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Instead of taking a last day of school photo, I’m tracking Zoe’s progress toward Central Virginia using the Find My Friends app on my phone. I take a screenshot when I see she’s arrived, her photo floating above the trees at the summer camp where she’ll be working as a counselor for the next 10 weeks. To prepare for this, we went to Costco for sunscreen, bug spray, socks, and other supplies. We ordered rain boots, a jacket, a rainbow of $6 tank tops, and her favorite hair product online. We emptied her trunk–originally purchased for her first time at camp in 2015 and still in astonishingly good shape–and filled it with carefully labeled and rolled-up t-shirts and shorts stuffed into gallon-sized Ziplock bags. We dug out of the closet her camp backpack, which still contained items from last summer, including a sock she’d been looking for everywhere. Last night I filled her tank with gas and this morning I ordered Starbucks for her to pick up at 6:30am on her way out of town.
I have done everything I can to make things easier for her, so she can go out and do hard things on her own.
She’s already done an admirable amount of adulting this year. She navigated junior year with challenging classes and two part-time jobs (three if you count occasional gigs babysitting for a family with three kids and a dog). She learned how expensive gas is (and therefore why it’s important to look for the cheapest gas) and how to get her car serviced and inspected on her own. She’s done banking and cooking and traveling out of state without her family and now she’s driven 90-some miles by herself four times in one week. She wrote her own end-of-the-year thank you note to her English teacher. She’s visited dozens of colleges and made thoughtful decisions about where she will apply this fall, demonstrating maturity and self-awareness.
And now she’s off to work and play for the summer. When she was a younger camper, I asked a few times if she would someday want to be a counselor, and she couldn’t imagine such a grown-up responsibility. Just like when she was a young martial artist and I asked her to picture herself as a black belt and she wasn’t ready to even conceive of the challenge. But her counselors knew that she would join them eventually. They could see it in her even when she couldn’t yet see it in herself. Last weekend she went down to camp for three days of staff training. She was nervous but ready. She was worried she wouldn’t have anyone to talk to or hang out with. By the end of the third day she had already made a friend who she didn’t want to be apart from for the two days she would be home before returning to camp. Thank goodness they are reunited now.
The evolution of parenting takes you from solving all your child’s problems–once you discern what they are–for them to figuring out, one by one, which problems they are ready to take on themselves. This requires careful observation and immense amounts of patience and often guidance from other people who’ve been through it before and can see things more clearly than you can. And as they get older, paradoxically it gets harder. I’d heard that adage from older parents since my kids were small–“little kids, little problems, big kids, bigger problems,” but of course I didn’t believe it until my kids were big. Making the decisions about what decisions to let them make for themselves is actually a lot more overwhelming than changing diapers, if less smelly.
At this point I feel like most of what we can do is gently and as subtly as possible guide them toward what we think would be good paths for them to explore. We are not the type of parents to force them into anything, barring what is required by law or basic human needs. We’ve taught them everything we know (for better or for worse) and to think for themselves. We’ve also taught them that we will always unconditionally be here for them when they need us. And that we trust them to make good decisions, and know that sometimes they won’t, because sometimes we don’t, because we’re human. So hopefully we’ve taught them how to learn from their mistakes. Or at least how to pick themselves up and dust themselves off and keep going.
So this summer while Zoe is working as a camp counselor, I hope she has fun–both with the other counselors and with the kids she will work with. She probably has no idea that so many young kids will look at her as a role model, and talk about how cool she is long after they’ve gotten home from camp, and introduce their friends back home to the music that Zoe introduced them to. I hope they come to her with problems and she helps them figure out what to do, or takes them to whoever can. I hope she learns incredible things from the 70+ other counselors who are there from all over the world, and from however many campers pass through her cabin or the archery range or the arts and crafts building throughout the summer. I hope she sees and hears stories and perspectives that will change the way she thinks and that she will never forget. I hope she tries things she’s never tried before. I hope she can shake off the mistakes she makes, because I’m sure she’ll make them.
I could not be prouder of her, or more excited for what lies ahead for her this summer. And I know I’m going to miss her like crazy. Patience has never been my strong suit, but I will have no choice but to wait for her to be ready to share the stories of her adventures. I know both of us can do hard things.
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I just ordered $100 worth of dairy-free meal replacement smoothies for my teenager, to pick up at Whole Foods tomorrow, because eating anything solid causes her severe stomach pain and she’s nauseated all the time. She came home early from school yesterday, with a COVID test in hand and instructions on how to take it with a certified COVID test instructor watching her on video. She has taken dozens of COVID tests already, and she knows how to do it, but I understand they want to make sure people are doing it right. Certified COVID test instructor Mhaxine (who must recite her script a hundred times a day) had us focus my phone’s camera on various codes on the box and on my ID and on the test results. Zoe doesn’t have COVID, which I already knew. But now you can’t be home sick from school or go to the clinic without testing. You can’t go back to school without emailing the negative test results to the school nurse and attendance office. Meanwhile, we are going back and forth with the pediatrician and the pediatric gastroenterologist and Zoe is scheduled to have an endoscopy in two weeks. She’s missed two days of crew–which you’re not supposed to miss any days of between February 21 and the end of May. Tomorrow I’m going to deliver an açaí bowl to her at lunchtime because it’s one of the only things she’s been able to eat over the past few days without feeling sick. When your kid is miserable, all your priorities shift.
At least she has beautiful nails. I took her with me to the nail salon last weekend and she somehow managed to get acrylic nails without me noticing until I had to pay the bill. Even if she can’t eat, she can at least admire her nails and enjoy the sound of tapping them on her phone.
I have a list on my desk of all the appointments I need to schedule: mammogram (oh I guess I need to see the gynecologist first, to get a referral), colonoscopy, dentist, kids’ dentist, my dermatologist, etc. All things I’ve been putting off or rescheduling since COVID. Hopefully I won’t have lumps or polyps or cavities or dangerous moles. I keep thinking I could just spend a day making appointments, but that would not be a very pleasant day. Since COVID seems to be never going away, I just need to suck it up.
Also tomorrow I am taking Niki to a camp that they don’t especially want to go to, even though it seems amazing, because they would rather stay home and play video games all day, which they think is awesome but I do not. Tomorrow is a parent-teacher conference day, so they don’t have school, but I still have to work. Someday we will have a house where I can have an office that is not in the same room as the tv and the xbox, but that day has not yet come. So off to camp they go. Last week I finally finished signing them up for summer camps and classes. This year they have fencing and archery, a camp where they drive to different parks and explore them and look for little creatures and give them names (at least that’s what they did at that camp last year), book illustration, art, and Minecraft camp (I consented to one week of this since the rest of the camps are active or artsy). Three of the weeks (book illustration and art) are just half day classes rather than full day camps because I don’t have to work those weeks and so Niki will not complain about having to go outside when it’s hot or eat lunch in a room that’s smelly. I would say my kids are spoiled, but truthfully I don’t like eating lunch outside on the ground when it’s hot or in a room that’s smelly, so I can’t blame them.
Oh, how could I forget Niki is also going to sleep away camp for the first time this summer. We all think they will love it. They’ve been to family camp at Camp Friendship twice already. They know the people, they know the place. They have not, however, slept away from us in quite a while. They can go to sleep if someone is at our house, but not if they’re at someone else’s house. And they still love to fall asleep intertwined with a parent. We are having faith that it will all work out when they are at camp. Zoe will be there too, but of course not in the cabin with them. We still have six months to prepare. Zoe was homesick at night for the first few years she went to camp, even though she loved it there. She says she eventually would fall asleep just because she was exhausted. I am constantly reminding myself that my kids are capable of things we haven’t seen them do yet, and they will be ok. Hopefully we’ll be ok too. Whenever Zoe is at camp I check the website compulsively for photos of her having fun, and race to the mailbox to look for letters. I remind myself that, during a rocky first grade year, Niki dreaded school–and then it ended because of COVID. Then we homeschooled for a year. And they did not especially want to go back to school for third grade because it was so much fun being home with me all day! And they never had to get dressed! And they played video games after they finished their work! It took a while for them to get used to school again (as it did for most kids I think, whether or not they were homeschooled or virtual schooled or hybrid schooled last year) and now they actually like school. They come home and talk about what they learned, and look forward to seeing their friends, and miss school when they have to stay home. I honestly wasn’t sure that would ever happen again, since it basically hadn’t happened since kindergarten. I had started to think kindergarten was some magical year that we would never experience again and school would be a battle forever. But it’s ok now.
And there is a nation of innocent people being attacked for no reason by an evil lunatic dictator. There are a lot of blue and yellow flags and lights and tributes. But I sure don’t know what to do, except wonder why our world is such a mess. The president stood up for LGBTQIA+ kids and mental health care in his State of the Union speech, but did not mention canceling student debt, or racial equity, or DC statehood. I did enjoy seeing two women–Kamala Harris and Nanci Pelosi–sitting behind him though, instead of two white guys. And maybe if the other old white guys don’t get in the way, Ketanji Brown Jackson will be confirmed to the Supreme Court and we’ll be just a little closer to having more justices who look like the people in our country and again, not all old white guys. No offense to the old white guys I love. They are not the ones I’m talking about.
In preparation for a meeting at work today I watched this video by Georgetown Law professor Kristin Henning, author of The Rage of Innocence: How America Criminalizes Black Youth. I have the book on my desk to start reading next week. As part of my new job with DC Action, I’m working with folks to reframe the conversation on youth and crime. Professor Henning describes in the video how Black young people are targeted and often arrested or harmed because they’re seen doing normal adolescent activities. DC Action and our partners are working to help District leaders, journalists, and others understand that there’s more to the story of a 14-year-old charged with carjacking than the need to lock him up for a long time or hold him accountable. Does it not occur to anyone that when 12-, 13-, and 14-year-olds are committing crimes like these, we need to look deeper? As I’ve written in op-eds and blog posts, the people who need to be accountable are the adults who are failing to provide meaningful out-of-school-time activities, mentoring, emotional support, job opportunities, and mental health care to young people–especially young Black people–who have suffered disproportionately through the pandemic. I see the struggles in my own kids, who have as much support and resources as they could possibly need. So when I read every day about people trying to ban books by and about Black and brown people and LGBTQIA+ people (don’t get me started on Texas Gov. Abbott who would rather have queer kids committing suicide than offer their families support) and school systems prohibiting teachers and students from discussing race or racism, or people saying antiracism is actually racism, I get enraged. No wonder I can’t sleep.
This, I think, is why people are obsessed with Wordle right now. It’s not always easy, but it’s definitely solvable. You can point to it (which is why so many people post their scores, although I do not) and say, “Hey, I did a thing! I accomplished something despite my existential angst and general feeling of despondence about our country and our world and all the personal and global problems with which I am grappling.” Or maybe that’s just why I play Wordle.
I haven’t been back to church in weeks, even though they’ve resumed in-person services. Going to church has always brought joy to me and been so important in my life, but the thought of going back again where everyone is masked and I don’t recognize even my friends and hugging is no longer a thing just makes me anxious and sad. I know wishing everything were back to “normal” is futile and there’s no such thing as normal anymore. But I haven’t yet arrived at a state of grace where I can embrace the constant change and dizzying feeling of flux. Maybe some days. But not today.
You Ask a Lot of Questions 