When your children first go to sleepover camp it is fraught with fears both yours and theirs. How will they handle potential homesickness, how many people watch them at waterfront? Will they eat well or just a steady diet of Captain Crunch and Fruit Loops? Will their cabinmates be nice to them? Will their counsellors rub their backs until they fall asleep if they are tender?
Soon enough camp becomes their FAVOURITE PLACE ON EARTH.
They dream of it all school year. They can’t eat the morning you drop them off as they are too excited. Those perfect butterflies make it almost surreal and dream like for them. They don’t write to you, and you are so good with it because you would rather they are in the moment then thinking about you or home.
When you pick them up they hug and kiss you but they are still in the cult like camp world, they shoot stories at you like rapid fire, break out in songs you have never heard of and tell stories in code you don’t understand. And then they collapse. They sleep all afternoon. They rise to the meal you carefully prepared and are melancholy, sombre and unanimated. They may cry. Bedroom doors close and they want to be alone. They miss all that is camp so profoundly and you understand it so well.
They have come home from their favourite place.
Great insight here. Good stuff.
rats – I thought this meant YOU were home from your fave place and we could have dinner soon!