I have declared my hatred of camping in prose, verse, and rhyme for years now, but recently, despite knowing this, some friends invited our family along on their rustic getaways. We were actually welcomed on two different trips because all my friends want to see me suffer but since they were on consecutive weekends, we went with the friends who asked first (and, totally coincidentally, those whose plans included a glamping option). So it was that last weekend, the four of us (sorry, Kevin the Dog) drove an hour outside Sydney and set up shop for the weekend in the outdoors.
In short, we survived. Smelly and tired and in need of showers and another weekend to recover, but alive nonetheless. And it actually turned out to be a pretty magical time.
How could it not be, when along with the shared toilets, lack of attending to personal hygiene, gigantic lizards, and occasional meltdowns, there were campfires, champagne in plastic cups, barbecues, laser tag fights, and seamless blending of four families (that left The Kid, on Sunday morning, asking why “everyone” had to be in our tent). There were no devices; there was creek swimming; there was no makeup; no room for artifice; there were meandering walks and conversations. There was understanding.
When TK woke up both days and marched around our campsite giving off his signature voice alarm, there were smiles. There was one of his friends, in her sleepy half-consciousness, saying, “I love James’s positivity.” There was Little Brother “crushing” his three-years-older friend at soccer and talking about it still. There was laughter and good-natured ridicule. There was being seen, and known.
There was discomfort. There was TK holding it in until he couldn’t then erupting prior to laser tag. There was my own anxiety, kept in check by the presence of families besides our own but always reminding me of its presence in early-morning wake-ups and body tension. There were mosquito bites.
There was also seeing. There was getting to know myself and my own family better. When TK admitted that he was upset because he had counted on being on the red team, there was my awareness of all the discomfort that’d been tamped down to reach that point of explosion, and there was my chance to help others see that too. And my chance to see the way I do it myself. How he comes by it not just diagnostically, but honestly.
Because that is the purity of the neurodiverse: their honesty. Not this outdated lack-of-empathy BS but their, his, total immersion in empathy; this consuming feeling-it-all and having to learn what to do with that. And somehow, there is how I was recruited to be a teacher for that, I in all my own feeling-it-all-ness, the irony and anxiety and emotions all running deep, where things are most true.
Honest people reveal our insecurities; they reflect who we aren’t yet, what we aren’t yet. Every time TK smacks another adult’s ass and runs away, laughing, I watch for reactions at such wonderfully inappropriate behaviour and find that so many don’t know what to do with it; the discomfort is too great and there’s no space for it. But. There are those who have been given the space to find out who they are, and therefore are able to give that space to others. They laugh, they play, they ask questions. I’m becoming one of them, I hope. I know.
Lest I forget, though, my children are not me. They are a mysterious mix of The Husband, and me, and another magical element called Themselves, and I’m reminded of this every time LB stands up proudly in front of his class to tell a joke, or when TK announces to TH on a walk, “I love interacting with people,” and I think, who are you?
My friend tells me that on the way home from camping, her daughter, apropos of nothing, said that whoever ends up with TK is going to be so lucky. I look at him, and at LB, and I think about how, for now, that person is me. Who are you? I think again, in the quiet of camp and the other still moments life provides, in the midst of discomfort and anxiety and the hard and the true, and the answer comes back in each moment, that that’s what we’re finding out.