May is the month everyone tells you to be grateful for. The light stretches into the evening, the school calendar finally empties out, and the kids come home. And somewhere between the last bell and the first "I'm bored," a lot of the people I work with feel something they're almost embarrassed to name: not relief, but a low, humming dread.
If that's you, I want to say this plainly: there is nothing wrong with you. Summer is a season of highs and lows stacked closely together, and the culture only ever shows you the highs. When your inner experience doesn't match the postcard, it's easy to assume you're the problem. You're not. You're just paying attention.
What's actually happening under the sunshine
Here's what I've noticed after years of Mays in this work: summer doesn't remove stress, it rearranges it. The structure that quietly held everyone together (the school day, the routine, the predictable hand-offs) dissolves almost overnight. In its place is a wide-open expanse that has to be filled, refereed, and paid for. For a lot of families, "freedom" and "no scaffolding" turn out to be the same thing wearing two different outfits.
In the therapy room I often reach for a simple idea from acceptance and commitment therapy, or ACT: the goal isn't to feel good all the time, it's to make room for the whole range of what's true. Two things can sit side by side. You can be genuinely glad the school year is over and quietly grieving your quiet mornings. When we stop treating the low notes as evidence of failure, they get a lot easier to carry.
When people describe it honestly, the struggle is rarely one big thing. It's the accumulation. The mental load of being the default planner, cook, and referee from breakfast to bedtime. The quiet loss of the small pockets of the day that used to be yours. The money math of camps and childcare, and the guilt when you can't swing what other families seem to. The friend you keep meaning to text back. For couples, it's suddenly negotiating every hour out loud and discovering you don't agree on what "a good day" even looks like. For the parent doing it solo, it's the sheer exhaustion of being the entire schedule. Naming the specific weight, instead of a vague "I should be happier than this," is usually the first place things start to loosen.
Where the highs and lows show up
In the calendar. The empty squares can feel like both a gift and a threat. Parents especially describe a strange whiplash: the relief of no packing lunches collides with the pressure to make it a summer to remember. That pressure is optional. Your kids will not remember a flawless itinerary; they'll remember that you were, sometimes, actually there.
In the body. Highs and lows aren't only emotional. They live in your sleep, your appetite, the tightness across your shoulders at 4pm when everyone needs something at once. Heat, disrupted routines, and the mental load of constant logistics are real physical stressors. If you feel more tired in "the relaxing season," your body isn't betraying you. It's keeping an honest ledger.
In relationships. More unstructured time together is more contact, and more contact surfaces whatever was already there: between partners, between siblings, between you and a teenager who suddenly has opinions. Closeness and friction come from the same place. The families who do well in summer aren't the ones without conflict; they're the ones who expected it and left a little grace on the table for it.
In how you talk to yourself. For the high-achievers I see (the ones whose worth feels welded to output), an unstructured summer can be quietly destabilizing. Without the usual scoreboard, the inner critic gets loud: shouldn't I be doing more with this? Rest that has to be earned is not rest. It's just a shorter leash.
A good summer isn't the one without hard days. It's the one where the hard days don't get to mean something is wrong with you or your family. Dr. Aaron J. Kimble
A few things that actually help
- Keep one anchor. When the school-year scaffolding dissolves, hold onto one small daily ritual that's yours — the morning coffee before anyone wakes, the evening walk. One fixed point makes the rest of the open calendar feel less like freefall.
- Name the load out loud. If you're partnered, put the invisible work on the table — who plans, who referees, who does the money math — and divide it on purpose instead of by default. Resentment grows best in the unsaid.
- Lower the bar for "a good day." One real moment of presence beats a flawless itinerary. Let some days be boring on purpose.
- Budget without apology. Decide what you can actually afford this summer — in money and in energy — and let that be enough. Your kids are not comparing invoices.
- Say the quiet part to someone. "I love my kids and I'm dreading this" is a sentence that loses half its weight the moment it's spoken to a friend, a partner, or a therapist.
This post is for education and reflection — it isn't therapy or a substitute for individualized care. If something here resonates, that's worth paying attention to.