The Last Four Summers

My colleague was scrolling through her phone the other evening when she stopped.

She had stumbled across photos of her children from four years ago. They were little. Gap-toothed grins, knees scraped, arms flung around each other with the complete unselfconsciousness of children who have not yet learned to be cool. She showed her husband. They looked at each other.

"We've got about four years left," she said. "Maybe less. Before they won't want to spend their summers with us anymore."

She and her husband are both senior professionals. Two good incomes. A nanny during term time. A cleaner twice a week. By any measure, they have arranged their lives well. They are not people who are waiting to be rescued.

And yet.

The summer holidays had just started and already she was behind.

• The school had sent three emails she hadn't opened.
• The uniform order for September needed to be in by the end of the week, plus the labelling.
• The car needed a service before the drive down to her parents.
• The flights for August were booked but nobody had checked in. She'd been meaning to find restaurants for the trip.
• The kids needed haircuts. One of them had a dentist appointment she kept forgetting to rearrange.

None of these things were hard, exactly. They were just relentless. And they were hers.

This is the part that the nanny and the cleaner do not touch. The visible domestic labour - the school run, the hoovering - has been delegated. But the invisible kind, the mental load of running a family, the remembering, the researching, the booking, the chasing, the checking- that remains firmly lodged in the heads of two already-stretched people who are supposed to be on holiday.

There is a finite number of weeks in the year when you are not, in some meaningful sense, at work.

And the real question we need to ask ourselves is this - are those weeks actually yours? Or are you spending them managing the logistics of your own life, phone in hand, half-present, ticking things off a list that replenishes itself overnight?

Research suggests the average family spends around twenty hours a month on life admin. Twenty hours. That is two and a half working days every single month, not spent on work, not spent with the people you love, but spent on the invisible scaffolding that holds everything else up. The more children you have, the higher that number climbs.

Retirement is not the answer. By the time you have stepped back from the career, the children will have built lives of their own. The window is now, and it is narrowing every summer.

What is needed is not just help with the doing - it’s help with the thinking. A life audit. Someone to look at the whole picture, to organise and prioritise, and then to handle the things that do not require you personally - the MOT, the check-in, the restaurant bookings, the school kit order, the subscription you forgot you were still paying for.

Your children are four years older than they were in those photos. The summers you have left are not a vague future concern. They are happening now, and they are going too quickly.

The question is simply whether you are really “in” them.