Notes on (Summer) Camp

And Loving Without Knowing

I’ve read Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” a few times, and with each reading, the essay makes me feel dumber, less queer, and less excited about making art.

I thought maybe I’d become cleverer recently and gave it another chance on Audible. I mixed the narration with Apple’s “Four Tet Essentials” playlist, so Sontag’s words played over gentle, persistent, softly shifting beats. In the process, I accidentally discovered that the combination of an audiobook with hotel-lounge electronic music tickles my brain in a way that it hasn’t been tickled since The Orb’s “Little Fluffy Clouds.” I still finished the essay with less grasp on “camp” than before I started. For self-serving reasons, I always like the parts where she says that attraction to the androgyne is the height of sophistication. But, as much as I want it to be, I don’t think the central thesis of Sontag’s essay is that I’m cute.

The camp that’s affected me lately is summer camp. Not mine. My sons’.

I spend most of the year missing my kids more than I can describe, my heart aching through distracted daily FaceTime calls, nudging my ex for pictures of their extracurricular activities, and texting them memes and videos they might spark to. Despite the love that stretches across the country, their lives hide behind a vague fog of “today was pretty chill” and “nothing really happened.”

On school breaks, I get custody. I fly to the East Coast for their short breaks. They come home to LA for Christmas and summer. When it became clear that it was going to be the new reality of parenting them, I decided that I would try to make the days the kids spend with me like the days I spent with my grandparents on my school breaks when I was a kid: dense with memories, milestones, and growth. When they’ve forgotten the familiar drumbeat of school days and everyday life, I hope they remember me.

A few Fridays ago, my fourteen-year-old marched with a group of aspiring lifeguards to the end of the Venice Pier for a “pier jump” into the cold gray water of the Pacific, forty feet below. I only saw kids like this on TV when I was growing up. They were athletic, cool, deeply suntanned, hair bleached by a summer spent in the waves, under the sun.  As they walked, they looked over the edge of the railing, wondering if they’d be brave enough to make the jump.

The Junior Lifeguard Pier Jump

Last summer, my son probably wouldn’t have jumped. He would have thought about it too much. His brain would have chewed on all the ways a high jump like that could go wrong. But this summer was different. He was in the first third of the kids to go for it. He was much closer to the front of the line than I expected. I barely had time to get my phone out when I spotted him scrambling onto the railing. I snapped a few quick pictures as he pushed off the pier and hung in the air for a few seconds before splashing into the waves. He tapped his head with his fist to indicate he was okay. Everyone cheered. He swam away to make room for the next kid.

That evening, my 11-year-old did his own brave thing. After watching his older brother do two back-to-back years of comedy camp and thinking he might be unable to perform in front of a room of 75 people, he performed an original stand-up set. He talked about getting bitten by a squirrel during golf camp (a real thing that happened when he tried to pet a squirrel). He told a true story about lying to a flight attendant that it was his birthday and getting first-class food in coach. He got laughs. He set up his best friend, who closed the show, like a pro.

For most of my sons’ lives, I’ve prided myself on how well I know them on a deep, archetypical level. The older one is intensely cerebral, curious about finance, politics, and the ways of the adult world, with a strong moral compass and a funny old soul. The younger one is magically comfortable everywhere, fast at making friends and learning new sports, with emotional intelligence and savoir-faire to spare.

Every confirmation of these general impressions made me feel like a good mom. Look at me introducing them to a new favorite book, movie, or band… look at me predicting how they’d feel about a new adventure, person, or food… look at me catching them breaking the rules in ways particular to them.  Even when I screwed up in other ways as a parent, this knowing felt redemptive.

As I handed them over to basketball coaches, golf pros, other parents, the fire department, and professional stand-up comics, I was again thrilled that I’d planned summer so well. Thanks to my talents as mom/concierge, a lot of heavy lifting from my partner, Krista, and some generous help from my Dad and Stepmom, I gave them a summer full of days I knew they would love.

They loved their summer.  I was proud that I’d curated their time so expertly. But as they took step after step into new maturity, bravery, knowledge, and joy, they became people I didn’t know quite as well, even as all the time, laughter, and meals brought us closer together.

Some of this is dumb and obvious. This isn’t the first time I’ve relearned my children. They were different people every month as newborns. Their preschool strengths and weaknesses differed from those they left elementary school with. But at some point, as happens in every relationship, I settled into a sense that I knew what they were about. And, of course, we have shared history, cherished memories, and a deep love for each other. However, I also recognized a kind of laziness and lack of curiosity in myself as I started to pay attention to how my sons at 11 and 14 differed from my sons at 10 and 13.

It was a text from my mom that shook me from my middle-aged-parent complacency. Between Christmas of 2023 and the summer of 2024, something shifted in my life in a way I haven’t yet been able to name. After so many years of surgeries, hard divorce conversations, and unpacking trauma in therapy, I found myself on a more stable foundation as a person than I’ve ever been on before. As I’ve transitioned over the past few years, there have been a lot of big, loud, holy shit moments of growth and joy. But this wasn’t that. This was a realization that the tally of happy days was growing longer and longer. That I was relaxing. That I was enjoying my little life of little routines and small pleasures and that things were (and are), good. Good in the way that could only really be conveyed by the way Matthew McConaughy might say good: slow, a little stoned sounding, savoring how good saying the word “good” feels.

Feeling safe in whatever this feeling is, I decided to try to heal the rift that formed between me and my mom when I came out and didn’t take her up on her invitations to send me to conversion therapy in my forties (honestly, a mistake, can you imagine the Substack I would have gotten from that experience?)

I texted her this novella:

And then nervously waited for her response and its potentially to be emotionally disruptive or worse.

She finally texted back over a month later:

When the text arrived, I was too busy with the kids’ summer activities to immediately feel anything. In my first calm moment, I reeled. I imagined responses designed to troll her and preserve my ego: responding with a “Ha Ha!” reaction or just “OK, boomer.” I imagined picking apart her argument that I was simultaneously a new creation while remaining immutably her son. Finally, I felt the sad, familiar heaviness of rejection, the sting of learning how disposable I have been to people who claimed (and claim) to love me. I was a moody little bitch for a couple of days, if I’m being honest.

The sentence “You have created someone else, and you are asking me to embrace this person you created as my child” stuck with me. It hung incongruously in the air as I watched my boys create themselves. The transformation from book-obsessed library assistant to basketball-obsessed jock and the transformation from quiet jock to sly standup comic aren’t as dramatic as the transformation from “extraordinary” (and extraordinarily sad) man into happy woman. But, every week, I saw my children author their own lives, their own selves.

As it turns out, my mom had given me a gift. She illuminated the ways I was hanging on to the version of my kids that exist in my ego instead of the ever-growing, ever-changing people they actually are.

I could see her loss in ways I never had. If I could recreate myself as someone so repellent to her, had any of the work she’d done as my mother even mattered? If she saw value in herself as the parent of a “remarkable boy” and “extraordinary man,” did it make her feel reciprocally less valuable when I revealed myself to be not a man (and informed her that the boy in her memories was a deception)? It must be intolerably confusing to compose texts to the living soul you’re mourning.

There wasn’t much time to think about it. There were carpools to coordinate, uniforms to wash, and basketball games to attend. Lesson by lesson, camp by camp, my kids became slightly different people. I imagined all the different destinations these compounded differences might take them to.

At one of their basketball camps, the coaches took the parents aside to ask us not to coach our kids from the sidelines. After a game, they encouraged us to avoid immediately giving feedback. They told us to start the conversation by saying, “I love to watch you play.” They told us to find joy in our kids' efforts to improve and their willingness to show up.

I thought this was great advice, and I deployed versions of it all summer, telling them: I love to watch you play… I love to watch you face your fears… I love to watch you tell jokes…  And all the while, I reminded myself: I love to watch you grow…. I love to watch you change… I will never know exactly who you are, but that won’t stop me from loving you with my whole heart.