Why didn't anyone tell me summer was a second job?

June 23, 2026

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Summer is a lie.

Not the popsicles. Not the pool. Those are real, and they're glorious. I'm talking about the idea of summer - the long, golden, unstructured stretch we're all supposed to lean back into like a hammock.

For a working parent, summer is not a hammock. Summer is a second full-time job that shows up uninvited in June and doesn't leave until Labor Day.

Here's the part that makes me want to scream into a beach towel.

We built this calendar for farmers. The story we all got handed is that summer break exists so the kids could work the fields. (The real history is messier than that - turns out it had as much to do with city heat and rich families fleeing to the country - but stick with me, because the bones of it are true.) We designed an entire society around the assumption that someone is home. On the land. Available.

And now? Almost none of us farm. But the calendar never got the memo.

So here we are. We don't harvest wheat. We harvest logistics. We harvest a thousand permission slips for a thousand camps that all start at 9 and end at 12:15 - a window engineered, I am convinced, by someone who has never held a job. (Three midday hours, five days a week. Find me the human who can build a career around that.)

Let me tell you what this one week looks like, since I really can't make any of this seem easy.

This week, I'm juggling: building a Fourth of July float in my driveway (neighborhood BBQ tonight!), an out-of-town lacrosse tournament, two swim meets, junior lifeguard camp, tutoring, other sports, potty-training a stubborn puppy, and more. Always more.

And every bit of that gets juggled alongside work.

It is a beautiful summer. Fireflies and popsicles and so much love - I want give a nod to that part too. But underneath the beauty there's the work, the lack of consistent childcare (because this summer, right where we are right now, I can't afford it), and a mountain of research and prep for a trial in a legal battle my family has been fighting for six and a half years (hence the inability to pay for childcare).

I'm kind of drowning.

Maybe your weeks look different than mine. I hope they do - this legal shit is too much for anyone - but I'd bet yours is hard in its own way. My eldest is up for swim practice at 5:45 a.m. (She's eleven. This is nuts.) My second is a night owl who needs me right next to her to fall asleep at 10:30. So it's just… never-ending. There's no clean shift change. There's barely a shift.

(I have a partner. I have my parents 500 yards away with a full tank of gas. I have help, and it's still impossible. Sit with that, because if it's this hard for me, the system is broken - not you.)

I went looking for the data to make sure I wasn't just being dramatic.

I'm not.

Summer doesn't just feel harder — it measurably breaks working parents, mothers most of all. Economists who studied it found that when school lets out, women's total hours worked drop by 11%, and working moms pick up nearly nine extra hours of childcare a week. (The hardest ages to cover? Six to twelve. Cool. That's the exact span of my four.) A Harris Poll for Bright Horizons found 90% of working parents lose sleep over summer scheduling - ninety percent. And nearly half of us say we can't comfortably afford the camps that are supposed to save us.

So yes - I really did go down the farming rabbit hole, and here's what's at the bottom of it: we built a calendar with ten-plus weeks of summer for a country where two of every three households with school-age kids have every available parent working. We designed the gap. Then we act shocked every June when parents fall in.ummer doesn't make parenting hard. It just rips the cover off how much our whole working lives depend on school being open.

So why am I not completely face-down in the deep end?

Here's the one saving grace, the thing that makes all of it survivable: I work for myself. (Yes. I refuse to stop circling back to this point. Maybe everyone can hear it after the 87th time - because corporate America is not going to bend to adapt to small things like ....summer.)

Truly. I'm an early bird, so I work 5 to 7 a.m. before anyone's up. I take the 9-to-11:30 block, the 12:30-to-3, and I clean up emails at night. I can stand on a pool deck on a Tuesday at 10 a.m. and not ask a single soul for permission. When my kid is the one on the board, I'm there.

(Did I sell you on it yet? No? Okay, give me a minute.)
​
I'm not telling you summer is all roses. It's a magical mess — heavy on the mess. I just wrote a newsletter about it. But it is possible to build a life where summer doesn't break you. I know, because I'm living the proof. And I'm going to keep preaching it from this soapbox until I lose my voice.

I've been a loyal citizen worker for a Fortune 500 managing summer - and a solopreneur. I'll take the latter hard all day, every day, each year.

Which brings me to the thing I've been harping on. (I know. I know.)

​The Lean Out Challenge​

​I need you to know how to make money on your own. Really know. Not as a someday-fantasy — as a skill you actually have in your hands.

Because the most dangerous place to be standing when the floor drops out is dependent on a single employer who can decide your fate over a coffee you weren't invited to.
​
I've been getting asked to be more concrete about what we actually do in the Lean Out Challenge - what your life could look like on the other side. Fair. So let me show you, using my own life, exactly what's on the table.

You work for yourself. I left lawyering for good the day my employer couldn't agree to a single concession that would've let me see my babies awake. I proposed 23 different schedules. The answer was no. So my answer became: never again will one company hold the keys to my life. That door I walked out of? Best thing I ever did.

You find fractional roles. I don't have one job. I have several, on my terms — fractional legal and investigations work in the stuff I'm genuinely g eat at, the white-collar fix-it work people call me for when everything's on fire. You don't have to blow up your whole income overnight. You stack pieces. That's the unlock most people never get told about.

You set your own hours. Remember my 5 a.m.? That's not discipline poloryrn — it's freedom. I built my day around my actual li and how my brain worksfe instead of jamming my life into the cracks of someone else's 9-to-5:30. I say no a lot more than I say yes now, and it's the most powerful word I own.

You do work you love - without the corporate BS. I spent decades burying my zone of genius under other people's org charts. Now I write. I tell stories. I help women get their expertise into the world. The thing I'm best at is the thing I get paid for. No performance review theater. No "executive presence" notes. Just the work.

You work with people you choose. I get to pick. I work with a group of women doing genuinely cool things, people who light me up instead of drain me. When you build your own thing, you stop inheriting your colleagues and start choosing your people. That alone is worth the leap.

None of this happened by accident, and I won't pretend it did. I stood up and decided to learn, connect, experiment, show up, try, fail, and try again. Sometimes that cost me money. It has been worth every cent.

I built this while the rain was still falling. I'm asking you to do the same - start now, while you still have stable ground under you, so the tools are already in your hands when you need them.

Come build with me. Worst case, you survive next summer with your sanity intact. Best case? You never have to ask permission to watch your kid off the diving board again.

If you have questions or want more info, join me on Thursday for an AMA at 1 pm et/10 am pt. Join; nothing to lose.

I'm rooting for all of us.
Amy
​

P.S. If you read this nodding into your third lukewarm coffee, forward it to the friend who's currently texting you "how is it only Tuesday." Tell her there's another way. Tell her I'll save her a seat.