My guilt about sending my daughter to day camp.

I dropped my 6-year-old daughter, Hannah, distressed, at camp again this morning. New camp this week: art, gymnastics, swimming, dance; all the things she loves best. Same stunning ballet teacher she’s idolized since she was 3 years old. Nice groups of girls drawing rainbows on their nametags. And still she cried. She didn’t want to be there. She wanted to be home.

This summer has been a bust, both for Hannah and for me, and it’s all because of day camp and the absurdly conflicted relationships we both have with it. In theory I’m against it: I like the fantasy of my kids lazing around the house. But in reality this drives me crazy, and to get any work done I need them gone. Hannah is the opposite: Camp sounds great to her in principle. Then I pick her up at the end of day one and she reports, “I didn’t love it,” and never wants to go again.

I’m the first to admit our day camp mess is a problem of my own making. It’s also a newly discovered lacuna in my landscape of maternal guilt. A teensy part of the trouble is the logistics in San Francisco. Here, as in many big cities, I’m told, the kids don’t spend four or eight weeks straight, messing around, drinking bug juice and playing freeze tag with a bunch of teenagers at the neighborhood park. Instead the kids have fabulous, high-concept experiences in one-week chunks. A week of horseback riding at Miwok Stables followed by a week of weird science at Camp Galileo, followed by a week of cuddling kittens and puppies at the SPCA. Still, back in March, when it was time to enroll or not enroll in these programs, I had a vision (or delusion): I didn’t want Hannah zipping around all summer. I wanted her to drift, even to be bored. My friend Emily, a psychiatrist, i.e., a professional stoic in the face of absurd fantasy, laughed out loud when I confessed the boredom part to her. (Her kids are older. She’s a realist.) But I’m self-employed, so I could barrel ahead. I signed Hannah up for three weeks of camps over the course of her 12-week summer. I felt great about it.

But then one day, in early June, school was over. All the kids walked down to meet all the parents in Speedway Meadows in Golden Gate Park. The kids sat on one side of the grass strip that served as a stage. The parents sat on the other. Hannah’s class did a square-dance routine. The other grades Irish-jig type things. Then the head of school said, “I now release your children to you for the summer.”

I felt so proud. And then I felt so screwed.

The first couple weeks went OK. I took a bunch of time off. Hannah played at her friends’ houses; her friends played at ours. Life was definitely mellower than during the school year, when Hannah and her younger sister, Audrey (who blissfully is too young for day camp and has retreated from preschool to the warm glow of her old nanny-share scene for the summer) are out of the house during most daylight hours (afternoons of grandparents, dance classes, playdates, and if need be, aftercare) and come home mostly to speed through domestic life: help cook, eat dinner, take a bath, read, try to giggle, go to bed. I’m sure the girls would like to be home more, maybe even to be bored more, during fall, winter, and spring. But I need to work, so I’ve inured myself to that thought. I believe working mothers are just as good mothers. Sometimes, self-servingly, I convince myself they’re better. Yet I also believe that a free-spirited, unfettered summer is a right of childhood. Dilemma: How was I supposed to deliver on that right yet also produce four magazine articles and start drafting a book?

The first of the three weeks of camp I’d scheduled, at Tree Frog Treks, was a godsend for me. Not so much for Hannah. The kids did a lot of walking, so for day two I got her new sneakers. Day three was especially hot, so I packed NUUM electrolyte tablets in Hannah’s lunch. By day four we were discussing how there was only one more day, and could she please stick it out? The last day all the kids walked to Chrissy Field and had a party by the gorgeous bay. Hannah was celebrating because she was done with Tree Frog Treks—“forever,” as she indelicately put it.

Tags: day camp, guilt

Elizabeth Weil is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and the co-author, with Dara Torres, of Age is Just a Number: Achieve Your Dreams At Any Stage In Your Life.

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