For most people, the summer months are usually fun, full of picnics, barbeques, vacations, and many other fun adventures. But for others, it can be full of the summertime blues.

If you are in a time of trying to conceive (TTC) that isn’t happening as quickly as you’d hope, (maybe because you are struggling with infertility, separations, or a host of other factors that plague our community that make family planning more challenging), then you might find summer hard with kids off from school and seemingly everywhere you turn.

Places once kid-free are now swarming with them while they enjoy their summer breaks.

So how can you enjoy summer and avoid the summertime blues that bring you down with the constant reminder that seeing other families with kids can be?

I will share my favorite tips that have helped me with my TTC and infertility journey. 

1. Identify and Recognize Triggers

It wasn’t until maybe two and half years into my TTC journey that I realized that certain situations, places, and social media negatively impacted my happiness and mood.

Constantly being around those that had kids, especially babies, made me angry, sad, and often left me feeling less than simply because I couldn’t seem to get pregnant.

Once I began to realize what evoked those feelings, I was able to work to mitigate them.

So if you find yourself frequently irritated, angry, sad, or any other negative emotion, work on identifying what is triggering those emotions because once you’ve done that you can work to prevent or limit them.

Is it seeing babies, pregnant women, or families that evoke those negative emotions, or something else? 

2. Plan Ahead

While it’s pretty hard to avoid all kids with some research and planning ahead you can limit the big crowds of kids and still enjoy your favorite summer activities.

Consider looking at the days and hours of operation for the location you are trying to visit and plan your trip to avoid peak times for those with kids.

If your schedule allows consider arriving an hour or so before closing time for places like the zoo, museum, and even theme parks when most families or camp groups would be heading home after a full day of fun.

For me heading to the museums near the end of the day usually meant we had the place to ourselves which really helped while we were pursuing fertility treatments and I didn’t want to be near lots of kids.

All those extra hormones made me, even more, emotional, and sitting at home made my summertime blues worse. Planning a trip to the beach?

Consider looking for adults-only accommodations or renting a condo or house so you can control your surroundings more. Research and planning can help you limit your triggers.

Some additional things to consider when making your plans. Camps are taking kids on field trips during the week and during school hours so if you are planning to go somewhere that camps might be going keep that in mind when you are making your plans.

Families with young kids will often go places on the weekends, and they usually go earlier in the day and also finish in the early afternoon. 

3. Know What to Expect

Whether you are planning a trip or heading out for some mini golf, know what to expect at each place.

If you are heading to a place where there might be young children or babies, even when you plan to go at the most “adult-friendly” times there still might be kids there.

Heading to the beach? Unless it’s an adults-only beach you are going to see kids, but you can seek out a spot on the beach as far away as you can. Look for groups without kids or walk farther down the beach and get away from the crowd.

Telling yourself ahead of time that you might still encounter kids can honestly help fight off some of those negative emotions, but also recognize that you might break down into tears from your triggers.

Ask yourself who is likely to visit this place, what people do here, and whether is this a place that kids will be at, and thinking about those answers can help you mentally prepare. 

4. Have a Plan in Case You Need to Leave

Even with the best planning, there might be times when you need to excuse yourself and head home.

At one point during my TTC journey, I was the leader of our unit’s family readiness group and during our summer pool party, I found myself overwhelmed with negative emotions.

While I couldn’t leave in the middle of an event I was running, I was able to excuse myself for a few moments to go cry it out and recompose myself. There were other times when I walked into an event that I was expecting to be all adults and when I saw kids I just turned around and went home because I knew I wasn’t mentally prepared for that.

Make a plan for what you want to do in situations when you need to either excuse yourself for a few moments to gather yourself and your emotions or what circumstances you will just leave altogether.

It took me a long time to realize that it was okay for me to leave situations that were impacting my emotions in a negative way and that it was better for my mental and emotional health to leave those situations.

TTC, especially when it’s taking a long time or you also are facing infertility, is already hard enough. You don’t need to stay in situations that add to that. 

5. Create Boundaries (let people know, unfollow on SM)

Along the same lines as creating exit plans is creating boundaries. A big source of many TTC summertime blues comes from social media.

Seeing all the family vacations, day trips, and pregnancy announcements during the summer on your social media definitely can have a negative impact on your mental and emotional health.

Creating boundaries for yourself and even for others can really help you fight off the summertime blues. Set limits on how much time you spend on social media, unfollow or snooze people that travel a lot with their kids, that is pregnant, etc so that when you are on social media you won’t see their posts that might trigger you.

If you have someone close to you that has kids you can create boundaries by asking if you can hang out without the kids sometimes, or if you can come over after the kids are in bed.

I know it can be hard for everyone involved to set boundaries, but I also know that they can help a great deal in fighting off the summertime blues. 

If you are in a season of TTC and you feel those summertime blues or find yourself dreading the summer you once looked forward to, I hope you will give these tips a try!

In this hard season of TTC, you can still find ways to enjoy everything that brings joy to you in the summer, it just might take a little more effort to keep those summertime blues away. 

*For more on this topic, check out Five Things to Stop Saying to Someone with Infertility, Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda or listen to M:M’s own Annie Pearce discuss infertility on our PODCAST