The Summer I Put Down My Phone

It's the final weekend of May, and in Austin, that means one thing: summer has officially arrived.

We marked it the way I'd promised we would, with a night at Hyatt Lost Pines, thirty-five minutes from our front door, but a world away from everything. There was a lazy river and a waterslide. A little farm. S'mores and a movie projected onto the lawn. Barbecue, all you can eat. Hiking trails through the pines, and free bikes in every size lined up like a small miracle.

We got there, unpacked, and within an hour, Jonny and I looked at each other and said the thing we always say when we underbook a trip: we should have gone with that extra night.

Because it felt like summer camp. And there is nothing — nothing — better, in our books, than feeling like you're at summer camp.

We almost brought the iPads.

That was almost the whole story.

Milly and Jonny argued about the iPads as we were packing our bags. She and Ernie wanted them for the drive, he said "No, thirty-five minutes doesn't need an iPad." I took her side. "Just let them have it. Not even for the drive?" He held firm.

That one hour we had before dinner — the 6 to 7 PM hour, the default "do what you want" hour on vacation, the hour where I probably would have opened my phone and started scrolling something I didn't need, and the kids would have been sucked into a game on their iPads they didn't need — instead, we taught Milly to ride a bike.

Two tries. That was all it took. Two tries, and she was off.

On the drive home, Jonny looked back at her and said, "Aren't you glad you didn't bring your iPad?"

And Milly replied, confidently, "Yeah. I actually am because now I'm a bike rider."

When we arrived home this afternoon, the first thing Milly did was walk straight to her bike in the garage and ask us to take off the training wheels. She rode around the cul-de-sac like she'd been doing it for years. Confident, fast, her hair behind her. I stood there feeling something I can only describe as grateful, with a side of butterflies and a plea to my memory to never forget this exact moment — the way you get when something small turns out to be a meaningful page in your book of motherhood stories.

There's a place I keep returning to in my memory this weekend — our cabin we sold last summer on Lake St. Catherine in Vermont. Thirty-five minutes from our house in Dorset, same distance as Lost Pines, same feeling of arriving somewhere that made you exhale.

We kept it as a no-screen zone. No Wi-Fi, no TV. While our neighbors had it all, we kept the cabin deliberately raw and old-fashioned. And what happened was one of the most beautiful things I've ever experienced as a mother: we all synced up. We woke at the same time. We tired at the same time. When the sun went down and the s'mores were done, nobody fought bedtime, because everyone was genuinely, wonderfully knackered. There was no war. There was just the dark, and the lake, and the quiet.

That's what happened at Lost Pines last night, too. The kids went down without a fight. Jonny and I looked at each other in the dark.

I brought my journal. I wrote two pages. That felt like its own kind of miracle.

I've been thinking about Just June — the moment, the feeling, the intention I've been naming for this month. I listed all the things I want to feel this summer: present, in tune, part of the calendar instead of running around it. But I realized I never named what I would actually give up.

So, I'm naming it now.

I want to be on my phone less.

Not because of any study or screen time recommendation. Because our children remember the thing that keeps us from seeing them.

And I hate that this small, glowing rectangle takes so much from us, and that they watch it take so much from us, and that they are learning, from us, what to do with the quiet.

If my daughter learned to ride a bike in a day because we used the default "zone out" hour to be together instead of disappear into our screens, imagine all the things that are waiting for us on the other side of that choice. Every single summer. Every single day?

Chief Moms will always be here. New stories and posts will be published consistently. But, it was never built to be a constant feed. I don't think any of us need another constant feed. The only things worth feeding constantly are ourselves, our children, and our partnerships.

So this is my summer love song: to less, to presence, to the hour between six and seven that could become the best hour of the day, if we let it.

The end of May is feeling so good.

I hope Just June finds us feeling the same way.

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