A Summer Warm-Up for a Self-Indulgent Future

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The New York Sun

“Human beings are the only creatures that allow their children to come back home.”

Thank you, Bill Cosby, for putting a fine point on the looming end to the blissful, if unnatural, quiet I have been enjoying for the past several weeks. My summer is over, camp is out, and, indeed, my children are coming home.

In the last six weeks, my husband and I have gone to the theater, caught up on art films, and screened the entire first season of “Mad Men” on DVD. All that before we took off to Italy for a week, meandering through the wine country that slopes from Florence to Rome. When we returned, we slept late, left the dishes in the sink, and lounged around the house in sweatpants, if we bothered to dress at all. We ate off serving plates, and left towels on the floors, and forgot to put napkins on our laps.

I assumed that all parents dropped their children off at the camp bus and then ran home to pop open the Champagne. (Okay, maybe not first-timers. I was once that mother who wept as the bus pulled out of the lot and suggested sleeping outside the camp gates so we could be the very first parents to arrive on visiting day. But that was before my sons grew underarm hair, rolled their eyes when I spoke, and lived to play “Grand Theft Auto.”) I was shocked to read a recent newspaper article describing camp staffers who spend as much time managing long-distance parents as they do campers. Separation anxiety. Remember the days when the phrase used to refer to a child’s fear of leaving a parent — not the other way around? The article quoted parents who proudly admit to making daily calls to camp, poring over online photos of their children, and pushing for two visiting days at camp instead of one.

It is almost too obvious to point out that, by micromanaging their children’s lives from afar, parents are robbing their children of the very independence sleepaway camp is meant to foster. Are these the same parents who send their children to boarding school and then buy a house around the corner?

Here is the real issue: Time focused on your children at large means time not focused on one another at home. I accept, even embrace, that, as a generation, we are overly engaged in our children’s lives. If our children spend as much time on the couches of analysts complaining about us as we did about our own parents, we know what they’ll say.

Talking about the children, worrying about the children, laughing at and about the children, is a full-time job. It is such a full-time job, in fact, that sometimes children have to be banished from the house for us to tackle it. (Having children is a blatant violation of one of my hard and fast credos: Never go into a family business. It is messy, all-consuming, emotional, and fraught. Not to mention the hyphenate job descriptions that can never be erased: husband-father, lover-mother.)

Gone are the days when I would practice being a parent in the mirror, trying on a stern expression like I once practiced returning my first kiss. I am no longer acting the role of a parent — I have become the real thing. I have grown into the job, the skin, the persona. I will always be on Code Orange, this year on alert for glassy eyes or the whiff of alcohol, falling grades, and broken hearts.

But no matter what a family’s story — the different plots, story lines, and dynamics that unfold along the way — the ending is always the same: The children leave home, and the mother and father are left alone. You will one day have to resume a life without children, so you better make sure you have retained a life to resume.

My joints have begun to ache, and the furrow between my brows is permanently creased from showing dismay — mock or otherwise — at the choices my children make. But I have not forgotten that there was life and love before children, and that there will be life and love after they’re gone.

And so I wonder about those parents who, having gotten over the first shock of watching their babies grow up and go to camp, aren’t running to catch the next plane to Tahiti. Summer is a dry run. It is a reminder that you fell in love with your partner before you had children and that they should not be the sole bond that connects you. It is a glimpse of what lies ahead. Do not make the mistake of thinking that summer camp was invented for your children. It was invented for you. It’s a taste of your exhilarating, disorienting, stifling, melancholic, self-indulgent, liberated future. Get out the Champagne before it’s too late and that camp bus comes rumbling up the drive.

Sara Berman is on vacation.


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