Camp Packing List
The packing list felt deterministic: the success of Sy’s sleep away experience was in the palm of my hands.
100 line items, categorized by Required, Optional, or Recommended.
Quantities of shorts called out, hooded versus non-hooded sweatshirts differentiated, colors of logo’d tees directed. I carried it around with me for weeks - annotating it with the names of the stores we would venture to to try on certain items, checking off those that had been procured from Amazon, indicating numbers of socks that were sourced versus outstanding. The folds and scribbles and swimming around in my backpack had softened the fibers of the list into a threadbare piece of hand-made recycled paper.
My own sleep away camp had required uniforms, but that had not mitigated the overwhelming deficiencies I felt when stacking myself up against the other girls’ wardrobes. My white t-shirts were too stiff, my green shorts were Umbra (dorky) instead of Soffee (cool), and my Keds simply did not stack up to everyone else’s Adidas Superstars.
While I worried less about Sy comparing himself against people based on clothing (could boys possibly care that much?) he was still my Son. My camp memories were adulterated with constant feelings of deficiency, from my soccer skills, to skinniness to Superga sneakers. I hoped that I could at least eradicate the possibility that Sy would feel less because he didn’t have the right brand of clothes. And so we went shopping in Scarsdale.
There is a camp store mecca located in a big shopping plaza that promotes itself as one stop shop for your entire camp checklist. We were there for 2.5 hours and took over a full ADA fitting room; Remi buried herself in one of the mountains of fuzzy pajama pants and when I announced that I needed a drink as the tab was being rung up, she declared, “me too!”.
As we decompressed at a chik-fil-a next door after, my eyes caught the 75 unread texts on the camp moms group text. I scanned them quickly to make sure the camp hadn’t burned down but it was just about the packing list. My own decision-making about what to bring from the Optional category was stressful enough; I could not handle another 19 women agonizing over whether to send an egg crate or not. In addition to sleeping paraphernalia, the Optional list included things like a Lacrosse Stick, swag for a 90’s themed night, and rain boots. He would borrow a necklace, I thought. He would come home with muddy shoes. I crossed out the optional items and muted the moms chat.
In the last few days before camp the channel had become an anxiety-inducing ad campaign full of Amazon links to bunk games, pictures of enormous packed trunks, and deep research into the weather patterns of upstate New York. I couldn’t handle it but I didn’t judge. The chatter mimicked the violent bubbles of a pot of water about to erupt into an explosive boil, the agony over the list serving as a pretext for the uncertainty of sending our sons into the unknown. With no other road map as to how to prepare our sons for sleep away camp, the packing list had taken on the gravitas of a Dr. Becky bible. All we could do as moms was purchase and pray.
The final packing of Sy’s trunks took so much focus that I took the day off of from my actual project management job to execute the task. I labeled, organized items in large ziplocks, and crossed things off the list with confidence and finality. Sy had his 28 socks and 18 shorts of his favorite brand, a new pair of basketball sneakers, and the required number of logo’d shirts. I felt I had physically done everything in my parenting power to prepare him for camp.
Bus drop off was anti-climatic, he boarded, we waved. Remi asked a few hours later why he wasn’t home for dinner. It was simply strange to be in the house without him. It was quiet. I imagined Sy’s constant chatter transposed into a bunk scene, where he’d be rattling off Jazz Chisolm’s stats to new friends instead of to me and Remi. I pictured him giggling in the dining hall, taking down cheeseburgers Hamburgler-style as his counselors laughed with glee at the pace and joy with which he consumed food. I could see his constant motion across the bunk floor, swinging imaginary bats and shooting pretend hoops as he recapped the day’s scrimmages with friends. I was certain he was having fun, but I realized I would never know the details. The cadence of the day, his interactions, his highs and lows - they belonged to him now. His pictures would tell me he was happy and his letters would report on notable recaps but my only insight would be through his eyes when he returned home (or through bi-monthly chicken-scratched letters).
I will give the institution of Visiting Day the benefit of the doubt that it was designed to be something beneficial to both parents and kids alike. Parents for having that view of camp life that is not just filtered through their children’s scribbled two-sentence postcards, kids for connecting with their families whom they presumably miss. I will tell you for the Goldmans, it was good for no one.
Unbeknownst to me, as our family was driving up to Roscoe, NY one of those chicken-scratched missives was shuffling through the Albany post office on its way to Greenwich. It carried critical information detailing all of the items that I had forgotten to pack for Sy that he wished for visiting day, including an arm chair pillow, another red TLW t-shirt, and a pack of baseball Top Trumps cards.
I didn’t have the information nor perspective to not feel crushed like an ant underfoot by Sy’s behavior that Visiting Day. We streamed into camp with the sea of other parents, our arms open wide to give hugs instead of filled with wagons and bags of gifts like the other families. Sy’s face seemed to fall down instead of lift up at the sight of us, breaking my heart for the first of several times that day.
“Can I meet some of your friends? What are their names?” I asked as we walked into the bunk. Children were gleefully attacking cellophane wrapped towers of candy and games as Sy sulked on his bed.
“They are probably busy,” he said shortly, observing the present rampage surrounding us. We decided to leave the bunk and walk up to the basketball courts.
“Want to play horse?” I asked.
“I just want to shoot by myself,” he said. Sy opened the big trunk filled with basketballs. As I was reaching in to grab a ball for us, he jumped over the rim doing the same and smacked his forehead on the lid of the trunk.
“You’re supposed to lift it up all the way!” He cried, rubbing his eyebrow.
“I was getting the ball for you, I didn’t realize,” I apologized. He recoiled at my touch as I tried to brush a curl away to see the bruise. I felt parts of my heart crumbling into shards that stabbed my insides as they splintered off. The day went on and I managed to offend Sy by making tragic mistakes at every athletic opportunity we had. First I threw the wiffle ball too close. I suggested frisbee, over by the pickle ball court? No, I was not allowed to play frisbee on the pickle ball court, didn’t I know that!? Then I hit the tennis ball over the purported mini court line. Sy yelled, “You hit it too far!!”
The tears came quickly from behind my sunglasses as I released from my ready stance and stalked off the tennis court. Sy didn’t protest and I didn’t look back. Remi was sitting under a tree in the shade, uninterested in getting hot nor in participating in our heated tension. “Come Remi, we are going to take a walk.” She smiled, and hugged my waist. “Where are we going?” she asked excitedly as I stomped down the hill. “To the water,” I replied, choking back tears.
We found a rock ledge by the lake, where someone had left little plastic ¼ pound deli containers that appeared to have once housed worms. “Oooh I’m going to make mud pies!!” Remi squealed. As she scooped water from the lake and packed it with mud, I burst into tears. Her innocent six-year old joy was too garishly bright against the darkness of this moment of reckoning.
Instead of soft hugs, smiles and sports the day had been filled with my enduring beating after beating, stiffening me into a statue that was not supposed to take whatever he was reacting to personally. How could I? Deep down I knew he was not just being a brat about the present mix up. I dabbed my eyes dry and reminded myself that I was a parent before I was a human. As I brushed the dirt off my shorts and stood up, I wondered how many times I had driven my parents to silent tears. In an other worldly realization I asked myself a question I had wrestled with the thousands of times I took a bad day out on them, but in reverse. Why was it so easy for Sy to give his best self to everyone but so hard for him to extend it to his parents?
I was awful to my parents as a teenager. Sometimes I am still. But they never yelled back. They never cried. They were always there on the other side of the doors that I slammed, waiting quietly. I eventually would come back out with an apology, an explanation, which they didn’t ask for but I know needed. They gave me the space to ruminate in my pain as it set in, the time to let my self-soothing structure my synapsis, so that the next time, my cells had been given the room to grow and move around and develop, dealing with adversity, disappointment and grief with more authority and strength the next time around.
In the days leading up to Sy’s homecoming, I seriously contemplated not going to the bus drop off. I was still ruminating on our interactions. I felt sticky with sadness. I reminded myself, that feeling was the human in me - not the parent. It had been my job that day, as it will be for the rest of my life to be the safe space that supports my kids to lean into whatever pain they are working through. Not only was it my job to not be offended by Sy’s actions, but that those actions were in a backwards way, good.
On visiting day we had charged into a world that for the first time, was of his own design not ours, and he was loving that world. He didn’t want to leave it. He was good at life outside of our cozy home. I scraped away the plaque that had lodged itself into the crevices of my heart with the strength of validation that his success at camp was the first step in his separating himself as a person. Unlike many of his great inherent attributes, that independence was full-on nurture. That was us being good at parenting. I took a deep breath of relief.
Visiting Day was a stark reminder that camp was not endless, and he would have to come home to our rule and oversight. At camp, he had found friends and counselors that loved him for the person he presented as when he arrived. That person was the person he chose to be - not the one he felt he had to be for us, or was because of us. That person was no longer MY child. That person had become his own separate self that others in the world got to know and love.
As I buckled up and got into the car to pick him up at the bus, I felt simultaneous devastation and ecstasy. Sy’s ultimate achievement would be experiencing love, for others and by others. I had to let him separate in order to find and settle into those true relationships. I had to give him away to let Sy give himself to the world.
How deeply lucky that world is. His mind is an ocean in its depth and his heart spans stratospheres. Those that get to be part of his orbit are blessed. And although I felt like Pluto on visiting day – demoted to a comet, but still circling his kinetic gravitational force – I still felt lucky. Because no matter how long he was out there spinning, pulling more people in to the light that he shined, he would always be my Son.
