Parenting & Family Quote by Marion Zimmer Bradley

Domestic time has a way of turning from a calendar into weather, and Bradley’s line catches that slippage in plain, almost offhand speech. “I do tend to lose track” isn’t a grand confession; it’s a shrug with edges. The phrase “do tend” implies pattern, not accident: this isn’t one forgetful afternoon, it’s a recurring seasonal disorder triggered by a very specific social mechanism. School is the metronome. Remove it and the household’s sense of sequence blurs.

That’s the subtext: time, in a family, is outsourced. The school year doesn’t just educate children; it organizes adult attention, productivity, even identity. When “the kids are out of school,” the parent’s day stops being partitioned into tidy, externally validated blocks. The sentence registers a small loss of control, but also a quiet critique of how much modern life depends on institutions to provide structure we pretend is self-generated.

Coming from a working writer, the line also hints at the collision between creative labor and caregiving. Writers trade in self-imposed deadlines; children ignore them. Bradley’s modest wording lets the reader feel the tension without dramatics: the domestic world doesn’t announce itself as a crisis, it simply rearranges the hours until you realize you’ve misplaced them.

It works because it’s intimate and deniable. You can read it as harmless busyness, but it carries a sharper recognition: parental time is not fully owned, just temporarily borrowed, and summer comes to collect.