A couple of weeks ago, my work colleagues and I were laying out the rest of the summer schedule for office vacations. All of us would be back by Labor Day, it seemed.
"I love Labor Day," one colleague said.
"Really?" I said. "I hate it!"
She said that to her, Labor Day is a chance to start everything all over again–to change the way you do things, to come in refreshed from vacation with new ideas and renewed energy. Lots of life changes happen in September, from moving to new jobs–new clothes, new school year, new season. And Labor Day symbolizes all that potential–not unlike the way Jan. 1, and its accompanying New Year's resolutions, create hope and possibility for the future.
But I just couldn't relate. "In our family," I said, "Labor Day is always the saddest day of the year."
I explained that my mother was from Maine, and although I grew up in New York, we spent every summer in Maine–from the day school ended right up to the day before school started–which was always Labor Day. We'd dread the coming of that first Monday in September, and we rejoiced the years the calendar allowed it to fall as late as Sept. 7.
Labor Day weekend, most of our neighbors in Maine would be out at the lake where we vacationed, partying and enjoying the last hurrah of summer with barbecues and bonfires. But we'd be moping around, gathering up our belongings for the trip home, trying hard not to think about the fact that we wouldn't be back until summer came around again. We'd pack everything into the truck my dad drove, then get up early Labor Day Monday to face the traffic and the long trip home. Nobody said much, but none of us were looking forward to going back to our other lives in the city. In our family, Labor Day was almost like a day of mourning–a symbol of all the summer happiness gone by.
Things are a little different now that I'm the mother, but I still feel sad when the first Monday in September is at hand, and so do my boys. We don't go to Maine for the whole summer–only three weeks–so we often feel like we didn't quite get our fill of the place, like we've somehow been cheated–even though we know full well that hardly anybody in America takes that much time off from work these days.
I always wonder if we had enough perfect days while we were there–and I have high standards for a perfect day. It can't be a day where anyone did any errands in town, or where it wasn't warm enough to go in the water. If it was too hot, that's no good either. An argument could mar the day; even a visitor could ruin it in my book, if the person overstayed his welcome or required a lot of attention.
But if I got to float on the water for most of the afternoon on a plastic blowup mat, with my kids nearby on inner tubes or their own rubber rafts, if we laughed and were silly together, if we put on our bathing suits after breakfast and managed to stay in them until supper–that would count as a perfect day.
There are no days like that after Labor Day, though. Just work days and school days. Even weekend days are busy when we're home–with kids' sports and birthday parties, and grocery shopping and cleaning the house.
And that's why, next weekend, when I'm up in Maine with my family, packing up for our long trip home–just like I did when I was a kid–I'll get that same sad feeling my own mother had. For us, Labor Day doesn't represent a beginning of a wonderful time. It represents the end of the favorite part of our year–our family summer vacation.
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This week's advice: Start planning now for next year's summer vacation. With your family, make a list of what was good and bad about this year's vacation, and how you might organize things differently next year to maximize what you enjoyed and minimize what you could have done without.
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