Ima 2 Eight

I sent my eldest daughter off to sleepaway camp this past week for the first time. I was determined to NOT write a trite and soppy blog post about what this has felt like for me, or for her. The mixed emotions are the same as lots of other parents. I went to sleepaway camp – Camp Ramah of New England – for three years, and I remember the excitement, the homesickness, the lack of letter writing, the first week of hating it, and then the not wanting to go home.

My daughter isn’t me, and Camp Sternberg, and Orthodox girls-only camp is definitely not co-ed, Hebrew speaking, Conservative Camp Ramah.

Even though I was all happy for her until precisely the moment I had to walk back to my car alone and then started to cry, feeling old and proud at the same time, this blog post is NOT going to be about that.

….You see, my daughter isn’t happy at camp.  She wasn’t so happy after two days, and borrowed a phone from a junior counselor to call and tell me. She couldn’t find some of her stuff, she was homesick – and you know? I was okay with it. That is normal for the first two days at sleepaway. Trite. Not worth writing about.

Then the program director called me. “Your daughter is very homesick. She would like to speak with you. She has been crying. She is asking to go home.”

The director and I are on the same page that it is still early, and that my daughter has to get used to being away. That adjustments and challenges aren’t always fun, but are worth it, and that this is a good life lesson for her at this stage of life. The director encouraged me to speak to my daughter just to reinforce that she has to try her best to make the best of it until visiting day.

WHICH IS ONLY ONE WEEK AWAY.

So what is this about?

The gaping chasm between my mind knowing that challenges and sometimes even pain can be good for my children over the long term, and what my heart is telling me it wants to do.

I give my children vaccinations, and watch them cry. I watch them struggle with school studies, and I push them to work at it, rather than fix their problems.  I know that they need to build all kinds of physical and spiritual muscles that sometimes only have “gain” with “pain”.

I know this to be true.

The feelings I have about my baby feeling sad and doing nothing to fix it, well, that is quite a different story.

This strong part of me feels compelled to kiss the boo-boo – to prevent or instantly fix the “skinned knee“….

I cannot help wonder to myself if mother and daughter are both struggling with very similar and equally painful tugs: She wants to stay and for it to be fun. She wants for this to work.  She also feels sad and misses my arms, her bed, my food.

I want this to work for her. I want her wings to get strong on their own. I want to watch her master a challenge, overcome a struggle, breathe through the pain and emerge victorious. But I also want to run up there and hold her every day for just a little while, like emotional training wheels, until she is all right for a whole day, two days, a week –  instead of sitting here on my hands.

The midwife that delivered this very same daughter told me then that she doesn’t allow mothers of the laboring woman to be present for her home-birth deliveries. She explained that the woman in labor can cope much easier with her own pain than her mother can cope watching her daughter go through it while doing nothing to help.

I guess that means I better adjust, because it looks like this is only the beginning…. for both of us.