Pre-Camp

It’s pre-camp season and I’m in the city. It feels weird. Most years, I’ve moved to camp right after mothers day and my birthday. This year, I’m not moving until June 1 and it feels so weird.

A&M are at camp. They are organizing, cleaning, planning programming and training, and all of the other random pre-camp stuff. I’ve face-timed with them several mornings, exchanged a million emails, calls and texts. I am working on staff training and pre-camp stuff too. But I’m not THERE.

I feel disconnected and I feel like I’m missing out. I don’t enjoy cleaning buildings that have been closed down for 9 months. I don’t enjoy moving heavy boxes of stuff around camp. But it’s all part of camp and I shouldn’t be missing out.

At the same time I am feeling so left out of camp, I am SO anxious about bringing my baby to camp. I’m sure all parents say the same thing about their babies, but my baby is PERFECT. He has beautiful, perfect skin with pink chubby cheeks. He has perfect blue eyes and blond hair and he is beautiful. He looks like a china doll.

My favorite childhood memories are from our cabin in the woods, playing in mud puddles, playing outside all day, running around the woods, playing in the lake, exploring the forest. When I talked about my future and someday having children at camp, I imagined myself as a calm, earthy mom who would allow her children to roam free, wind in their hair, playing in the dirt, carefree, outdoorsy. But now, I have this perfect doll like baby and all I want to do is find a giant plastic bubble and hover over him every second of the day.

I’ve been waking up in the middle of the night thinking about sunburn, bug bites, poison ivy, germy campers, dust and dirt and I just can’t imagine my perfect, pristine baby getting dirty.

The great thing about pre-camp is that it is an adjustment period that allows me to ease back into life in the woods. And the problem with not actually being at pre-camp is that I am not in the adjustment phase, I’m in the anxiety phase and that’s not going to get better until I get to camp.