Picture this: (my millennial moms who used to watch The Golden Girls will get the Sophia’s voice reference). It’s 11 p.m. on a Wednesday night, and you are deep in a ChatGPT rabbit hole asking which camp bag labels will actually survive the washing machine. The regular white sticky labels keep falling off, and if one more thing comes home unlabeled, you are going to lose your mind.
Everyone talks about the mental load during the school year—the dentist appointment scheduling, the sports sign-up, the finding a reading tutor. And for moms with ADHD kids, we can add in the IEP follow-ups, the teacher emails, the therapist appointments squeezed between your work Zoom calls.
Summer has its own particular brand of invisible labor that nobody warns you about until you’re already in it.
Let’s start with the camp bag. Every single morning, that bag needs a towel, a bathing suit, a change of clothes, sunscreen, a labeled water bottle, and a snack without nuts. This sounds simple. It is not simple. It is a daily logistics puzzle you solve in your head before 7 a.m., while also remembering that your babysitter can’t do Tuesdays in August, that camp picture day is Thursday, and that your kid is absolutely not wearing that shirt.
And everything (even socks) must be labeled. Because camp lost six towels last summer and you paid $18 each for them. So you order the labels, you apply the labels, and then the labels start peeling off in the wash, and you’re back on ChatGPT at 11 p.m. like some kind of exhausted label sommelier, trying to find the one brand that can survive both a nine-year-old and an industrial dryer. And that’s just day camp. Sleepaway camp is a whole different beast.
This is before we even talk about what happens if your kid isn’t in camp. Because then you become the full-time unpaid activities director. With a nine-to-five that did not pause for summer and a child who, by 10 a.m., has already declared that they’re bored, hungry, and that the iPad died.
You are now fielding requests, coordinating play dates, and texting your sitter a revised schedule while simultaneously on a Zoom call pretending everything is fine. Drop-off and pickup now live on your calendar, which means the sitter’s hours need to shift, which means you are renegotiating the entire logistics architecture of your week.
For moms raising ADHD kids who need more structure to thrive, summer is a particular kind of hard. The invisible scaffolding that school provided is gone. The predictability is gone. And what moves in to fill that space is big emotions, louder afternoons, and a kid who is struggling to regulate in a season that is one long unstructured expanse of time.
The fallout from that doesn’t stay at home. It follows you onto the train, into the meeting. Into the quiet moment at your desk when you’re trying to focus, but instead you’re mentally running through whether tomorrow’s camp bag is packed.
That is the mental load of summer. It’s not one big thing. It’s a thousand small things that live in your head rent-free from June through August, running in the background like seventeen open tabs that never fully close.
Here’s what I want to say to the moms carrying it: you’re not imagining how heavy it is. This is real cognitive labor that tends to fall on one person — usually you — and it runs constantly, invisibly, all season long.
You don’t have to do all of it perfectly. The labels will peel. The camp bag occasionally misses the $18 towel. Your kid will survive both. What you cannot keep doing is pretending the weight isn’t there.
Name it. Split it where you can. And maybe let your partner do the 11 p.m. label research for once. They have ChatGPT too.
