The Dress-Rehearsal of Youth

Having just attended visiting day at my son’s upstate camp, I can’t help but think about that fragile age between eleven and thirteen, when you are almost an adult yet still very much a child. You want to watch scary movies and be brave enough to walk into the bathroom by yourself at night, but you are still afraid of monsters and portals to other dimensions. You want to fit in with crowds of people you don’t even like because crowds are the only place where you don’t actually have to be seen. It’s brutal to be young. And yet, when we are old, it’s easy to romanticize the time when we weren’t tasked with bearing the full weight of our choices. When the world still felt like a place of infinite doors, and we hadn’t yet realized that every yes came with a hundred silent no’s. We forget how scary that silence was, how sharp the ache to be accepted, understood, and loved without conditions. Youth isn’t freedom, it’s the rehearsal for it. And like all theater, if it’s ever gonna be good, it first has to suck.

I don’t know the other kids at my son’s camp. Nor do I have the experience of being a boy, where having a sport or at least an understanding of sports seems absolutely paramount to one’s social relevance. But I’m already on the offense. I’m already suspicious of the other smiling faces I see on my Campanion app each day.

Are these kids gentle? Are they kind? Are they treating my son with respect and compassion? What’s more likely is that they are being kids. And kids can be dicks. My kid included. At home, I could control. Here, I can only write.

It’s so hard as a parent to sit back and hope for the best. And yet having children is, at its core, a lesson in letting go. No matter how hard we try to protect them, they’re going to get hurt. They need to get hurt in order to grow. Our job is to refrain from interfering.

I can’t be Marty McFly, going back in the DeLorean to beat the shit out of the girl who lived across the street from me in Eugene, Oregon. That train has passed, and that girl is probably dead. Seeking out justice for our children is most often less about them and more about experiencing a corrective experience for ourselves.

Still, the urge is there. The part of me that wants to sit down with each camper and give a TED Talk on empathy. The part that wants to hover invisibly over the field and whisper, “Don’t exclude him. Let him take a turn. You’re never going to the NBA, you are a four-foot-tall Doozer from Fraggle Rock, and your dad is a Jewish dermatologist!” But I can’t. And I won’t. Because being a strong parent sometimes means watching your kid be left out. Sometimes it means watching them leave others out, and giving them shit for it later. Their pain is not a reflection of our past, but their own story to navigate.

I don’t want my kids to have easy lives. Easy lives make boring writers.

Whether or not my son ends up loving camp is besides the point. What matters is that I refrain from playing the puppet master. Even though I'm friends with the camp doctor and have requested videos from afar, I’m not hiding under his bed. I’m not going under cover as a student at the all-girls camp down the road. I’m not even renting an Airbnb in the area in case he needs me to get there at a moment’s notice. I’m trying to give him space. Because he doesn’t need me to engineer his world. He needs me to be there when he comes home, to listen and not try to fix.

That’s the real work of all parents. Letting our kids stumble through their messy first drafts - letting them revel in the melodrama of their dress rehearsals, while we hold our notes, knowing that, obviously, we could make everything ten thousand times better.

If only they'd let us.

(On my way to visiting day)