The stories we tell

Friends!

I now have an on-demand course about Neurodiversity-Affirming education and how to support it if you work with kids in any capacity! I’ve kinda been working on this for 20 years, nbd :) You can take it anytime and get two CEU’s if that’s your thing. Use code DRSARAH for $5 off if you do, and pretty please share with your networks if you know educators, child and family therapists, OTs, SLPs, etc.

The drive to family camp last weekend was easier than ever. As we barreled five hours up into the mountains from Oakland for one last summer hurrah, the boy, 9, was glued to his 13-hour audiobook, the girl, 7, consumed by a combination of the High School Musical Soundtrack and narrating everything she saw out of the window to us from the back seat. This season is always a record of time passing — kids with shit-eating grins or, if they are older, barely concealed eye-rolls, clutching chalkboards announcing their growth. No one can believe how tall they got over the summer. We shove them into the close-toed shoes they abandoned in May like evil step-sisters in glass slippers. Except instead of cutting off their toes (see Grimm’s version of Cinderella) we drag them to Nordstrom Rack after school for a new pair.

Here are the things my baby, who is weeks into second grade, did this weekend that she couldn’t or wouldn’t do last year:

• Jump off the rope swing

• Practice archery (she even hit the target a few times)

• Walk by herself up the hill from our tent to meals

• Make herself a salad

• Go to activities (friendship bracelet making! fairy doors!) without a parent

• Wipe her own ass (that it took this long brings me great parental shame)

• Brush her own hair (ish)

Have I also grown? It was my birthday a few days ago — it always fell in the dead time between camp and school, when no one could celebrate. I can’t, in all honesty, remember who I was a year ago. I did not take a picture with a sign.

The first night in the mountains, I woke up in the dark and dragged myself out of my sleeping bag to pee. Even without my glasses on, the stars were epic. When I returned to our tent, and climbed back into my cot, I heard a woman talking in the distance. Sounds travels at night in a campground of 150 people, and it seemed one of the other campers was somehow not exhausted. I put in my ear plugs, tried to think about the breakfast someone else would be cooking me in just a few hours. But the woman was too loud, too annoying. She spoke with great animation, seemingly without interruption, kind of like someone I know (me!). I reminded myself that it could still be some reasonable hour for late partiers, just another mom trying to let loose. But when I checked my watch, it was 4am. What the fuck?

My baby is growing but she is not, in many ways, grown. At dinner in the camp mess hall, she had clung to me more than I’d liked, complaining about the food and neglecting to clear her plate. I watched my friends with older kids enviously. As we’d gone to sleep that night, she’d whined about being scared, and kept me up long after the “sleep train” had come for me — asking for snuggles and opining about the shadows on the wall. “Just frickin go to sleep!” I’d yelled in a vicious whisper, not unlike the tone the woman was using now to rant to her conversation partner, who didn’t seem to have much of a chance to converse.

How inconsiderate she was, this woman! Didn’t she know that, in this world of horrors upon horrors all we had was each other? If we can’t even consider those around us, those trying to get back to sleep so they can be good mothers in the morning, what then? What kind of world, I thought, as I noticed for the first time that my bed was just a wooden board with a gymnastics pad on it, were we leaving behind for our children???

I took out my ear plugs, put on my glasses and sandals. I would find her, tell her we could all hear her, it was time stop. I didn’t want to enrage her, I just wanted to make her understand. I unbuckled the flap to the front of the tent and slipped out, started walking towards where I believed she was. But a few paces in, I couldn’t hear her anymore. I did hear what sounded like it could be the mama brown bear that was spotted earlier that day, and so I rushed back into the tent, confused, defeated.

The peak of the weekend was the dance party. Counselor Liam, all of 22 or something, full on enthusiasm, made a playlist that consisted of K-Pop Demon Hunters alternating with pop ballads (Wrecking Ball, that Natasha Bedingfield song about how no one else can do it for you). I handed out the glow sticks I’d bought on sale six months ago and actually remembered to bring. The kids screamed, the adults jumped up and down too. Everyone was dusty and stinky and full of ____, it was the best kind of club. When Boom Clap came on, I ran across the deck to my daughter, who was dancing with a new friend. “They’re playing our song!!” I yelled — but she only looked at me out of the corner of her eyes, not straight on, and made a gesture I knew but had never seen on her, the one that means, don’t make a big deal out of this but please leave. My seven year old was giving me the brush off. I slunk away, joked about it to the other moms. We all murmured something like “We’re in for it now! These kids hate us!”

I was recently served an album of photos from September, 2018, the year she was born. There was was my son, sitting in the cart at Trader Joe’s and passing items to the cashier. There were both of them, toddler and baby, being pushed in two swings at the same time. There was the profile of a woman I accosted at the farmer’s market because she had the platinum blonde choppy bob of my dreams, which no sane hairdresser since has allowed me to get. I took several videos that month of my 5-month-old daughter. What I remember of that time is that I was underwater, unresponsive, forcing an insecure attachment. But the mother in the videos, who you only hear but never see, is warm, animated, in love. Was I faking it? Or are my stories about my own motherhood all wrong?

Back in the tent, next to my bed, I could hear the woman again, clear as day. Her voice must have been traveling from the river behind us in to the back of the tent. Maybe she wasn’t even in the campground, maybe she was too far to find. But I was wide awake now, there was no way I would settle down. And what was worse, I was sure that in the morning, no one else would relate. I was always the only one — too sensitive, slightly askew. I would tell this tale at breakfast and get nothing but blank stares, giggles, or pity. What did it matter that I knew the woman was real, that I witnessed the injustice of her full-volume monologuing, which got even louder as I moved to peek out the back door. She didn’t care about me. No one did. Even my own daughter didn’t want to dance to Charlie XCX with me. If you feel bad for yourself in the woods and no one is around to hear it, is it justified? I glanced down at my little one, always so precious when asleep, her long lashes resting shut, her pudgy fingers curled over the cord of her headphones.

And suddenly, I realized that I knew this woman, and well. She wasn’t an enemy. If anything, she was a friend, had helped me through so much of my ten years of parenting, not to mention my own childhood. I hesitated for a moment, thinking about how there would come a time when my daughter would outgrow her, just as she was outgrowing me. Finally, I turned off Superfudge, kissed my girl softly on her mosquito-bitten forehead, and went the fuck to sleep.

Also, this:

I’m rewatching Girls. I never rewatch because I have too many NEW things to do!!!! But my sister-in-law was doing it and everything she does is cool, and boy am I glad. I’m on Season 3, and it just still feels so fresh and interesting and FUN.NY. Thirteen years later, Lena Dunham’s naked body still feels transgressive. I wanted to be mad at the fact that Adam Driver has the biggest lasting legacy of them all, but I can’t be. He’s just so good. And looking back at Charlie’s character, now that I am obsessed with Christopher Abbott, adds new depth. Like this one Reddit poster, I had totally forgotten about this scene from Season 1 and in completely destroyed me. She is so brilliant, I don’t need her to have done anything else.

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