Driving home on the second hour of a seven hour drive with the windows down because our air conditioner broke, I wondered how my kids would remember this experience. Would they remember it in the same way I remembered getting stuck in stop and go traffic without air conditioning outside of Washington D.C. when I was 10? (Sorry Mom and Dad – that was *awful.*) Or will they look back on it fondly as “well, we got through that”? After all, people took plenty of road trips before air conditioning was introduced in cars and survived. I’ve read many people say their family road trips were some of their favorite parts of childhood.

In a way, this conundrum extends to all of summer. So often, adults’ memories of childhood summers are full of nostalgia – memories of ice cream, the pool and playing outside until the sun goes down. My older son loves Calvin and Hobbes, with the pages of his four volume collection well-worn and the spines chomped on by our pet rabbit. The comics about summer reflect this perspective. Calvin romps around in the forest all day with Hobbes and turns cardboard boxes into fantastical devices at home. Summer is endless, innocent and free. It’s the epitome of a “simpler time.”

But like all nostalgia, it’s not accurate.

One day, my son was lamenting how his summer isn’t like that of Calvin and Hobbes. I looked at him on his third hour of reading comic books and I raised an eyebrow. After all, my kids have as close to an idealized summer as you can get these days. As my husband has summers off, we don’t have to use camps as daycare. In addition, our neighborhood is pretty old-fashioned and kids can go places without their parents. On weekdays, my kids play ping-pong at the community center across the street, kick around the soccer ball at the park, play endless hands of the game Exploding Kittens, futz around the house, and have a decent amount of video-game time. In evenings, we watch fireflies and bats off of our back porch. On weekends, we go camping, bike to the ice cream store, and go to concerts in our town square. This summer alone, we’re going to the Great Smoky Mountains, Cape Cod (to visit family), King’s Dominion and Ocean City! So I was a bit skeptical of this “Why is my summer not The Best?” attitude.

But thinking about it another way, he had a point. Nostalgia-tinged versions of summer – including Calvin and Hobbes – leave out all of the not-so-ideal parts. They don’t include the indeterminable boredom of being in the car or fighting with siblings. The part where everyone is hot, tired, and snapping at each other fade into the background. The meltdowns, from both adults and children, are left out of the retelling. Even when bad things are mentioned, they’re told in the context of being funny. After all, tragedy plus time equals humor. This nostalgia flattens the summers of real-life, eliminating the struggles and challenges of being a kid. So I could see why he might be a bit discontent with that as an example.

I explained to him that while Calvin’s summer did in fact, sound lovely, that it wasn’t representative of summer even in the 1990s when those strips came out. I went to day camp – my mom was the director – was not allowed to roam all day by myself. Those strips were based Bill Watterson’s adult memories of his own childhood in the 1950s, which were colored by the parts he liked remembering as an adult. (Calvin and Hobbes has plenty of the challenges of being a kid – just not that part.) I did mention to my kid that he’s lucky that he has so much control over his time, but focused mostly on the fact that what was portrayed simply wasn’t realistic.

So next time kids complain about their summer, we adults should remember what summer was really like as a kid – both good and bad. And sometimes, it’s sitting through a long-ass car ride with no air conditioning.