Summer Camp Planning

Back in Virginia, summers for kids meant doing nothing. The neighborhood kids would loiter around all day, jumping on trampolines and drinking grape soda (though to be fair there seemed to be quite a bit of that during the school year too). Here in the Bay Area, summers are apparently when the true nature of parenting declares itself. During the school year, I can pretend that everyone else is normal, that all the other kids leaving school are also heading home to eat snacks and play. In reality, they’re probably all being shuttled off by ride services or grandparents to various lessons, but I don’t have to know that.

Then January hits, and with it circulated spreadsheets of camps. Well-intentioned parents coordinate summer schedules six months in advance, so they can get their kids and their kids’ friends into all the best camps before they fill up. The assumption on these calendars seems to be that every week should be booked, with either a camp or a transcontinental vacation. No wonder people say having more kids is too expensive—if you assume properly raising your kids includes flying them to Australia for vacation and shelling out $500-plus for sports camps at Stanford, it would be tough to have four (the two most common comments I get from strangers when out with all the kids are, “wow, you’re brave”—in a near-sarcastic, not encouraging, tone of voice—and “your husband must be rich”—which I find offensive on several levels).

The sheer options of camps has left me mostly in a state of paralysis of choice: every swim club and park has its version of a tennis-swim-arts combination camp; there are lego camps to promote citizenship, engineering, or themed along popular movies; every conceivable type of science, engineering, coding, visual arts, theater, dance, and sport camp is being run somewhere within a short radius of our house.

At heart, I would like to put our older kids in a few camps; the summer seems like a good time to get them to try some new things with short-term commitments, and some variety of routine may be good. But I think the reason I feel subliminally stressed by this whole venture has more to do with the undercurrent of the culture here. The way people approach summers seems to say that parenting is about out-sourcing and optimization. You outsource their care and teaching to specialized experts. You outsource their socio-emotional learning, their skill sets, their cognitive development, all according to the most recent research. You optimize their time, with never a wasted week. You optimize through comparative analysis, seeing what other parents are doing. In the end, you optimize for outcome, assuming you can maneuver your kids into success by controlling the right variables.

I don’t think I believe that. I believe parenting happens at home, where the difficult decisions aren’t which lego camp to put them in, but how to help a middle child develop self-confidence, or a strong-willed child learn to be a servant. I believe the most important things I want to teach my kids—values, worldviews, character; not just knowledge and skills—are best learned by modeling at home. I don’t think parenting is about optimization, but shepherding. Imputing skills so they can navigate a system for outward success isn’t as important as knowing them deeply, in every stage, and understanding how to reach and guide them in ways they need. Ultimately, I think about what I want for them in their lives—would it be nice if they went to an elite school? Yeah, I guess so; but what is more important is that they love and follow Jesus, that they marry the right person, that they grow in character (and when I think it’s crazy I’m thinking about colleges, I remember that line from Semple’s book Where’d You Go, Bernadette: “Let me rock it straight: the first stop on this crazy train is Kindergarten Junction, and nobody gets off until it pulls into Harvard Station”).

I think the conclusion we’ve come to is: spend no more than half the summer with the older two in camps. Go for low-key camps, not necessarily the most competitive or popular, based mostly on interest, though it’s okay for us to require one for the sake of pushing them to try new things. But mostly, I’m trying not to get sucked into this extremely pervasive sense of pressure and stress, which takes some level of conscious effort. It’s probably good preparation for the future.

Sojourner

The process of adjusting here has been a lot more complex and prolonged than I expected. During the first six months or so, I was mostly taken by all this area has to offer and the thrill of finally having settled, but this past month, I’ve been consumed more by what I would call adaptation fatigue and situational dysthymia. The logistical hurdles, the flush of introductions, the initial wonder at available resources have passed, and now I am faced with day-to-day life in a place where I don’t quite feel like I belong yet. I feel oddly tired of introducing myself to new people, of forever putting myself out there without feeling truly understood. I feel blanketed at times with a heavy sense of loneliness or displacement. I find myself withdrawing or becoming easily judgmental of others.

Part of the challenge is finding sufficient space to process this all, I’m finding. Space to breathe in it. I’m constantly on the verge of burn-out from childcare: to my bitter discovery, living near my parents in Virginia meant not only more breaks from childcare than I had fully realized, but also a level of support in the practical and spiritual parenting of our kids that I now shoulder largely on my own. Secondly, this process has been different for me than for Dave, who is a native returning to his closest friends—it is still a process for him, but instead of naturally bringing us together, it tends to bring out our differences, in values, personality and upbringing. Lastly, if possible I tend to disregard my emotions in favor of function and appearances; in reality, I haven’t chosen to give my emotions space as much as felt, rather frustratingly, that I can’t escape them.

In this space, there are two truths that are seeping into my consciousness. One, we will always be creatures who long to belong and are shaped by where we live. I thought before the move, “well, places are less important to me than to Dave; I care more about just being settled inside our own home”—but the reality is, while it’s true that I never wanted to live in Virginia forever and don’t necessarily want to move back now, I am apparently very much a product of the culture in which I have lived most of my life. This is inescapable. I am adapting in superficially functional ways—I now expect bikers and pedestrians at every stop sign, only “landfill” if it can’t be composted or recycled, own yoga pants and hiking sneakers, have upgraded Mac products, can push my way through the constant crowds of Asians at Costco—but in deeper ways I still feel like I’m swimming against the tide. I choose following Jesus over ideologies that value self-determinism, personal freedom or total inclusivity above all else. I tend to feel that chinos or jeans equal casual wear. I value common civility, maybe even a tad of Southern gentility, in public. I feel wary of the pervasive stress and busyness, the sense that success can be maneuvered into with the right kinds of programs and activities.

So I am more of a southern Virginian than perhaps I had appreciated, and it is no wonder that I feel more displaced than I had anticipated. There is a kind of grieving that must happen, a kind of loneliness that must be walked through, a kind of reconstruction of self that must grow out of this space. I don’t want to lose some of the good things about growing up and starting my family in the south, but I want to be willing to be challenged in some of it. I don’t want to lose sight of some of the more insular aspects of this place or take too much for granted. More than anything, I need to stay humble in all of it, not to fall into disengagement or judgement, so that I can receive what I need to grow how I need. I suppose any major life change—a death, a loss of relationship, a change in life stage—is like this.

Second, in this space I feel more keenly aware of the truth that I will never fully belong. Not really, not anywhere. Reading through chunks of the early Old Testament, I see a sweeping pilgrim narrative. Why did God choose his people, only to ask them constantly to leave—Abraham from his hometown, the people from their lands for Egypt, then from Egypt for the wilderness? Throughout the law, God values the sojourner: don’t forget, he says, that you wandered in tents; provide for the outsider because you once were one too. Remember that your forever-home is ultimately not here. The narrative is not of earthly belonging as much as God’s presence in the journey. There was never Eden again, but there was the cloud, there was the tent, there was the temple, there was Jesus, there is the Holy Spirit. The deepest part of me will always be sojourning, but it will always be with God present.

There is the temptation, particularly at this stage of our lives when we’re looking to settle in houses, kids, cars, jobs, geographies, to look to all that for belonging, but this instead is the truth which one day catches up to us all. We are sojourners. Life is full of goodbyes, and nothing we have do we grasp too tightly. Maybe one day I will feel like I completely belong here—maybe I never will. I don’t know. But in the not-yet, to be sustained by the I-Am: this is what it means to walk in this space.