May: It’s the month of award ceremonies, sports banquets, graduations, class parties, themed dress-up days, and end-of-school celebrations—not to mention Mother’s Day, Memorial Day weekend, and the transition from school to summer schedules. You may have seen the memes circulating throughout social media about the May-cember craziness. For anyone with children in their lives, May is arguably a month that is even busier than December.
The calendar holds plenty of fun. It is sweet to watch four-year-olds sing songs and wear mini caps and gowns at their preschool graduations. It is wonderful to watch your child receive a trophy after completing a sports season. It is a relief to be done with homework and tests and instead send in books and board games as the kids and teachers pass the time, just waiting for the last day of school.
But the difference with the jam-packed May schedule is that the rest of the world keeps trucking right along, unlike that stretch of time between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day, when it feels like everything slows down and everyone has the mutual understanding any new big projects or initiatives will simply have to wait until the beginning of the next year. In May, there are no work disruptions (except for Memorial Day). People are not in summer mode yet.
Getting through the month of May is a bit like sprinting a marathon. We operate at full capacity and keep on going…and going…and going. We just need to make it to June, and life will resume at a normal(ish) pace again (of course, we still must contend with the summer childcare scramble and general routine-less malaise).
We could make May easier. We do not have to mark every single school transition with a graduation. We do not have to have an award for every child every year. We do not need to have a theme day for the entire last week of school. We do not need post-season tournaments for all the spring sports.
Yet we keep all of these extras (and invent more) because they can be so tender. They make the kids and parents and grandparents smile and feel special. They make for great pictures and social media posts. Milestones matter. We should mark and celebrate them. Our society may have just gone a little overboard.
Other than triple-checking the calendar and ensuring that my planner is extra organized, I cannot tame the May mayhem. I have learned, however, to schedule a vacation at the end of May every year (highly recommend). The old adage is true: blink and it’s over.