Sleepaway we go

 A few days before Eli left for sleepaway camp for the first time, we speculated at length about what we might do without each other.

"Maybe Daddy and I will walk around the house cursing really loud," I said. "Or we'll go to really boring, quiet museums."

"And I'll be walking around camp saying, 'Ha ha, I'm walking around without my parents!'" Eli concluded gleefully. (Despite my best efforts to remind him that "no parents" wasn't equivalent to "no rules," I don't think it really sunk in.)

When we got our first opportunity to speak to Eli on the phone a week into camp, he sounded hoarse ("because I've been talking to all the counselors, and all the campers," he explained) and a little overwhelmed.

"I really miss you guys," he said, sounding bewildered to hear himself admit it. "Once, during rest time, I even started crying because I missed you so much."

"Really?" I said, while my heart cracked into a thousand teeny pieces. "But then what happened?"

"Well," he said philosophically as my heart knit itself back together again, "I told myself, 'Time flies when you're having fun.'"

When we hung up, I realized that Phil and I had created the perfect amalgam of ourselves: I would have cried from homesickness too (if I had ever been brave enough to go to sleepaway camp in the first place), but that pragmatic pep talk Eli gave himself? That was all Phil. 

For much of the pandemic, while the four of us (I'm counting the dog, because you always have to count the dog) shared an apartment that was never meant to serve simultaneously as an office, a gym, a living space and an entertainment center all at once, all I ever wanted was to be alone. Once, at the end of a long day at the end of a longer week, I literally fled the apartment and sat morosely on a step in front of our building, at which point a nonthreatening but nonetheless weird man walked by, did a double take and said, "Don't look so sad. If you don't have anyone to love you, I'll love you," at which point I was reminded that even during the height of a pandemic you are never alone in New York City.

But even though Phil and I are pointedly living it up in Eli's absence (if gleeful day drinking, kayaking and binge-watching "My Unorthodox Life" on Netflix counts as living it up), I miss Eli more than I thought I would — certainly more than I ever thought I would circa, say, June 2020, when I was forcibly separating him from his true love the iPad for the 700th time.

"I feel like my parental muscles are atrophying," I told a friend. "Like when Eli comes home and I have to do boring parental tasks like make him take a bath and go to bed on time, that's going to be a bummer." 

The next time we spoke to Eli on the phone, almost two weeks later, he was ebullient. 

"Ohmygodohmygodohmygod I have so much to tell you!" he said breathlessly into the phone. 

He told us he had been flipped into the lake on a boat ride. He told us that he was wearing his white button-down shirt for Shabbat and that he had borrowed gel from a friend to "style his hair." He told us that he had climbed the whole vertical climbing structure, that the BMX bikes were "so fun," that he had signed up to try water skiing. He told us that his friends had given him gifts because he wouldn't be at camp on his birthday in August. He told us he was "so sorry I haven't written more letters, but I really like to use my time to play cards with my friends." He told us the lake was his favorite activity and Outdoor Adventure was his second favorite. (As someone who was very much an indoor kid, who hated Long Island day camp and who once nearly fainted after slicing her finger during archery, I practically lit up from the inside when I heard this.)

Then he told us, "Only eight more days until I see you guys! I can't believe the time went so fast!"

This time when we hung up, I was bursting with a peculiar kind of pride. I eventually identified it as the rarest kind of feeling I have as a parent: the unusual sensation of having made a decision that felt right. I wanted Eli to go to sleepaway camp to detox from screens and try new things without his pesky parents breathing down his neck. I wanted Eli to go to this particular sleepaway camp because it has an  awesome lakefront, and in the imagination of a girl from Queens who never went to sleepaway camp in her life, that's what sleepaway camp should look like. And I had told everyone who asked, "What if he wants to stay longer?" that I didn't think he would — that he had budgeted four weeks of camp into his mind and that he would be ready to come home.

And for once in my parenting life, my master plan had worked! We had given him an experience we could feel good about. He loved the lake! And he was nevertheless looking forward to coming home! 

Eli in his camp happy place

See, for most of Eli's life I've been marveling at how different he is from me — and maybe even, to be brutally honest, from the kind of kid I thought I might have. He's brash where I'm cautious, assertive where I'm meek, confident where I'm uncertain. 

(Case in point: This gem from the camp Instagram:)

But when we hung up the phone that day I thought, I know you, kid. Or at least I'm beginning to figure you out. 

When I was a teacher, the highest compliment I ever got from a parent was "You're describing my kid exactly the way I see him." This year, I had a lot of occasions to think about how I see Eli, how others see him and how he sees himself. A few weeks before camp, we met a bunch of the boys in his bunk. They seemed to bond over a shared love of baseball — Eli's contribution to the game, by contrast, was to take his friend's glove and yeet it over the fence — and it sent me into a tailspin of doubt. I worried that he wouldn't want to play with everyone else, that he wouldn't bond with his bunkmates, that he'd spend his days sitting in the grass longing for the air conditioned comfort of a movie on our couch.

Then I realized something I've been realizing over and over for the better part of nine years: Eli wasn't worried. 

"If there's a choice between playing baseball and going to the lake, and everyone in the whole entire camp chooses baseball, then cool, I'll be in the lake all by myself," he told me.

"You know, Eli," I said, "one thing I admire about you is that you don't care what anyone else thinks. You go your own way. When I was a kid, I was always really worried about fitting in with everyone else. You don't feel like that. I think that's really cool."

He looked pleased. After all, 99% of the time it must feel like I'm nagging him to do things differently (turn off the iPad, lower your voice, redo this writing assignment, throw out these wrappers) and here I was giving him a genuine compliment. 

Later that day, we walked to the playground and ran into someone who asked if he was excited for camp. He nudged me.

"Mama, tell them what you admire about me," he said in a stage whisper. And I realized that what he wanted was for me to prove that I know him, that I see him for exactly who he is.

I can't wait to see Eli when he comes home. (He has already requested that he be allowed to stay up until 11 p.m. "or at least 10" because he has so much to tell us.) I can't wait to hear more about camp. And I know I'll make a million more wrong decisions in the course of my parenting life, probably beginning as early as Sunday afternoon when he gets off that camp bus. So I'm giving myself this victory lap.

I know you, kid.