May-cember Is Real

It is a Tuesday night in early May and I am standing in my daughter’s school auditorium, phone in one hand, program in the other, Resy notifications going off in my pocket while I try to be fully present for the last performance of the year. Tomorrow there are finals to prepare for, a menu to finalize, a scheduling conflict to resolve before service, and somewhere in the back of my mind, a flight I have been meaning to search for three days. The music starts. I put the phone away. I try to be fully present and really enjoy the moment.

Parents know this season. We have given it a name: May-cember. And if you are living it right now, you already know exactly what I mean. You are racing to follow the school calendar to its final, breathless sprint. Finals. Step Up Days. Arts Nights. Last performances, last dances, teacher appreciation events, graduation ceremonies. White knuckling it through the bittersweet process of watching your child close out a year of their life while simultaneously trying to plan their summer. You are juggling work schedules. You are negotiating calendars.

And somewhere in the middle of all of this, you are also supposed to be planning a trip. Trying to carve out as much time as possible with your kids during the small, sunny window of the year when you can finally have them all to yourself.

I have been thinking about this a lot lately. About the particular anxiety of this cultural moment, the pressure that parents feel at these transitional times of year, about the sense of inadequately closing one chapter and inadequately opening another. Of never quite doing any of it well enough because there is simply too much of it happening at once.

The collision is real. The feeling of being pressed, for time, by competing obligations, by the people you love most who all need something from you right now, is not a personal failing. It is the inescapable reality of this season. It is May-cember. And it happens to everyone.

What I have learned, after years of living through it, is that the answer is not to do less. It is to know, with absolute clarity, what you are moving toward. Because when you know what is waiting on the other side, the temporary stress becomes manageable. Not easy. Not comfortable. But manageable.

For me, what is waiting looks like this. A table at Bar Pitti in Soho on an early summer evening . The cold artichokes, the crowded sidewalk, the particular pleasure of sitting outside in New York in June. Walking through the Met on a Tuesday morning when there is nowhere else to be. Our annual dinner at Quattro Leone in Florence, enjoying the same dishes we order every year, Michele reaching across the table for the bread before it even lands, the ritual of it so deeply familiar that it has become its own kind of homecoming. These are not destinations. They are the emotional architecture of a life we have built together. And I cannot access them from inside the auditorium with my phone buzzing.

This is not escape. I want to be clear about that distinction because I think it matters. Leaving is not abandoning. Stepping away is not irresponsible. Refilling is not indulgent. The people in your life, your family, your colleagues, your community, the guests who come to your table looking for something they cannot quite name, they need you at full capacity. And full capacity requires replenishment. The trip is not a reward for surviving May-cember. It is the investment that makes everything that comes after it possible.

So here is how I am moving through this season with my sanity mostly intact. I plan in slivers. No marathon sessions, no stressful deadlines when I am already depleted. Fifteen minutes in the morning before the day starts pulling at me. A quick flight search during a quiet moment between appointments. A pin dropped on a map while I am waiting for something else to begin. The trip slowly starts to build itself in these little moments. One day it is detailed enough to be called done.

And I remind myself, on the days when it all feels like too much, that this end of school year frenzy is temporary. What the frenzy is building toward is not. May-cember ends. And the summer begins.

How are you moving through May-cember this year? What is waiting for you on the other side of it? I'd love to know.