Hi, loves. 🌿

On sleep-away camp (for parents)

The kid has been away at sleep-away camp — her first time — for three days now and the apartment is quiet. Everything feels sort of off, like time has lost its clear sense of order: I had cheese and crackers for lunch at 11:30am and then a salad at 2:30pm. I read an entire book in a day and immediately started another. I walked to the pool and swam and walked back, all wet. It’s all been lovely and relaxing and also a little sad, the reminder that these babies we raise won’t be ours forever. They won’t always sit at the counter asking for more milk or need to be picked up from dance or slam the door in our faces. One day, all too soon, they will move out and have a life that’s really entirely their own, just like we all did, and it’s sort of shattering.

But in the meantime, we are allowed to spy on them. I find this the most disturbing of rituals. How new is it? I know that when my nephew first went to camp many years ago that my sister had the capacity to look at pictures and send emails, and at the time I thought, wait, you can see them? Can’t they just be left alone? Can’t everyone be left alone?

We got an email on the first night that all had gone well, and then came the photos. Perhaps the most disturbing part of all this — and you can skip over this if you are familiar with this particular high-tech weirdness — is that the app on which you view said photos has a picture of your child logged into the system so that it can do face recognition on said child. This way you don’t need to sort through dozens of photos to find her. Up pop the ones meant for just you!

I know many parents love this, and there’s perhaps, in theory, some sort of reassurance in this: my child is alive and happy and not horribly sunburned. (But if she were, what on earth would we do about it anyway?) But I find it all hard to take in. The photos I’ve seen of my own kid don’t tell me much: she looks not necessarily happy, but fine? Focused? She’s paying attention? She’s not crying in a corner? I mean, it’s basically impossible to tell, and I have no idea what these little moments are meant to tell me. Why invite me into them at all? Isn’t the whole point for her to be away?

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The first time I went to camp, I got on a bus for eight hours, crossed the Quebec border into Ontario, then had to cross a lake to get to the actual camp. Obviously we had no way to contact anyone but by phone, and that was forbidden. The idea was this: if you are homesick, you will only be more homesick if you actually call home. So forget about everyone and just dive into life at camp. Good luck.

For the first week or so, I was so homesick I made 21 lines on the wall behind my bed so that I could cross them off as I inched closer to the time I’d return to my parents. By day 4 or 5, I was fine and forgot about the lines entirely. By day 21 I didn’t want to leave, and I returned to camp for every summer after that, gone for three, then six, then eight weeks, mostly happier at camp than I was at home.

But camp was mine entirely: my parents got no view into life there other than what I chose to share. My mother sent me long letters almost every day. Letters she wrote in her familiar script, detailing what she and my dad were doing, what they were eating, who they had seen, where they had travelled, how much they missed me.

I was (am) the baby, so they were alone all summer long, and it never occurred to me until now how weird and sad that must have been for them. Or maybe they loved it? But I don’t think so, at least not at first. The letters told another story, that my mother really did miss me. She never asked me to write back; this was, like so much of her parenting, a one-way street. She was meant to take care of me, to make sure I was okay, not the other way around. And I immediately adopted this when it comes to Noa: We will write to you every day, I told her, remembering the envelopes from my mother, but you do not need to write us back. You just have fun, and forget about us!

It wasn’t until I came home and brought the rolls of film to be printed that I allowed my parents in at all: this was my best friend, Allison. (This was the boy I kissed.) This was my counselor. Here’s us on our canoe trip! I was allowed to be the narrator; it was only my story to tell. I’d been left alone to experience it, and now I was the lone expert. There was no way in but through me.

What upsets me about all this technology — I mean, basically everything, but that’s another letter entirely — is that none of us are alone. The kid isn’t left alone and neither are we. I feel like I should be checking up on her (refresh! refresh!) when I really don’t want to, when what I really want is a break. When what I really want is my mind and my time back, even for five days. And while she might not know that we can see photos of her, when she returns, we will have an impression of her experience that was not necessarily hers. I don’t want any of that. I want it told through her eyes, her mind, her stories, her joy and heartbreak.

Perhaps this is a bigger commentary on how performative and public our lives have become, how rare it is to have an experience and to keep it entirely to ourselves. I am as guilty of this as anyone — the slivers I show online paint a particular portrait, but without me there to narrate them, what does anyone truly get? A friend and I once joked that we were going to write “real” captions for all those family Instagram photos: Right before this was taken, I threw a plate at his head. The kids have been fighting nonstop and they only stopped because we promised them a third piece of cake. The next day we got into a huge fight and stopped talking.

Camp photos are not posed social media shots, this I know. But what I long for more than anything in this moment of everything being posted and liked is some silence. Silence for us, here in our adult apartment, with our books and our coffee and our time alone to watch a movie at 7pm; and silence from her: a time for her to have an experience that we will never truly know. An experience that’s a tiny preview of the rest of her life: our kid, out in the world, on her very own.

Sending love,

Abs xox

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