Note: Previously published in the Ask-the-Therapist column of the Jewish Echo Magazine July 2014

Thank you for the great advice you give in your Ask-the-Therapist columns. My question is as follows: We have never gone to the Catskills for the summer as there was always that cost factor. My wife really wants to go this year as many friends are there and she feels it would be great for the children. I’m concerned about the cost and being bored during the week. I know it’s common to go. What’s the right thing to do? Thank you.

 On the surface, your question seems very straight forward and easy to answer. Assuming that you and your wife have a functional marriage, I would imagine that the two of you would have a conversation about the reasons why she wants to go to the bungalow colony and then you would express your concern about the cost.

She may cite many different reasons why the bungalow colony is important, or at the least, beneficial. The children need a change of scenery and environment so they can develop different aspects of their talents, social life, and interests. Children who do not do well academically can shine athletically in the bungalow colony. They can pound their energies into building clubhouses, swimming, and hiking. Children who struggle socially find the safety network of the bungalow colony crowd comforting and other children more easily accepting of differences. It is also easier to monitor the social difficulties children face when it appears in the bungalow colony environment and intervene directly and effectively.

Children expand their social capacity not only with other children, but with the adults they come into daily contact. Somehow in a bungalow colony, these adult-children interactions are comfortable and comforting in ways adult interactions in school are often not. The relaxed attitude in the colony, where it doesn’t matter if you don’t know the chumash or gemorrah in day camp, when it doesn’t matter if you oversleep in the morning, when it doesn’t matter what or where you eat supper, where everyone’s bungalow becomes your own, and everyone’s mother is a little bit yours, gives the child the ability to relax into a strong support system, developing a stronger self that can go back to school in September with more confidence and backbone.

Daily exercise, instant access to socialization, late night games and sleepovers, relaxed mothers, ability to be mostly independent, freedom to run around in a safe environment, opportunities to engage in physical activities, a new support system and variety of friends are all the benefits of a bungalow colony. Ask any adult who has grown up in the old-time bungalow colonies and they will tell you the long term benefits, over the ten months of school and winter, over the lifetime. The experience is incomparable.

And of course, your wife will tell you that it is her vacation as well. After the rigors of parenting children over the school year, the relaxed atmosphere of the bungalow colony, with a mother’s ability to socialize all day and night long, while still tending to the children underfoot, is a huge gift. Meals eaten outdoors, children occupied all day, the ability to watch the little ones while sitting in a circle with other mothers. Swimming, walking with friends, sitting on a beach chair snuggling with a little one, the best of mothering comes out in the summer months where there is nothing that must be done, no homework, no gourmet meals, no getting up for school on time, no complaints from teachers, no pressure. The parent-child relationship can be developed and expanded in new and loving ways.

And it’s unbelievable how children who are eligible through the Board of Education for special services like speech, occupational, or physical therapy; tutoring and counseling, can usually receive these services upstate by practitioners who also are in the Catskills for the summer!

So these may be things your wife will tell you about why she wants to go the bungalow colony.

Then the two of you would discuss finances. It does not appear from your question that the cost is prohibitive, only that it is a concern. In that case, I’m sure your wife can point out where the bungalow colony can be cost-effective. The children don’t need to go to camp full summer. The day camps in the city are usually more than double of that in the mountains; she won’t need as much cleaning help, if any is even available. She may forgo the Florida trip she usually takes with her sisters in the winter to afford this. She may suggest you not arrive with your car each week but come with a brother in law, with a neighbor, to save on gas and tolls.

As you can see, I am a big fan of the bungalow colony.

But it is just as clear, that if whatever I have just written is not applicable to your family, that the cost would take its toll on you and your family, then this conversation would make your wife regretfully realize that the two of you cannot do the bungalow colony this year, and you will work out other ways to make this summer meaningful and relaxing. There are many families who have wonderful memories of summer, not necessarily in the mountains.

It is your second comment, how you are worried about being bored while your family is away, that caught my attention as a social worker.

While it is a positive aspect of your relationship with your wife and children that being away from them leaves a hole in your day, I would like to present this attitude in a different light.

Partners in marriage, to use a metaphor borrowed from a colleague of mine who works with couples as I do, should be like two different colored pieces of clay rolled out into long snake-like forms. It is possible to both roll them up so that they look like one entity made up of two colors, but also can be unrolled so that each color remains distinctly apart from the other. Marriage is not blue and yellow mushed up into a green blob; it’s blue and yellow separate, yet together.

You would feel claustrophobic (as do many men!), if your wife would wrap her life around you, demanding your attention when you come home from work because she has been stuck home with the kids all day long and is desperate for adult company. You would prefer that she fills her day with satisfying activities that when you come home, you can unwind with the paper, just vegging on the couch, or bouncing a basketball in the driveway. Then the two of you can meet as friends who have much to share together as a result of a day well spent individually.

I imagine that if you feel bored without your family, you have not learned to define yourself as a person outside of your work or wife/children, in a way similar to women who do not define themselves as people outside of their children and husbands. Both, such a man or woman, would become quite boring to the other spouse who is actively engaged in life (unless the busy spouse only likes to hear him/herself talk and is uninterested in hearing the other).

A short-term solution to your boredom would be to come up every Tuesday night to the bungalow to break the monotony of your week alone without her. Skype with your children, talk to your wife on the phone.

But most importantly, why not use the summer without them to do things you have kept pushing off all these years? Joining the gym? Socializing with old friends? Taking courses or classes that interest you like guitar or sky-diving lessons? Seeking a chavrusah in learning?

Become someone that your wife misses each week because you are interesting to be with, to talk to. If being by yourself makes you feel bored, create a person who finds his company interesting; then chances are others will too!

Enjoy your summer, whether in the mountains or the city, by modeling for your children how to use their free time constructively in ways that rounds out their character and makes them interesting to themselves and others.

My book, Therapy, Shmerapy, can be found in bookstores or online