When my son left last summer for his first time at sleepaway camp, I expected we wouldn’t get many letters. He was 8, after all, and his penmanship looked like he was being poked in the arm by rhinos every time he picked up a pencil. I’d been a prolific letter-writer as a child because I enjoyed writing and loathed camp. Some of my favorite camp memories revolve around rest hour, when I could be left alone to write my heart out. (My bunk hates me, but that’s okay because I hate them too! Everyone has Umbro shorts but me! Waterskiing is awesome.) My brother, on the other hand, loved camp and typically managed to send out only the required I got to camp. I am in bunk 8 missive before falling silent for his remaining eight weeks away.
I was hoping that my son’s postal habits would tend more toward my brother’s side of the spectrum – I wanted to know that he was fine, but mostly too busy and happy to bother writing. I steeled myself for a degree of separation. What I didn’t count on was how confusing camp communication is in the modern era.
As I watched the camp bus pull away, I wondered what kind of insane thing I’d done, sending my son off to live with strangers for four weeks with no ability to make so much as a phone call for the first week. How was I going to make it through the summer? I needn’t have worried. An hour later, my phone chimed with a text from the camp informing me about the status of the bus. It was heading toward Westchester but running behind schedule. A few hours later, my phone chimed again. The bus had entered the state of Massachusetts.
It was simultaneously too much information and not enough. On one hand, I felt reassured that the camp kept in such close contact with parents. I was glad to hear that the trip was going smoothly. On the other hand, the idea that the bus would not go smoothly hadn’t crossed my mind until the camp felt obliged to update me. Why had the bus been running behind schedule? Was there something wrong that they weren’t telling us? And then hours passed with no further news. Had the bus driven off a cliff en route to Maine? Without the updates, I would have waved goodbye as the campers left and assumed that all was well. But now I was in a state of nervous panic. And then in the early evening, a final text: The bus had made it to the camp in Maine.
I began checking the camp blog first thing each day and discovered that it, too, only stoked my anxiety. After almost a week, my son had yet to make an appearance on the blog. I spent every morning reading about what a group of kids I’d never met had been up to the previous day. I scanned cheery descriptions of camp-wide games involving riddles, shout-outs to strangers who had passed their swim tests and multiple references to the beauty of the camp’s lake. But not a single mention of my son. As I clicked through picture after picture of smiling campers shooting arrows and sailing, fear crept into my heart. Why wasn’t he in any of the photos? Was he off in a corner crying? Was he refusing to participate? Was he so homesick that he was spending all his time at the nurse’s station buried under blankets?
As a parent, I’m often awash in child-related information. Other parents email me real-time pictures of my kids on playdates. Baby sitters text me while I’m out to dinner to ask where the Monopoly set is. Once my son tweeted me from school as part of a class project. Each new communication leaves me both annoyed and thrilled. I don’t like being plucked out of my temporary child-free state — a time when I’m typically engaged in some other activity like earning a living or having an adult conversation or simply enjoying not being needed by small children — to have my child’s existence affirmed. But then I look at the cute playdate photos or read my son’s tweet, which was about how he wanted to do lots of stuff together, and my heart melts.
I’d been nervous about how four weeks of possible silence from my son might feel, but this – this information overload that said too much and too little – was far, far worse. And then, one day, my son showed up on the blog. He was standing in some kind of woodworking shed, and he was holding a saw.
At least I knew he was there. He hadn’t been lost in the wilderness when the camp bus drove off a cliff outside Boston. But was he ... happy? And should an 8-year-old really be holding a saw?
Even more confusing, I was allowed to email him daily, but campers were restricted to handwritten letters only. So every day I would sit down at the computer and try to figure out what to say to someone who had yet to communicate with me. Someone who hadn’t even bothered to get his picture taken while smiling and holding a nonlethal tool so I’d know he was okay. At first my emails were just upbeat reports on my day and speculation about his. “We decided to repaint the living room,” I wrote. “It’ll look different when you come home. Are you learning to use a saw?”
But over time, as the days passed and no letters arrived, I sensed that my emails to him were becoming less like emails you might write to your 8-year-old child and more like journal entries you don’t expect anyone to read. “I watched the sun set last night,” I typed into the Email Your Camper form on the camp website. “It made me realize how infrequently I get to actually see a sunset, and how when you’re watching a perfect one it makes the whole world quiet for a moment.” I stopped short of ruminating on the meaning of life and pressed send.
And then, three weeks into camp, a letter arrived. He’d forgotten to write our names on the front, or maybe I’d forgotten to tell him to do so. He’d never addressed a letter before. The entire address was crammed into the upper left corner of the envelope, which is a logical place to begin writing something on any piece of paper that isn’t an envelope.
“Dear Mama and Dad,” read the letter. “Camp is awesome. My bed is near a window. Love, Me.”
And with that, my fears disappeared. The angst and gnawing worry that the texts and the blogs and the pictures had spawned, the images in my mind’s eye of my son curled up in a ball, too miserable to put pen to paper, vanished. In the end, three weeks of silence and two handwritten lines gave me all the information I needed. My son was happy. And too busy to bother writing.
Hana Schank is a writer, a website usability consultant and the author of the e-book “The Edge of Normal.”
