I Just Wanna Go Home

for Kristen

“I just want to go home!” Clayton sobbed, again and again. “I want to go home!”

At that moment, I did, too. I imagined lugging all our sleeping bags and gear back to the parking lot, and then driving the hour and a half back home, where our nice, comfortable beds were waiting and the dogs would be oh-so-happy to see us. I even imagined leaving it all behind, just walking away empty-handed, with the tent half-pitched on the tent pad and the whole slapdash heap of pads and sleeping bags piled up beside it. It would be so simple to just shovel our over-tired kids into the van and come back for the rest of it in the morning. Because clearly things weren’t going to work out. Clearly this was a camping trip that was just not meant to be.

It was all my fault. It had been my idea to come here. The kids and I had camped here with my sister and her two boys earlier in the summer, and I couldn’t wait to come back and show Don how clear the lake was, how near the tent sites to the water’s edge.

And it had all seemed to unfold so perfectly. Even in late September, the forecast predicted clear skies and unseasonably warm temperatures. I had borrowed a friend’s canoe and had concentrated very hard on keeping it on the roof during our drive down the mountain, and it had not fallen off. And I was confident that this time I had remembered to pack every single thing, from beach towels to beer coozies.

I had also thought to borrow another friend’s ten-man tent. We had our own tents, of course, but only one tent was permitted per campsite, and I had wanted to spare Don the discomfort he had endured the last time all five of us had slept in our one four-person tent. I had also wanted to arrive well before sunset, so that we could avoid putting up the borrowed tent in the dark. But traffic south had been awful as usual, and it had seemed, at the time, like a good idea to stop for burritos on the way. The burrito joint was next to the kids’ favorite toy store, and I hadn’t been able to resist Clayton’s pleas to “just look at the toys for a minute.” And then there was the balloon man in the toy store lobby, with absolutely no line at all, and what were a few more minutes when we were so late already?  

It was twilight as we rolled into the campground, full dark by the time we’d found our spot. Borrowing the tent now seemed to me a ridiculous idea. The instructions were miles long, and the gray and black tent poles were perfectly camouflaged on the dark ground. Don and I made a valiant effort while the kids played cavemen in the dark, but as their play wound down and their patience wore thin, the tent still lay limp and shapeless on the ground.

At last we gave up.

“We’ll just sleep out tonight,” I said, trying to sound as cheerful as I could. “We’ll put up the tent in the morning when we can see.”

“But I don’t want to sleep without a tent!” Clayton said. I could hear the anxiety rising in his voice, and since I had proved unable to do the one thing that would relieve that anxiety, I fell back on the pis aller of every parent in a pinch: sugar.

“Why don’t we make a fire and have s’mores?” I said.

While Don tended the fire and the kids roasted marshmallows, I laid out our mattresses and sleeping bags.

“It actually looks pretty cozy!” Sylvia said cheerfully, eyeing the nest I had made. (Sylvia these days is reliably upbeat, so that I find it harder and harder to remember her younger, weepier self, when she would throw herself to the ground in a fit of tears multiple times a day.)

Even Clayton, propped up with the sugar and his sisters’ enthusiasm, had begun to accept the inevitable night under the stars. As his sisters changed into their pajamas, he opened his backpack to get out his own.

“Oh no,” I said. He didn’t even need to speak; I knew immediately what was wrong. I had told all the kids that afternoon to pack their pajamas and two sets of clothes. I had even checked the girls’ backpacks, just to make sure. Why hadn’t I checked Clayton’s? It was all coming horribly back... I remembered now him saying his backpack was too full of books and stuffed animals; the clothes wouldn’t fit.

“Just put your clothes on your bed, then,” I had said. “And I’ll get them.”

But, distracted by the long list of other things I had to pack, I hadn’t gotten them! And now Clayton— of course it had to be Clayton, Clayton who is so meticulous about his routines, so rigid about his wardrobe— Clayton had no clothes.

“We brought two bathing suits,” I brainstormed. “You can wear one of those as shorts and we can buy you a t-shirt at the gift store.”

He shook his head, sobbing. Swim trunks were not shorts.

“You can wear your daddy’s t-shirt as pajamas,” I suggested. Still more tears.

“I just want to go home!” he wailed. “I want to go home.”

***

This is the point when all my internal conflicts about parenting a sensitive child rise up and twist around inside me, leaving my head spinning. On the one hand, my heart goes out to Clayton. Not only is he being expected to sleep outside for the first time, with no shelter of any kind, but he is being asked to do it without the comfort of his own pajamas and the ritual they represent. Morning will come, and his backpack will still be barren of clothes, and so while his sisters get dressed for the day, he will be left out of that ritual, too. For Clayton, this is a legitimate reason to despair, and as his mother, every part of me wants to protect him from it.

And yet there is another part of me that wants him— needs him— to pull himself together and buck up. He is almost nine years old, and this is not a true catastrophe. The stars are brilliant; we could not have picked a better night for sleeping out. And surely there are millions of little boys who would not think twice about wearing the same clothes all weekend— we are camping, after all. For all I love Clayton’s sensitivity, I want him to be resilient, to be flexible. I don’t want him to fall helplessly apart each time life throws a curve ball at him.

***

In the end, it was his own empathy that got him through. I told him how badly I felt. I said that it was all my fault, and if I could make it right, I would. Even as badly as Clayton felt, he didn’t want me to feel worse. And so, eventually, he stopped crying and fell asleep.

I had told the children that sleeping out was one of my favorite things to do. During the dry California summers of my twenties, a tent had seemed superfluous and artificial; I loved how the stars were the last thing I saw when I went to sleep, the moon’s slow journey across the sky as the night passed. Maybe I am out of practice, maybe the kids’ anxiety had made me anxious, but I did not love sleeping out that night. All night I scanned: the sky for rain, the campsite for critters, my bare limbs for the daddy-long-legs I could feel creeping across my skin. My sleeping bag was gritty with sand, and I was too hot inside it and too cold out. A baby in a nearby campsite cried every few hours, and long before dawn I could hear the boats roaring out from the marina, the slap of their wake against the rocky shore. And I thought, of course, of Clayton, and his plea to go home. Yes, I thought, swatting another creepy-crawly off my arm, we should just go home. Have breakfast, take the canoe out, maybe go for a swim, but definitely go home.

Except by the time morning came, no one— least of all, Clayton— wanted to go. The sun sparkled on the lake while we ate our pancakes; we couldn’t wait to get in. The water was summer-warm against my skin, and as I dove beneath the surface, I let it wash the night away.

The camping trip turned out to be one of our best yet. With a little help from our neighbors, I got the luxurious tent set up. Clayton got a new, glow-in-the-dark t-shirt from the camp store, and learned that even the worst moments pass, and that tomorrow is indeed another day. We packed a dry bag and set out in the canoe, stopping to picnic and swim at our own private swimming holes and beaches. We hung the hammock between two trees above the lake, and Dee Dee and I snuggled while Clayton and Sylvia played sweetly together with the cavepeople in the sand. That night I slept deeply; if the baby cried, I didn’t hear him. And in the morning, when Clayton and I stepped out of the tent together, and the sky was just barely lightening in the east and the trees were dark silhouettes against the lake, Clayton— wearing as pajamas one of his father’s t-shirts that came down to his knees— looked out at the view and said, “Momma, it’s so beautiful here.”

Then the girls were up, too, and we clambered carefully down the rocks in the half-dark. I lifted the canoe into the water, and we set out. Slowly, the dawn came. The sky was bright; the water clear and warm. We stopped to swim at a deserted beach, then headed home to warm up with cider and hot-chocolate.

Clayton sat in the front of the canoe, trailing the paddle through the water.

“I really don’t want to go home,” he said.

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Here's Dee Dee's version: