On Sunday I dropped off my kids at camp and, all going well, I won’t see or hear from them for two weeks. This wasn’t part of my plan for the summer. Sleepaway camp, a staple of American childhood, isn’t in my background and the whole idea of it filled me with dread. At their age – eight – I would have hated it, I’m sure, being sent away and forced to have fun. But my children aren’t me and they pushed and pushed until finally last week I gave in. So there they are, at a lake in New Jersey, and here I am, in New York, alone.
It should be good for all of us, this period of detachment. Unless you favour the Edwardian model and ship off your kids to boarding school as long-range training for ruining the country, parenting young children is intense. Single parenting, in the absence of immediate family, can feel – in my case, as a single parent of twins – like being one person divided into three.
In the last eight years, I have spent no more than three consecutive nights away from my kids. I don’t hand off to a spouse in the evenings or have a wife to carry slightly more than 50% of the load. This suits us, but it does make this period of separation even more weird. I have never been one of those women who worries about sublimating her entire identity into motherhood. So why am I drifting around my house like a ghost?
The problem is partly structural. There comes a point, in parenthood, when the release of pressure is less likely to invite relief than to guarantee some kind of collapse. Without dropoff and pickup, perpetual feeding and tidying and the endless refereeing of fights, what, precisely, is the organising principle of my day? When am I getting up and going to bed? And how am I getting anything done if I am not coursing with adrenaline to overcome background exhaustion? People tell me to use this time to “relax”, which, in my case, means basking in the luxury of having time to return stuff to Old Navy and start the complaints process for my broken bin. (It was an expensive bin with a lifetime guarantee – damn right I want a replacement.)
This looks quite sad written down and, I’m vaguely aware, isn’t what I’m supposed to be doing. Maybe I could get a haircut. Or lunch! People have lunch, right? Friends counsel “self-care” in the form of traditional mani-pedi pampering and I do like that idea. On the other hand, the thought of using this time to sit still while someone faffs with my feet triggers something akin to panic. At the very least, I should be maximising my investment – camp wasn’t cheap – by pushing through two months’ worth of work or scheduling a mild bout of Covid. Without responsibilities, it strikes me this would be an excellent time to get ill.
And that’s just the surface panic, beneath which lies the deep, bone-level panic about where my children are and what they’re doing. It feels exactly like the days and weeks immediately after their birth, when any time I spent in the world without them triggered a pervasive, queasy feeling that something was terribly, terribly wrong. I resist sending the camp needy emails; I have some pride, at least. But on the portal where the organisers upload daily photos, I scour every picture like a homicide detective searching for clues. Is that a real smile on my daughter’s face, or a make-the-best-of-it smile? She looks cold in the water; doesn’t she look cold in the water? And is that sunburn?
As I said, this period is extremely useful in flushing out modes of attachment I may want to start work on. When friends with older kids recently started talking about the fear of empty nest syndrome, I scoffed and thought, “that’ll never happen to me”. I’m too involved in my work. I have solid relationships outside the one with my children. I know precisely who I am and what I’m about. Last night I went out with friends and tonight I’m going out too. This is fun, doing things and seeing people and distracting myself from the truth of the matter, which is that I’m counting the seconds until they come home.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist based in New York
