Good Apple

by Elizabeth Passarella

  Between 2012 and whatever Year of Our Lord we are currently in, we have never not had a child crawl into our bed in the middle of the night. For years it was Julia. We tried walking her back to her room. We tried making a pallet on the floor. We tried bribery. The only thing that worked, for a short season, was letting her move to the couch in the living room. Why, you ask? Because, according to her, it felt safe, since it shared a wall with our bedroom. That type of malarkey is proof that you can’t reason with these people.

  My friend Murff, who has a daughter two years older than Julia, once said to me, “Just wait. One day Julia is going to sit in her bed reading Harry Potter, turn out the light, and go to sleep on her own.” She might as well have told me that I’d be able to shoot tiny chicken pot pies from my armpits. Sure enough, though, it happened. Julia started going to bed with a book and a flashlight and falling asleep with only a gentle nudge from us here and there. And guess what? Approximately forty-seven hours later, James began showing up at our bedside in the middle of the night. It’s as if Julia slapped him on the bottom and said, “I’m out. I’ve given everything I can. You’re up. Make me proud.”

  When James eventually stops coming into our bed, it’ll be Sam’s turn. Sam, who last night was awake, screaming his head off, from midnight to 2:00 a.m. He’s either teething or growing horns.

  Where was I?

  I’m very tired.

  Oh, prayer.

  So yes, I’ve prayed for everything under the sun: for more sleep, for more patience, for my children not to need me, for different children. Some nights, I don’t pray, but I crawl into bed next to Michael, after finally getting our children to sleep, and say, “I hate everyone who isn’t you.” I think God gets the message.

  Last Sunday our pastor, David, preached on prayer—because God has a habit of meeting me where I am—and he made a good point. God doesn’t give us what we want, he said; God gives us what we need. It’s very hard to know the difference, and sometimes you never see it. Even Jesus, in the garden of Gethsemane, prayed for God to take away the cup, to save him from death. God said no. And humanity was rescued.

  What we all need, David said, is God himself. We need his presence, his help, his love for our children when we can’t love them well on our own. We need to know that, no matter how prepared or well-intentioned we are, we can’t do it. We’re helpless. I, for one, welcome that news. Because is it any surprise? All I have to pray is, “I can’t do this. But you can.” And then let go and wait.

  (For the record, I’ve waited a lot. God also thinks I need patience, apparently.)

  . . .

  I wish I could go back to Real Simple Family and write at the end of every story: “This may work; it may not. We want you to know that you can read every parenting book about sleep and every article about tantrums, you can do everything right with discipline, you can try to reason with your child or reward her with sticker charts, and you may still find yourself in the fetal position on the floor outside her bedroom door, wondering if you’ll ever survive. We’ve all been there. You aren’t alone.” That’s a little long, though, and we were always having to cut run-on sentences for space. So, maybe instead we should just say: “They grow out of it.”

  Or I could offer this Real Simple–worthy trick: Wait until they fall asleep. Bite your tongue, scream into a pillow, whatever you need to do. Keep the awful thoughts in your head—that maybe the third one was a bad idea, that you wish you could move to a tiny house in Colorado by yourself—and try to stay calm. I promise, the minute they doze off, mere milliseconds after their breathing deepens and slows, you will lift your head and look at them and think, suddenly, “I love them so much I could die.” And, miraculously, it will be true.

  TWELVE

  EL SHADDAI, EL SHADDAI

  IN NEW YORK, MANY OF THE Jewish families we are friends with send their children to sleepaway camp for the majority of the summer—seven weeks—starting when the children are in first or second grade. I’ve learned from a few Jewish friends my age who grew up spending every summer away from home how common this is, especially in the Northeast. Jewish parents all over the city are sleeping in and going for runs and listening to podcasts in peace for the months of July and August, and when I hear them discussing deposits made to outposts in Maine, I think, again, that maybe I could sacrifice the salvation I hold so dear and decide to be Jewish, at least while school is out.

  Anyone who is thinking that seven weeks feels like too long doesn’t live with three children in a two-bedroom apartment.

  . . .

  My first sleepaway camp memory is being at a week-long church camp a few hours outside of Memphis with my friend Hallie. I don’t remember much of what we did during the day, but I remember the bedtime routine. For a child who was fearful at night and hated sleeping alone, being in a cabin with a dozen other girls and two counselors was heaven. I could have lived at camp, just for the sleeping arrangements. At this particular one, the director would announce over the PA system every night that, if we got into our bunks and calmed down and the camp got very quiet, maybe the Lady of the Lake would sing. It was cheesy bribery that shouldn’t have worked but did. After a few minutes of squealing and shushing and rustling, a counselor’s voice would come over the speakers singing the famous Amy Grant song, “El Shaddai.” The chorus was in Hebrew—maybe that ignited some subconscious attraction—and it sounded lush and slow and comforting. “El Shaddai, el shaddai, el-elyon na adonai.” To this day, that song feels like a warm lullaby to me. I hum it sometimes when Michael is out of town and I can’t fall asleep.

  Several summers of my tween and teen years, I went to sleepaway camp for a month. It was a very large, very popular Christian megacomplex, and I loved it at the time, but looking back, it seems a teensy bit cultish. There were a lot of rules, like having to always wear socks, even if you had on your brand-new, rainbow-striped Tevas, like I did. And when we showered, we had to show one of our counselors that we were “soapy” before being allowed to rinse and dry off. Even at the time I knew there was something odd about a bunch of twelve-year-old girls yelling, “I’m SOAPY!” to their college-age counselor and shivering while standing away from the showerhead until she could give you a thumbs-up. This camp excelled in what we Christians call legalism: where outward, strict adherence to the rules is valued over the motivations of the heart. You get the salvation by following the rules and achieving your goals. It was all law, no grace, which is only half the story, according to Jesus, who, by the way, is only noted in Scripture as lathering up feet.

  When Michael and I began discussing the idea of sleepaway camp for Julia, we were not on the same page. He never went to camp and didn’t see the value of it. I was contemplating if it was possible to send Julia to Maine for seven weeks. We landed somewhere in the middle, a two-week Christian camp in New Hampshire. Now, at first, I was wary of doing a Christian camp, given my experience. Plus, I had memories of my friend Murff heading off to a secular canoeing camp in North Carolina every summer, where she learned about thongs and where one of her friends smoked in the woods. She would return to Memphis at the end of the summer with a glow of maturity and knowledge. The thing was, our kids were living in Manhattan, where they occasionally saw people walking through Times Square in thongs. I briefly flirted with the idea of sending Julia to camp in the South, with my best friends’ children, putting in motion our ultimate plan for them all to be college roommates. Then I realized that camps in the South are actually more expensive than camps in the Northeast—alert the press: summer camp is a relative bargain up here. Julia had also started talking to me about Christianity as if it were a Southern thing, like an accent or a love of pimento cheese. When she had a rough day at school and didn’t feel like she had any close friends, she’d say things like, “It wasn’t the same for you, growing up. All of your friends were Christians. None of the kids in my class are.” She had a point. Growing up in the Bible Belt meant that a majority of my friends attended church regu
larly; I was the mainstream. She was in the minority in her New York City public school. This gave camp an even greater urgency. I wanted her to meet girls from New Jersey and Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. I wanted her to see counselors who grew up in New York or Boston and still knew Jesus. The camp we chose for Julia seemed like the kind of Christian camp where screwups would be welcome, where the rules existed to keep you safe but give you freedom. It seemed chill. The packing list was pleasantly vague. “Shorts,” it said. No specification on how many.

  As I began packing her suitcase, I started to get really, really excited. For me. I was proud of how well I had aced the packing, first of all. (If you want to see how legalism manifests itself in grown-ups, it is a mother packing her child for sleepaway camp.) I had bought a stamp with her name on it and was stamping individual socks. I worried that she didn’t have enough shoes or the right rain gear. I pre-addressed her stationery envelopes. I rolled up bath towels and two weeks’ worth of clothes, yet even with all of that gear, the duffle bag flumped down, like a bouncy house being collapsed, when I pulled the straps tight across the top. It was just a little over half full. I thought for a split second: Her stuff is still small. She’s still so little.

  She was going, though, and if I haven’t mentioned already, I was excited. I didn’t even think I would miss her. Honestly, I was too exhausted and overwhelmed to even consider it.

  That summer, Sam was fifteen months old, and I was starting to wonder if I would ever have fun with my kids again. Sam was starting to show his true colors, which were: brown, for the six times he’d pooped in the bathtub, once while I was in it; red, for the blood I’d shed cleaning up broken bottles and vases and drinking glasses and Christmas ornaments, all of which he’d hurled across the room like he was tossing confetti; and black, for the hole I wanted to crawl in and live out my days. He went through a phase that summer where he’d take the remote controls, lift them over his head, then throw them on the ground hard enough to knock the batteries out of the back, so that he could put the batteries in his mouth and suck on them for a while. There are seagulls who do this. They pick up turtles and crabs and then drop them from great heights so that their shells crack on the rocks below, exposing the soft, delicious meat. I felt like someone had poured diesel into my gas tank. I was running, but with lurches and stalling. The motions of wrestling a toddler into a diaper or catching him as he threw himself off the top of the playground structure felt foreign. I was being asked to speak a language I hadn’t practiced in years, and it was physically and emotionally taxing. I couldn’t rebound. There was no breathing room, no patience for my older children, because I was already spent just trying to keep Sam alive. So, no, I didn’t consider that I would miss my oldest child. I was just ecstatic to be down to two.

  Truthfully, I didn’t think she’d miss me either. She was a tough kid. My little lion.

  I’m not sure whose idea it was for me to drive Julia the five and a half hours to camp by myself, but a few hours before we left, it started to seem like a bad one. I was, am, and forever will be a terrible driver, due largely to the fact that I have a terrible sense of direction and am always missing a turn or else having to cross four lanes of traffic to make one that I almost missed. My bad driving was one of the reasons New York was such a perfect place for me to move. An early adulthood filled with fender benders—and one harrowing accident where I went the wrong way down a one-way street, crossed an intersection without stopping, was miraculously spared a horrible death, and broadsided a tour bus—made a city with a subway system a wise choice. I could get everywhere I needed to go via public transportation, and I planned to. I used to say that once I was thirty-five, I was going to relinquish my license and have a driver take me places, like a duchess. Instead, I married a man who came from a long line of native New Yorkers who own dented cars that they park on the street, which meant that I was now loading my daughter’s duffel bag into the trunk of our dirty, dented Hyundai in preparation for driving her to a state that I could only find on a map after first pointing to Vermont. A month before this trip, I was still toodling around with an expired license. But knowing that I’d be doing this drive alone, I dragged the kids to the DMV with me to get it renewed. It was a terrible decision, as bad as you can imagine, and I had to buy everyone a Wendy’s Frosty on the way home.

  “Are you going the whole way in one day?” My mother called to express her concern. “Oh, ’Lizbeth, I’m nervous. Do you know where you’re going?” she asked.

  “Yes. I do,” I said, by which I meant, Google Maps does. I reminded my mother that I used to drive twelve hours back and forth to college alone, in one day, and she reminded me that I got lost in the Bronx trying to drive to an internship in Long Island after college and had to pull into a McDonald’s parking lot to cry for a little bit.

  Julia and I were on the road for twenty minutes when Michael texted me.

  Does Google Maps have you taking the Hutch to the Merritt to 95 in Milford?

  I handed the phone to Julia and told her to text her father back.

  Yes. Exit 54 to 95.-Julia

  She didn’t mention that I had already missed the exit to the Cross County Parkway and had to turn around in a tire-shop parking lot to get back on the road in the right direction.

  What if I really didn’t miss her these two weeks? Would that be so bad? Would that make me a monster? What if she didn’t miss me? Would I be proud if neither of us cried when I left her? In my family, capability and self-reliance were prized attributes. You didn’t lean on someone else to solve your problems. You didn’t “air your dirty laundry” to the outside world, for sure, and you didn’t air it to your own family, either, unless it was absolutely necessary. You figured things out. You weren’t needy. The results of this philosophy, for me, have been mixed. I am confident and independent. I think I’m a good friend, because I don’t ask too much of people, but that’s only a positive if you’re measuring friendship by my standards. On the other hand, I have a hard time asking for help. Even at a store. Even for directions (which, given my proclivities, is exceptionally crazy). But I came to the conclusion, on that long drive, that if neither Julia nor I got emotional at camp drop-off, it would be a good thing. It meant we could handle tough circumstances. It meant we were strong.

  We stopped for the night outside of Boston, at my friend Amy’s sister Julie’s house. Amy and her two sisters grew up in Connecticut and went to this camp; their devotion to it was one reason I picked it. Amy now lived in North Carolina but sent her own daughter to New Hampshire every summer. We’d coordinated our kids’ sessions to be able to spend part of the weekend together. Julia and I dropped our bags at the house, and everyone headed out to dinner at an Irish pub. It was late for us to be sitting down to eat, and I worried that Julia wouldn’t sleep enough that night, that she’d be tired before she ever got to camp. The restaurant was loud, and Amy was giving us a laundry list of things to remember for the next day: We should arrive a little early to be in the front of the line for Julia’s cabin assignment. That way she could get to the cabin quickly to claim a top bunk. Then we’d need to see the nurse for a quick check-in and run down to the waterfront for her swim test, but Amy recommended going to the nurse first to avoid a long wait. After the swim test, then we would go back to the cabin and unpack everything. It was helpful to have a shower caddy, she said. We brought a shower caddy, right? Julia was looking down at her plate of steak and mashed potatoes, which she hadn’t touched. Little tears were hitting the edge of the table, splat, splat, splat.

  Everything was starting to go south. The details were overwhelming. The reality of being away from home was setting in. For a kid who, like her mother, wanted to control everything, the great unknown of the next day was proving too much. I thought, This is why my mother put me on a bus to camp in a bank parking lot. If I freaked out, I had to handle it on my own in the bathroom of a Greyhound.

  In bed that night, Julia plastered her chest, stomach, and thighs again
st my back and hooked her right arm over my side, spooning me so tightly I couldn’t lift my hand to scratch my nose. This was needy. This was nine years old. She was still so little. I had forgotten. I lay very still, held her hand, and prayed. “God, please give me compassion. Make me sweet to her tomorrow, even if she’s needy,” I mouthed into the air.

  What’s nice about my no-neediness stance is that the world backs me up. Being strong and able to control your destiny with the force of your dreams or what have you is the goal. That works for me, because I happen to have a personality—I will not say Enneagram number, and you can’t make me—that helps. Fortunately, God uses periods of weakness or situations out of my control, whether it is infertility or the fact that I can’t find New Hampshire on my own, to remind me that being needy is the best chance I’ll get to see how powerful he is. That night, he just gave me a weepy nine-year-old to remind me that needy is actually the appropriate position of our souls.

  Julia woke up in a great mood. By the time we pulled into camp and parked in front of the main lodge, she was asking about going for a month the following summer. We were first in line for her cabin assignment, thanks to Amy’s advice, first in the cabin to claim her bunk, and one of the first in line at the lake for her swim test. Walking there, along the gravel paths through the woods, seeing the clear, dappled lake for the first time, she said, “It’s so gorgeous here! I can’t believe it.” I watched her wade into the water without a second of hesitation and swim laps back and forth between the docks. I needed to head to an outdoor chapel on the opposite side of the property for a first-time parents meeting, so I asked if she could find her way back to her cabin alone, and she did, no problem. When I came back to say goodbye for the last time, she was sitting on the floor with her counselors and a few other campers, drawing and making friendship bracelets.