Happy Camper: Part 1

I come from a long line of non-campers. 

If you asked me as a kid what I thought of camping, I would have missed the verb distinction and provided breathless detail of my love of going to camp. 

My only point of reference for camping was the place you go for a week that had cabins and a lodge perched on the edge of a lake. You swam, practiced archery, canoed and built campfires. I wasn’t really sure I could be missing much when I was already in camping heaven, at camp.

When I realized there was another kind of camping, I found it to be a curiously mysterious activity and for families much more healthy than mine. This kind of camping required a tremendous amount of teamwork and willingness to do manual labor, skills we did not possess in large quantities. 

I also missed the logic in spending days preparing to take belongings with you in order to do all of your inside activities, outside. I apparently shared a similar view with my grandmother. When I asked her if she was going to go with us on a rare camping outing, she replied, “Why would I go camping for fun? No thank you honey, I camped the first thirty years of my life.” That pretty much summed up the great outdoors legacy my father inherited and passed along to me. 

My mom, on the other hand, desperately wanted us to be a camping family. She tried many times to get us primed for camping with camping-lite activities like picnics, hikes, walks, books about the great outdoors, etc. I believe Mom saw camping as something she could add to her toolkit of techniques to ward off the evils of modern culture. Camping combined chores, the outdoors, potential contact with wildlife, limited television-time, physical activity and being together as a family. Really, all that was missing was Sunday School.

Despite her earnest and clever attempts, my father’s mindset prevailed. He was simply uninterested and his lack of cooperation was the same as a direct counterattack. By the time we actually went camping for the first time, my brother and I were teenagers, and with no connection to camping, we viewed this new activity as a form of work as well as social and technological deprivation.  It was three against one and ultimately, my mother would lose.

Now strangely, here I stood as an adult in my own living room, crying over the camper I was selling. My camper. Crying.

But really, what’s not to love!? Here it is in a great little RV park in Lincoln City, Oregon, the last time we took it out together as a family with our own kids in August of 2010.  

This turnabout of core life interests and beliefs surprised even me.  Even as I gush the words, “RV park,” I feel a strange disorienting affection for the way the asphalt pads are laid out, the tidy bathrooms and cheery community centers.  Mind you, I still practiced my self-righteous loathing of true RV’ers.  I fancied us somewhere between Sierra Club backpackers and those who’d sold their souls to take a stadium of home comforts with them on the road.

Regardless, that I would transition so dramatically over the course of twenty years to become a champion of the benefits of camping, this will go down on my Life’s Little Surprises list for sure.

I nosily wiped my eyes and nose, and through the picture window watched our little Jayco Jay Series 1007 camper slowly slide down the driveway behind the new owner's gray Ford pickup. It moved the way I knew well, made a familiar wiggle and ca-chunglk sound when it bounced from the driveway to the street and then it was gone. I watched an inappropriately long time, straining voyeur-like, until it truly disappeared from sight. 

Wondering if I was overreacting, I checked in with the hubs. “I’m sad,” said my stoic, engineer-husband, standing next to me. Yes, this was a hard thing.

Why camping then? Why not just watch movies, go on walks, eat out, make dinner? Crafts, games, volunteering? I guess because in many ways, camping takes pretty much all of those amazing things and makes you work just a little harder for them.  You also are forced to do them together, outside (Mom is crying happy tears right now, I can just hear it).

There is also an element of shared work that seems almost impossible to find in any other city life-setting. Even those of us compelled to give our kids chores will admit we work mostly isolated from each other. Clean your room, vacuum the floor, mow the lawn. Alone.

How did I get from camping newbie to activist? That is for next weekend, Part 2. For now, this is the photo of a family that spent a week in a camper, together. Somehow, the joy of our lives wasn’t diminished by lack of comfort. I am convinced in many ways, it enhanced it. 

Empty-Nest Report: Holidays

Last weekend was my birthday and Mother's Day, and for the first time, the girls were gone on both days, away at college. 

I did what I think any mom would do in similar conditions; I spent the weekend:  

a) Trying not to cry

b) Trying not to think about "life changes" 

c) Crying

Here's the deal: celebrating a mom-focused holiday without your kids really sucks. It's a bit like being allergic to dairy and in an ice cream store where all you get to do is stare. You want to be happy for all the ice-cream eaters but deep inside, you just want some ice cream. For yourself. Selfishly.

Disclaimer: It really was a wonderful weekend! John took me to one of our favorite restaurants. He asked wonderfully creative questions, bought flowers and a card.  The girls sent emails. My parents hosted a potluck dinner and I saw siblings, nieces and nephews. Friends indulged in lovely lunches and gifts, and two of them even planted my veggie garden (!), proving creative gift-giving is alive and well.

I have nothing to complain about and felt warmed by the love and depth of my community.  It is just that I was having a distractingly painful experience of missing the girls all weekend.

Here they are, on my birthday to be exact, having a blast on a Puget Sound dance cruise.  This is exactly what I would want them to be doing on a Friday night in Seattle.  Live life! Enjoy college! Carpe diem!

Which is why I ... cried? All weekend?! 

Bwwwahhhahah! Snif. Snif. Snif. 

I juggled Happy, Sad and Confused all weekend. I moped around, did the forbidden empty-nesting things that generate angst: looked through old photos, peeked in their bedrooms, counted down the days until summer break, texted. "Restless" would be a word that comes to mind. And rattled. Especially rattled as I didn't see this coming. Goodness, we hardly even celebrate Mother's Day and I acted if some giant tradition had been abandoned. 

So I just cried. And then, I would feel better for a while. And then I would cry some more, and be fine again for a while.

This seemed a better approach than pretending I was stoically cruising through the weekend, fine that for the first time in twenty years, my children were not present for the two holidays of the year where I can count on some part the day being about me. (That sounds horribly selfish but it's true. And we all secretly think it.)  

Even when our finances were tight or the business was unstable or someone was sick, birthdays and Mother's Day were always a pause of at least a few hours, to push back the tide of life a bit and say, Not now! Today, we get out the Special Plate and we will have tiny shrimp for dinner! Or hamburgers, applesauce and anchovies! Or whatever that person wants!

There was a tangible sense that I needed to sit in this space, to not fight what was happening and what I was feeling. As I explored this strange cocktail of joy mixed with sadness, I heard my mother's voice in a new light for the first time:  Honey, I just want us all to be together for my birthday.  Really, you don't need to get me anything for Mother's Day. Whatever works for your schedule, I'll be there. 

Oh. 

Ooooh.

You really do get to that point, where all that matters is being together, where you're not mad that you don't get a present or the right present. It takes work to get together, especially when people are spread hundreds of miles apart. And if you have to choose between one or the other, you take the gift of presence.

So, my universally shared quest for control and predictability appears to be edging toward extinction. In its place, random grief, random happiness, random life. 

In other words, more of the same. 

Oddly comforting and a wonderful gift.