First week away
My eldest son left for his first week of sleepover camp yesterday.
It’s the same camp that our family directs at each year (sometimes twice), so he’s been there every year of his life. He knows the staff. He knows the facilities. He knows the routine. He knows several of the kids who will be there. His aunt will be the nurse for the week.
Even so, my wife took some convincing to let him go, and she’s struggling with having him gone. She recognizes that this isn’t exactly rational, that her feelings have less to do with him going to camp and more with him becoming more independent and less reliant on his parents. Her logic can tell her that he’s in a safe and familiar environment with people we know and trust, but her emotions still tell her that he’s her baby, too young to be away on his own.
Parents can have this feeling often, of course – when kids go off to school for the first time, when they get their first job, when they go off to university, when they get married. Even if we trust that our children are ready for these challenges, even if we know that it won’t end their relationship with us, it’s not always easy to convince our emotions that we’re ready to let them go.
What helps me is to remember that the new stage of a parent-child relationship always opens new opportunities, even if it ends some old ones as well. It may never again be possible for me to rock my eldest to sleep in my arms while we listen to classic jazz, but we can now sit around and tell stories about what it was like to be at camp. It may never again be possible for me to beat him in soccer (we’re almost at that point), but I can look forward to taking him out for his first beer.
It’s easy for our emotions to fixate on the past, to get stuck in nostalgia. Sometimes we need to remind them that there are as many memories to be made in the future as we have made in the past.
Luke Hill is a stay-at-home father of three boys, aged nine, seven, and three. He has fathered, fostered, adopted, or provided a temporary home for kids anywhere between birth and university. He has taught college courses, adoption seminars, camp groups, Sunday School classes, rugby teams, not to mention his own homeschooled kids.
