What I Learned on My (Extended) Summer Vacation, Part 2
Next Stop: Washington, D.C. and Making Connections
By Lisa Jancarik
Our weekend in Washington, D.C. was a nostalgic trip for me. My first visit inside the Beltway came at age nine. By then, I recognized the familiar landmarks from the evening news and was awestruck at the sight of them in real life. I equated them with indomitable, almost tactile power (although to be fair, I would not have used the words “indomitable” or “tactile” to say so back then). Reagan was in the White House, and our nation was a Superpower.
In the intervening thirty years or so, Reagan outspent the Soviets in the nuclear arms race, ending the cold war with the best weapon available to him in the 1980s, the U.S. dollar. I’ve been to the nation’s capital several more times, watched many more news broadcasts, and have come to look upon politicians and the scum ring in my tub with equal disdain.
The world has different challenges these days, and so do I. Now, I struggle sometimes to relate to my daughter: princesses, fairies, magic…it all leaves me with the vague nausea of having eaten too much cotton candy. I envy grown-ups who can just go with it when the Mean Witch-Queen tricks Prince Ken into imbibing the love potion (keep control of your beverage, bro’…first thing my RA taught me when I got to college. In my own childhood, I read shelves of fantasy novels, but magic gradually lost out to reality for my attention. Exposure to real, more interesting places like D.C. assisted in displacing fantasy themes from my imagination.
Well, bottom line, my fairy-stricken six-year-old wasn’t going to get the same rush at seeing the Capitol that I did at age nine, so we had to plan the visit around some different themes. For example, the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum is easily the coolest place in D.C. if you are a kid. Neil Armstrong, Apollo, Skylab…I’d heard of them when I was a kid, but to see them in real life? They fairly glowed with significance to History and Science assigned to them by all the PBS I’d watched (remember Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” series?). Not so for my little girl a generation later.
Luckily for our D.C. weekend plans, she is curious to learn about things her dad and I liked when we were kids. The sight of airplanes and rockets suspended from the ceiling proved irresistible even to my girlie-girl, no fairy wings or magic wands required. She bounced through the walk-through segment of Skylab, pointing and asking questions. She played with a mission control simulation in another area until we finally made her leave for lunch and the IMAX film. Then, she sat through the Hubble IMAX film without so much as a twitch or squirm, staring at the beautiful images of the stars. Throughout, she watched for our reactions and wanted to hear which exhibits we liked. Truly, I was relieved that we didn’t have to bail out to see the first ladies’ inauguration dresses exhibit, my reluctant plan B.
Most rewarding to me, though, was when she told me later that her favorite part of the day was seeing the bright orange airplane Chuck Yeager flew to break the sound barrier…it had been one of my favorite things to see when I was a kid, and I loved that it was still there for her to see. Maybe she’ll learn that there is more to love in the world than whatever fantasy dreck Mattel and Disney are selling this season, but in the meantime I’m finding that the best way to draw her away from the fairies is to use myself and my own interests as bait.
Final Stop: Summer Camp and Parental Anxiety
About midsummer, my six-year-old went to a camp with my in-laws. I’ve never been to this camp, and I don’t know much about camps in general. Admittedly, her dad had some input in the decision to let her go, but let’s face it: I was the major roadblock here.
I’m the one who is always reaching for her hand, calling after her and generally making a fuss over risks to her health both real and imagined. My husband rolls his eyes at some of my precautionary measures, while I have, in my less charitable moments, accused him and his family of letting her juggle knives…not really true, of course, but I tend to be a little bit high-strung (perhaps you’ve noticed if this isn’t the first post of mine you’ve read). So how did a paranoid mother of one little girl let this camp idea happen?
First of all, this camp sounded like a great time for my six-year-old. A whole week of playing outside? Interesting surroundings? Plus unchaperoned time with the doting grandparents? Might as well roll her birthday and Christmas into the package while we’re at it. She’d never pass that up, given a choice!
Second, the American Camp Association website claims 11 million people per year, children and adults alike, go to U.S. camps of various kinds. Most of them are not eaten by bears, drowned in the lake while canoeing, or hopelessly lost while hiking in the woods. Many of them are return visitors, so they plainly survived the previous summer’s camp adventures. Sure, she could have broken a bone, but honestly, that could happen with a trip to the local park a few miles from our house.
So, I fussed over my kid and warned her about…well, everything I could think of, paranoid or not. Then, I packed her up into her grandparents’ minivan and watched them drive off into the filth and danger of nature. I didn’t hear from them on a daily basis, as cell phone reception was spotty out at the campground. I made my peace with it.
The photos that came back from that trip glowed with warm sunshine and happy smiles, my daughter relaxed, content or even delighted. If I hadn’t chosen to relax and trust her grandparents fully, if I’d insisted on going, I probably would have ruined the trip for everyone by chasing her with sunscreen or a sweater the whole time. I would have told her not to climb on things that were entirely reasonable to climb on. I would have constantly admonished her to be careful. In the process, I would have also communicated to my in-laws a lack of faith in them. It was a good thing I didn’t go: I would have been a complete buzz kill for everyone there. Instead, my kid and my in-laws got a good week of time to themselves to make memories on their own terms. They all came home already talking about next summer.
Summer’s end saw us safely back home with some great memories and a lot of navel-gazing for me (also known as “material” for blog articles). Not sure who grew up more over the summer: probably the kid, but I definitely made some progress, too.
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