During the normal school year, before my three children and I were confined to distance learning and lockdown measures, I structured my time faithfully, maintaining a life with a purpose entirely my own. My children worked hard to carve out that kind of space for themselves too, the way children should.
“Keep out — knock before entering!” they would write on little note cards, tacked and taped to their bedroom doors.
In summer, however, when my children went to sleep-away camp and we were apart, we seemed to spend a lot of time figuring out how to get back to one other.
Last year, after dropping my two older children at camp, I was struck by a peculiar sadness. It was my daughter’s fifth year at camp and my older son’s third — I didn’t even check the camp packing list, so cavalier had I become about the process of shipping my children off on their own, packed in salt and ready for the new world.
But that year, along with their battery-operated fans and egg-crate mattress toppers, it felt as if I’d also sent them with a set of invisible tethers, like silk strands from my web. Come back, I thought, as soon as they’d gone. I didn’t remember that feeling being as strong any of the summers I’d sent them before.
At home, I peered into the near-empty fridge to find a jar with three pickles, jaundiced and floating; maraschino cherries from an ice cream party years ago; and a lone can of seltzer — the weird flavor that nobody liked.
I awaited the first letters from camp eagerly.
My daughter’s letters dropped through the mail slot and into my foyer, often one after the other, addressed to me using my full name. Her handwriting was straight, organized, a work of art — it seemed to belong to someone else’s child. My son forgot my name entirely; instead, he wrote our town, state, and ZIP code first, before our street address. Convention aside, he probably assumed the big picture was the most important piece to get right.
Please send slings for my camping hammock — I forgot to pack them, one of them wrote.
It’s OK if you don’t send packages, but please write me letters, said the other.
There was more, of course, including descriptions of their descent into a month of relaxed hygiene hacks. I savored each of these letters in full before sitting down to write them back.
I imagined my son as I wrote to him.
I miss burying my face into your neck at the end of each day, and passing my fingers through your thick hair. We found a spider living under your side of the dresser but we told him he couldn’t stay long because you’ll be coming home.
To my daughter, I said more.
It is so hot out that the trees are just hanging there, with their mouths open, letting the sun fall inside. I miss seeing you standing in the kitchen, making your breakfast, because it reminds me how beautifully you’ve grown.
These letters were wistful condensations of whatever I could think of that was true.
While my older children were away at camp, I found myself holding the proverbial fort, trying not to let too many things shift and change in their absence: artwork they’d left on their walls, piles of clean laundry not yet put away. This place-holding exercise felt at once futile and necessary. It would be hard for my children to come home and find that everything was the same as when they’d left — that’s when they would realize how much they had changed at camp. But it would be important for them to do so anyway.
The sorrow I felt when I dropped my children off at camp was precisely because by that time, I’d done it enough to know that as soon as children leave home for a time, nothing is ever the same as it was. The first year my daughter returned home from camp, she sobbed in her room, unable to articulate why. With growth comes inexplicable loss, which is all the more puzzling for children who also feel empowered by the thrill of becoming a new version of themselves while away from home. This simple shedding of innocence, of comfort, of old skin — that’s the way it is.
The letters my children and I sent each other to and from camp were little shots of treasure, containing everything we would use to put our family back together at the end of summer. In these letters, we could filter out whatever junk had accumulated in our regular, school-year lives — the things about ourselves and others we wished were not so, any sense we may have had of wanting more in our lives than what we needed. This was as true for my children as it was for me as their mother. In those letters, we were panning for gold, apart, but hanging onto one another while we became truer, more valuable versions of ourselves.
Toward the end of last summer, my daughter wrote to me of the biscuits they’d served in the dining hall. The biscuits, she said, made her feel just a tiny bit homesick. She thought of the biscuits I’d been making from scratch that year. Would I make them for her on the day she returned, please? I smiled and swelled. Of course, I wrote back, when you return, we’ll have biscuits for days.
I think of these cherished letters now that my children’s camp will be closed this year. Perhaps love always was the simple desire to stay connected to one another, no matter where we are.
If hope is the great human challenge, I have never taken it on quite like this before. While my children and I are home together for the long haul, we cannot pursue our own growth with the same kind of grit we have mustered before. Hold on, dictates reality. Not so fast, it reads aloud to me and anyone else whose long days are played out around a short kitchen table. Let things develop organically over time, it mandates. Now the avocados are gone. Now the pears. See what happens next, when the cantaloupes turn. Just wait until you reach the canned beans, the carrots, that netted sack of onions — you’ll know then where the flavor is held.
Sometimes, we have the luxury to choose to open ourselves up to something new. In the past, for my children, this has meant going away to a place where they have the freedom to develop in ways that aren’t possible when they’re confined to the same old routine at home. But I can see that the opposite may also be true.
With any great loss comes new growth, however gradual it may be. For now, this will have to be the place from which good things begin.
Samantha Shanley is working on a memoir.