I sent my kids to sleep- away camp during a pandemic

“OK, let me get this straight,” my husband Ian said to me, calmly. “You spent a week packing the kids up for a quarantined, hermetically- sealed, sleepaway summer camp — and you forgot to pack their face masks?”

We were sitting in the car at Camp North Star’s dropoff point in Poland Spring, Maine — where no adult was allowed to leave their vehicle. All trunks, sleeping bags, and offspring were unloaded by camp staff in face masks and gloves.

“Why don’t YOU try packing up three kids during a global pandemic?” I shot back, as camp director “Momma Brooke” gave me the once- over through her “Momma Brooke” face mask.

“GREAT, Momma Brooke is pissed off already,” my 12- year- old Louie told us, in a mix of resignation and anger — a timbre he had worked hard to perfect during our seven- hour schlep north.

None of the kids seemed to want to get out of the car.

It had been a hard decision ... summer camp during a global pandemic?

“They need it,” Ian told me. “WE need it, Claire.”

Five months with your kids 24/ 7 is no joke; that’s like 12 spring breaks back- toback, with no break. We needed a break.

To be honest, it wasn’t the kids we needed a break from — it was the perpetual fight to keep them off their devices. That and the constant, pulsating anxiety implicit in slowly realizing that your children’s academic curriculum has been replaced by TikTok, and that their career ambitions are now entirely focused on YouTube gamers with names like “I AM WILDCAT.”

No devices for an entire month seemed to us like a dream come true. But to all three of them, it was clearly their worst nightmare.

“You’ll forget about your phone within a few hours,” I assured Louie, who looked at me like I was packing him off to the Gulag.

“You know,” a friend told us, hours after dropping the kids off at camp, “all these old summer camps were originally built during the polio epidemic to get kids out of the city.”

We were now sitting on the back porch of a Maine lodge, numbing our guilt with gin- and- tonics through lodge- themed face masks. When we had pulled away, all three kids eyed us miserably through the car window, wearing the disposable hospital masks we had fished out of the back seat. It didn’t help that some kid behind us was sporting a TikTok face mask with some cool, customized air- filter situation incorporated into the “o” of the logo. You can run but you cannot hide…

“Yeah,” the woman on the porch went on, “they would separate kids from their parents through wire fences, spaced 6 feet apart — the kids would clutch the wire, and refuse to let go.”

“This is not helpful,” Ian told her, as he saw me flag down another round of drinks.

I now had seared into my brain the image of a boy clinging to a barbed wire fence, screaming for his mother — this and our final glimpse of George as we pulled out of the camp parking lot, glaring at us from the lice line.

“You guys need to give yourself a break,” my mother told us. “Do something fun, just for yourselves — just the two of you.”

“You guys are crazy,” Ian’s mother shouted into the phone. “Who leaves their kids during a global pandemic?”

We do, that’s who. And about a hundred other families who trust Momma Brooke to keep their kids happy and safe — or at least away from TikTok.

“I didn’t send Matt,” my friend texted me from the wilds of the West Village. “I didn’t have enough faith that other parents would have kept their kids isolated, tbh” (“to be honest” — I had to look it up).

All campers were required to follow a strict quarantine for the two weeks leading up to drop- off, and needed to keep a 14- day temperature log. We also had to take a COVID- 19 salivabased test from a place called The Vault, administered at home, with a Zoom physician overseeing the whole thing. The test involved spitting into a test tube for 45 minutes, while arbitrating

near fratricide over who could spit with the most “gusto.”

The kicker was the kids themselves had to sign all the documentation. Louie spent the entire week before we left like a prisoner of war consigned to a labor camp — and when he got hip to the fact that he would be the one signing off on all our precamp protocol, he had a field day.

“I’m not signing this,” he told me. “We saw grandma. That’s not quarantine.”

When I explained that family members were considered part of the circle of trust, he proceeded to depose me for 45 minutes on whether or not was worthy of circle of trust.

“How do you do a socially- distanced camp?” my friend asked me. “Isn’t sleepaway camp all about, like, campfires and trust falls?”

“Don’t talk to me about trust,” I snapped.

Besides, trust falls were a thing of the past; they died when Trump came to office. A socially distanced trust fall nowadays is like spending a day on the floor of the U. S. Senate.

And ... what the hell? Why was everyone trying to amp me up about sending my kids to summer camp?

“Because we are sending them away during a global pandemic where everyone is on lockdown,” Ian told me, helpfully.

“Then GO GET THEM,” I shouted, now spilling my gin- and- tonic and tearing off my stupid Maine lobster face mask. “This was YOUR idea. And if anyone gets POLIO, it’s all on YOU, pal!”

But we worked through it. I am sitting here writing this in an empty house, where every child’s screen is locked away ... but mine. I have four weeks to write a novel, become a vegan, revitalize my marriage — oh yes, and find myself.

Because before you know it, they’ll be back — and who knows if they will even be going to school next year.

Pass the gin- and- tonic.