We went on our annual Moms and kids camping trip last week.
It’s been nearly a decade of that same exact thing.
My friend Amanda and I load up our cars with a month worth of things and converge on the local KOA for three nights of campfire conversation, swimming, and togetherness.
We leave the men at home.
My husband doesn’t love camping the same way I do.
He wasn’t raised with a dad who everyone called “McGuiver.”
No one had him basically trained to be a large animal vet by the age of 11,
out there lancing things.
After a few touch-and-go trips early on in our marriage, I realized that Justin needs an environment that is much more…orderly and clean.
When I look back on the photos of this trip down through the years, it’s astounding to see how the kids have all grown.
It really shows up when they are set to the same backdrop of the same tiny cabins, and same old trees.
There are the years when some were in diapers, faces covered in a marshmallow and dust glaze, happier than if you’d given them a million dollars. The toothless years. The first year I let them go to the night time movie together alone. The years where fellow camper boys constantly followed my teens.
Every year we look forward to this trip.
My girls all talk about it almost like that little KOA is their actual birth place.
They know every detail of it by heart.
We never even take lanterns or flashlights anymore.
They can get everywhere at night just by their memory.
As they have grown more I have worried they might be bored there this time.
The KOA is designed with small kids in mind, with their petting zoo, and jumpy pillow, and afternoons where they do face paint.
Every year I wonder if the same old things will sustain them,
but every year I am surprised, once again.
They love it for the same reasons I do:
It is just “Our Thing.”
Every year the summers stretch on with the usual procession of photos on social media posted by friends of ours who have much more money than we do, and therefore spend June and July traveling all over the place.
I have to admit that I have sometimes felt inadequate as a mother with this simple summer offering –
An ice cream drum stick from the store there,
a circle around the campfire telling stories,
our plastic s’mores bag.
I would love to take them to Europe, and have them posing along the cobblestone streets,
But, instead, our family has dirt paths to log cabins,
a little playground,
and familiar bike lanes.
This year our camping trip felt bittersweet, as my two teenagers will be seniors this year.
“The last summer of childhood” is a phrase I kept hearing them repeat.
I wondered, as I made the reservations, if it would be our last year where everything felt the same, but I never said anything to them.
I didn’t want to bring the mood down.
Until they have children of their own, they can’t understand the exact way a mother’s joy and excitement for her children’s future often mingle with pain.
I decided to just try to take it in more myself, you know, “pay extra attention this year, just in case,”
So, I took more mental snapshots of them riding the bike loop, washing dishes at the spigot,
and noticing the way their much older faces still glowed in the campfire the exact same way;
Each flicker like a flash of all the years past:
An amber-colored flip-book of my treasured memories.
Then, after three nights of our same old togetherness,
we packed up the cars once again, checked under the beds, swept the dust out the doorway,
and started back home again.
Year 9: Complete.
Every year my husband, Justin, shows up on the last day and helps us load up all the things we brought into our car and his truck.
Us packing way more than we need is also a tradition we uphold, apparently.
My youngest daughter, Paige, asked to ride home with him.
My oldest teen had to take her boyfriend home,
and the other teen’s boyfriend had driven himself,
meaning that she, my Tessa, my deep feeler, climbed into the car with me.
Each car pulled out in a single file line, tires crackling on the gravel in the heartbreakingly familiar way of leaving.
In my mind, I could still hear her seven year-old voice say that out of all the sounds in life she loved, her favorite one was hearing the zippers of tents open in the morning while you are camping, and then starting to hear the footsteps of other camper’s feet,
on that very same gravel,
as they all start their day.
She and I sat for a minute once the others had left.
It was obvious that neither one of us wanted to leave.
What I wasn’t expecting was to look over at her, and see that she was wiping tears away.
.
“Oh, Honey! What’s the matter?” I asked her.
At first she couldn’t say anything.
Then, finally, after a few deep breaths, and one last visual sweep of the scenery,
she said something I understood more fully than she knows yet:
“I’m not ready for what is coming after we leave.”
I put the car back in park, and for the next several minutes she filled it with her explanation that the whole time we’d been there this time, she had been feeling the same “What if it’s the last time” as me.
She had been trying to take it in.
She had also realized that this pure symbol of her childhood that she once thought would be forever could be a fleeting thing, as she and her sister now prepare to have their last year of high school, and then head into a whole new mystery life once they cross that graduation stage.
In that moment, looking at her with her dirty feet and tear stained face, I saw my little girl as just that – A little girl – trying desperately to be brave.
These places and traditions, no matter how humble, are a piece of the familiar to which they will cling when everything around them feels new.
My humble summer offering is the dry land,
when all they can see is an ocean of change.
I know that next summer may look different, as they prepare to go on to college, and they may have jobs that they can’t leave.
They may travel far, and do more than I could have even believed.
Who knows? They may find love, and settle down even sooner than I think.
Then, maybe they will have children, and before long I won’t have any more pictures to add to a succession of an album that once started out simply as “Camping 2015.”
But then, one day when they are grown and have their own lives completely separate from me,
I hope they can still close their eyes and remember the second home we made out of a little log cabin in the woods every year, even just for four days.
I hope they can still trace every path there just by their memory.
And maybe when their hearts are yearning for those familiar paths, and tastes, and feels of yesterday,
they will say to their own little family
(maybe some of whom are in diapers),
“Do you guys want to go somewhere magical?
I know just the place.”
Mom Outnumbered
Hi! My name is Kerri Green; Wife to Justin, and mother to four highly entertaining daughters -Alena, Chloe, Tessa, and Paige. I am an artist, a writer, a daycare provider, a lover of people, a believer that there is humor and beauty in all things, and the author of Mom Outnumbered; a blog about real family life, and my observations of it. My goal is to make people laugh, to be there for them when they cry, and most importantly, to let them know that they are not at all alone in this up and down world. I live with my family in Sebastopol California, and I am opening the window into our life. So welcome! Come in. Sit down. Just please don’t mind the mysterious wet spots.
