doesn't always use the pro photos, it's usually a bit cheeky, and most importantly, I enjoy it!(Don't take away my Christmas cards, it's the only sanity I have left this year..../s)
I will never do Christmas cards and this whole newsletter made me feel pretty great about it, thank you! I am an obstinate, contrarian Gen X opt out person by nature, and I have done my level best for my whole life to opt out of any compulsory invisible gendered labor tasks that don't interest me. I love to clean and sew and decorate the house, but cards of any kind are my absolute third rail nightmare. Part of why I wanted to elope (and we did!) was no invites, no thank-you cards, no performance of photography, no gifts. I legit took our wedding photos with a timer and a tripod. However, my husband and I are both total cruise director-types for vacations, holidays, and parties and because we share that compulsion 50/50, our vacations are pretty resentment-free, especially when I direct us to spend an entire afternoon reading for pleasure and enforce that shit for real. Much easier with just two of us, obviously. Group trips are a whole different beast. Planning fun for so many people is challenging, even for this Vacation Mom.
Oh, I kind of miss being Vacation Mom! I made very elaborate Google Sheets that were productive ways to procrastinate during the workday.
I see your point(s) though. I deeply feel “Is it actually a weekend trip out of the city if you don’t even go on a little hike?!?!”
It reminds me of an old episode of This American Life (I think? I didn’t used to listen to too many other podcasts) about a family that goes on vacation and the dad is so miserable when the tiniest things go wrong that he digs himself into a pile of misery and ruins his own vacation, and his family’s along with it.
Thanks so much for this one - I feel like you shine light into every little corner of the Mom-leisure role. It is useful and affirming to read. For me a lot of these expectations were so naturalized so long ago that unlearning is - for now at least - a continual project. In order to resist falling into old "I must perform domestic/family competence" assumptions, I find myself explaining and re-explaining these dynamics to my spouse and to myself. We're getting better about balancing this stuff, but sometimes it feels like the project is endless. You say so much so clearly here, this one is getting shared with my spouse for sure.
I particularly appreciate that you mention the class aspect of Mom roles and performances. I think about this a lot, I feel it in my own habits and feelings about what is expected of me, and I try to thwart it in small ways. But it's a real puzzle, and maybe even a red herring(?). Job, neighbors, kid's school, lack of leisure time, income - the factors that keep people Mom-laboring to fit in, they are an enormous influence on all this. They show up sooner or later in every small Mom-decision, but to what degree can small resistances push back?
Okay, I don’t really disagree with anything in this piece, re: holiday cards. It’s all pretty gendered and the lengths taken can be a bit of an eye roll. Certainly a lot of the things are just too cutesy and too much work - I don’t begrudge opting out.
But, but...what about the demand/recipient side of things? As a social media-less millennial male, I actually do appreciate receiving holiday cards from any friend or family who sends. As a somewhat globetrotting parent, I can imagine my family appreciates the (basic, Albertsons gloss 4x6 tucked into a) holiday card we usually send. My cynical heart races at the (however professionally prepared) card I might get in the mail from an old high school friend with kids.
Oh man I have definitely (jokingly?) called myself both Vacation Mom and Cruise Director out loud while on trips at several points in my life. I’m not a very demonstrative person and I think these activities - making pancakes for everyone! Pulling together the spreadsheet and making the campground reservation! - were always my awkward introvert way of being like “hey friends! I love u, let’s hang out!” I did for awhile get roped into planning a yearly tradition trip that started to feel like work so one year I just let the ball drop and lo and behold no one else took over.
Funnily enough as I drifted away from that group I was lucky to make some friends in my mid 20s where I think we all bring just enough Mom to the table and we still travel together semi regularly. Now that I am an actual mom I appreciate that even more! There’s no denying the gendered nature of so many of these things and I find I’m constantly running up against new ones ...who plans the holiday gift for the daycare teachers? Etc
The best and only answer I’ve found for it is just not doing the ones I don’t like, or being very clear with my partner that said gifting is not somehow uniquely on me when I can’t.
We did do a holiday photo card this year. We bought a house and our realtor surprised us with a gift mini photo session with a photographer friend of his. I never would have had the mental bandwidth to organize it myself but I’m actually really happy to have a photo of my whole family together because (as mom!) I’m literally never in photos as I’m always behind the camera. It does feel especially nice to have in this particular year though when we probably won’t get to see any family or friends at Christmas either. At least there was this one little silly moment where we got to be laughing and normal? And I do feel like personal mail feels nice in this year of distancing. I just hope me sending it does not then feel to my friends like a chore they have to reciprocate.
Aside from the whole Vacation Mom/Christmas card thing, this sentence just sums up so much of my life that it hurts: "And a lot of it is performing, just generally, for everyone else — trying to meet and exceed their expectations, and trying not to make anyone mad at me, things I feel like I’ve never not been doing." Yep. Yep yep yep.
Oh wow. There’s so much here! My closest friends and I go camping with our families every summer and somehow the women ended up with “camp names.” Mine is “Mom to All.” Somehow it made me sad and yet it’s true? I don’t do any of the cruise-style planning but just care for everyone throughout. Like stick with kids whose paddleboards are lagging behind, that kind of thing.
I do an end-of-year card with photos, though just random photos not professional. I started it because my husband’s company moved us about every two years and it felt like a natural way to keep in touch with friends we valued. That was pre-social media but it’s come to feel valuable to relationships that might slip away. It’s a very gendered thing in our house. I think of it as part of that uncompensated emotional labor that also maintains social connections. Necessary? No. But I hear from a number of my own old college friends that they really appreciate it. Maybe it’s non-categorizable.
I just read this right in tandem with Lyz Lenz's substack on a similar theme, and I realized that the way I have managed to both embrace my need to be the Vacation Mom and my anger at having to PERFORM Vacation Mom is to keep only the *private* elements of it. So, yes to being the one who sets up holiday decor and arranges to get a tree, because those are for *us*. But I just won't do holiday cards (I did buy a small pack of little "peace on earth" ones to send to family I won't see this year, but not the zeitgeisty photo ones), or make our camping trips more exciting than they need to be? I do try to remind myself that boredom is good for us all, which helps.
It does take a lot of mental effort to opt out, though.
Love love love this dispatch. In the early days of our parenting adventure, my husband and I had a yearly fight about Christmas card planning and execution. EVERY YEAR between 2008 and 2019. It mattered to him, but I was the one putting in all the work in the midst of producing holiday magic. Never mind my day-to-day exhaustion from Thanksgiving to Christmas Eve, followed by a yearly viral hit post-Christmas that could take me out of commission into the New Year.
I'm playing the long game on Christmas cards. I'm one year away from rolling out my Christmas card retrospective. I've saved every Christmas card we've received from 2011 onward, and plan to send notes to all my mom friends who did all the invisible work. A little dividend on past investment, if you will. I see them. I am them. We're in this together. And now it's basically a group art project I plan to roll with until I'm old and gray.
Vacation Mom and Card-Maker here. We’ve never done the professional-photographer type of card, but until this year, we always had vacation photos to use. Even in years when we were too busy for big trips, we visited family for a week and went to the beach or on a hike and took lots of pictures. Then this year, nothing. No travel, no family visits, and kids at the refusing-pictures age. I thought about bailing on holiday cards, then decided to use baby pictures of each of us. Somehow, this STILL took multiple hours. For my next trick, I will try to find a rental house for spring break that is within driving distance and close enough to restaurants and (outdoor) activities, but not TOO close. Whee!
I wonder if "Peak Vacation Value" is a uniquely American construct, given that as a society we are afforded significantly less vacation time than pretty much any other major industrial nation.
I don't think people *want* to squeeze as many things in to their time away from work as possible--- they just don't have any other choice.
For example, the pandemic is effectively taking valuable vacation time away from me this year because I probably won't be able to use it to travel. I will find other things to do with that vacation time (use it or lose it!), but I'm going to be upset that these 14 extremely valuable days that I am granted by my employer this year are not going to be spent taking a long road trip or flying to a foreign country.
Sand trickles through the hourglass... only so many vacation days left before you die.
Every single paragraph of this speaks to me. I just stayed up until midnight perfecting the damned holiday card (through minted, with foil!) after managing the photographer, the casually coordinating photo outfits, and the kids' damned moods during the pictures. Thank you for naming all of this - recognizing what I'm doing may help me let go of the parts that I don't like.
I'm a young millennial who *loves* going ham on Christmas. And has never had a budget to accommodate that leading to many a year of hand made Christmas cards. I work for a printing company, and last year treated myself to making a very beautiful accordion fold Christmas card (4 panels). Two of the panels were tear away postcards from two trips that I took that year. The other two panels were a card with a quilt I've been working on, on the front and some poems and prose to reflect the postcards and a little missive and picture of me.
So, you know: very simple
But besides the joy of the production and the beauty of it, it was a very nice treat for me not to do individualized letters to every individual on my list (which I'd done until last year).
This year I'm sending a double-sided card. 2020 Doom Bingo and 2020 Making the Best of It Bingo. And a note informing all sendees that if they get bingos I'll donate $5 to a bail fund (Doom) or mutual aid fund (Making the Best of It).
So again, not simple. But it's making my spirit bright. And also as a no kids, yet, single, I report that I haven't felt weird sending it out.
Counterpoint on the holiday card: if I didn't have photos taken each year by a professional photographer, there would never be any (nice, non-selfie) photos of me with my husband or children. I'm sure it's just another gendered job for the mom to do, but I am the only one in this household who will think to take candid photos, and I am definitely the only one who can take photos where everyone's eyes are open and feet aren't cut off.
I do send a holiday card, but I've been doing it for 15 years (long before kids), it doesn't always use the pro photos, it's usually a bit cheeky, and most importantly, I enjoy it!(Don't take away my Christmas cards, it's the only sanity I have left this year..../s)
I will never do Christmas cards and this whole newsletter made me feel pretty great about it, thank you! I am an obstinate, contrarian Gen X opt out person by nature, and I have done my level best for my whole life to opt out of any compulsory invisible gendered labor tasks that don't interest me. I love to clean and sew and decorate the house, but cards of any kind are my absolute third rail nightmare. Part of why I wanted to elope (and we did!) was no invites, no thank-you cards, no performance of photography, no gifts. I legit took our wedding photos with a timer and a tripod. However, my husband and I are both total cruise director-types for vacations, holidays, and parties and because we share that compulsion 50/50, our vacations are pretty resentment-free, especially when I direct us to spend an entire afternoon reading for pleasure and enforce that shit for real. Much easier with just two of us, obviously. Group trips are a whole different beast. Planning fun for so many people is challenging, even for this Vacation Mom.
Oh, I kind of miss being Vacation Mom! I made very elaborate Google Sheets that were productive ways to procrastinate during the workday.
I see your point(s) though. I deeply feel “Is it actually a weekend trip out of the city if you don’t even go on a little hike?!?!”
It reminds me of an old episode of This American Life (I think? I didn’t used to listen to too many other podcasts) about a family that goes on vacation and the dad is so miserable when the tiniest things go wrong that he digs himself into a pile of misery and ruins his own vacation, and his family’s along with it.
Thanks so much for this one - I feel like you shine light into every little corner of the Mom-leisure role. It is useful and affirming to read. For me a lot of these expectations were so naturalized so long ago that unlearning is - for now at least - a continual project. In order to resist falling into old "I must perform domestic/family competence" assumptions, I find myself explaining and re-explaining these dynamics to my spouse and to myself. We're getting better about balancing this stuff, but sometimes it feels like the project is endless. You say so much so clearly here, this one is getting shared with my spouse for sure.
I particularly appreciate that you mention the class aspect of Mom roles and performances. I think about this a lot, I feel it in my own habits and feelings about what is expected of me, and I try to thwart it in small ways. But it's a real puzzle, and maybe even a red herring(?). Job, neighbors, kid's school, lack of leisure time, income - the factors that keep people Mom-laboring to fit in, they are an enormous influence on all this. They show up sooner or later in every small Mom-decision, but to what degree can small resistances push back?
I resemble this entire article. Glad I'm not alone!
Okay, I don’t really disagree with anything in this piece, re: holiday cards. It’s all pretty gendered and the lengths taken can be a bit of an eye roll. Certainly a lot of the things are just too cutesy and too much work - I don’t begrudge opting out.
But, but...what about the demand/recipient side of things? As a social media-less millennial male, I actually do appreciate receiving holiday cards from any friend or family who sends. As a somewhat globetrotting parent, I can imagine my family appreciates the (basic, Albertsons gloss 4x6 tucked into a) holiday card we usually send. My cynical heart races at the (however professionally prepared) card I might get in the mail from an old high school friend with kids.
Oh man I have definitely (jokingly?) called myself both Vacation Mom and Cruise Director out loud while on trips at several points in my life. I’m not a very demonstrative person and I think these activities - making pancakes for everyone! Pulling together the spreadsheet and making the campground reservation! - were always my awkward introvert way of being like “hey friends! I love u, let’s hang out!” I did for awhile get roped into planning a yearly tradition trip that started to feel like work so one year I just let the ball drop and lo and behold no one else took over.
Funnily enough as I drifted away from that group I was lucky to make some friends in my mid 20s where I think we all bring just enough Mom to the table and we still travel together semi regularly. Now that I am an actual mom I appreciate that even more! There’s no denying the gendered nature of so many of these things and I find I’m constantly running up against new ones ...who plans the holiday gift for the daycare teachers? Etc
The best and only answer I’ve found for it is just not doing the ones I don’t like, or being very clear with my partner that said gifting is not somehow uniquely on me when I can’t.
We did do a holiday photo card this year. We bought a house and our realtor surprised us with a gift mini photo session with a photographer friend of his. I never would have had the mental bandwidth to organize it myself but I’m actually really happy to have a photo of my whole family together because (as mom!) I’m literally never in photos as I’m always behind the camera. It does feel especially nice to have in this particular year though when we probably won’t get to see any family or friends at Christmas either. At least there was this one little silly moment where we got to be laughing and normal? And I do feel like personal mail feels nice in this year of distancing. I just hope me sending it does not then feel to my friends like a chore they have to reciprocate.
Aside from the whole Vacation Mom/Christmas card thing, this sentence just sums up so much of my life that it hurts: "And a lot of it is performing, just generally, for everyone else — trying to meet and exceed their expectations, and trying not to make anyone mad at me, things I feel like I’ve never not been doing." Yep. Yep yep yep.
Oh wow. There’s so much here! My closest friends and I go camping with our families every summer and somehow the women ended up with “camp names.” Mine is “Mom to All.” Somehow it made me sad and yet it’s true? I don’t do any of the cruise-style planning but just care for everyone throughout. Like stick with kids whose paddleboards are lagging behind, that kind of thing.
I do an end-of-year card with photos, though just random photos not professional. I started it because my husband’s company moved us about every two years and it felt like a natural way to keep in touch with friends we valued. That was pre-social media but it’s come to feel valuable to relationships that might slip away. It’s a very gendered thing in our house. I think of it as part of that uncompensated emotional labor that also maintains social connections. Necessary? No. But I hear from a number of my own old college friends that they really appreciate it. Maybe it’s non-categorizable.
I just read this right in tandem with Lyz Lenz's substack on a similar theme, and I realized that the way I have managed to both embrace my need to be the Vacation Mom and my anger at having to PERFORM Vacation Mom is to keep only the *private* elements of it. So, yes to being the one who sets up holiday decor and arranges to get a tree, because those are for *us*. But I just won't do holiday cards (I did buy a small pack of little "peace on earth" ones to send to family I won't see this year, but not the zeitgeisty photo ones), or make our camping trips more exciting than they need to be? I do try to remind myself that boredom is good for us all, which helps.
It does take a lot of mental effort to opt out, though.
Love love love this dispatch. In the early days of our parenting adventure, my husband and I had a yearly fight about Christmas card planning and execution. EVERY YEAR between 2008 and 2019. It mattered to him, but I was the one putting in all the work in the midst of producing holiday magic. Never mind my day-to-day exhaustion from Thanksgiving to Christmas Eve, followed by a yearly viral hit post-Christmas that could take me out of commission into the New Year.
I'm playing the long game on Christmas cards. I'm one year away from rolling out my Christmas card retrospective. I've saved every Christmas card we've received from 2011 onward, and plan to send notes to all my mom friends who did all the invisible work. A little dividend on past investment, if you will. I see them. I am them. We're in this together. And now it's basically a group art project I plan to roll with until I'm old and gray.
My parents never did Christmas cards and felt kind of bad about it - I am determined to never do Christmas cards and to feel good about it.
Vacation Mom and Card-Maker here. We’ve never done the professional-photographer type of card, but until this year, we always had vacation photos to use. Even in years when we were too busy for big trips, we visited family for a week and went to the beach or on a hike and took lots of pictures. Then this year, nothing. No travel, no family visits, and kids at the refusing-pictures age. I thought about bailing on holiday cards, then decided to use baby pictures of each of us. Somehow, this STILL took multiple hours. For my next trick, I will try to find a rental house for spring break that is within driving distance and close enough to restaurants and (outdoor) activities, but not TOO close. Whee!