Ear-piercing screeches. Tears like Victoria Falls. It was the first day of camp, the first time Sienna would be separated from me for a long period of time (in this case 3 hours) and my little girl’s brain must have pulled some sort of “ABANDONMENT” trigger because I had never seen her so terrified. Her counselor, a somewhat stern looking woman with glasses and a light blue shirt held Sienna back from me.
“Go!” she commanded, her dirty blonde hair falling into her face as she wrestled with my daughter. “This is normal. It’s her first time being away from you. We deal with this regularly. But go or it’ll get worse!”
Sienna wailed. Other kids cried but Sienna’s tortured, almost guttural howls drowned them out. I didn’t feel frozen to the ground, more like my feet were stuck in bottomless tar. My knees wobbled as I thought back to camp orientation when they said that some kids would act as if nothing was wrong while others would feel as if it were the end of the world. I thought Sienna might cry, but this, this I didn’t expect when I dressed her that morning in a bathing suit, shorts and a t-shirt. I didn’t prepare for this as I slathered her body and face with suntan lotion.
Sienna’s sneakers squeaked as she tried to pull away from the counselor. She wrenched herself out of her grip, scooted around her like a basketball player pulling off a pick and roll and wrapped herself tightly around my legs.
“DADDY!” she screamed! “DADDY! NO! DADDY!”
The counselor pulled Sienna away, ripping both her from my legs and my heart from my chest. My eyes watered. The general anxiety disorder-related facial tic that I’ve had since my nervous breakdown in 2010 twitched awkwardly.
“GO!!”
Somehow I gained the strength to turn and walk out the door letting it bang closed behind me which set off a new set of shrieks. Peering shakily through the door’s small rectangular glass I saw the counselor and other volunteers trying to get Sienna under control, pulling her towards the main room as if she were an a new inmate in an asylum.
Three hours. Three hours without me. Her protector. Her father. Three hours without my little girl. I thought I’d enjoy the time alone, but I felt tremulous and unsteady. I drove home and watched television instead of blogging as I’d hoped to do.
She ran into my arms when I arrived. I picked her up, her fresh tears dripping onto my face and shirt.
“She cried most of the time,” the counselor said. “She played a little. She didn’t go into the water. It’s the first day. It’s normal. It’ll get easier and better.”
I doubted it. Sienna hugged me tighter than I thought possible. I nodded and said, “Ok.”
Two weeks in and nothing changed. Sienna cried when I woke her up for camp. She cried as she lay in bed with my wife for 20 minutes after I’d gotten her ready. She cried in the car. She screeched once we got to the red brick building. She clung to me like a monkey, scrambling onto my shoulders once we reached her classroom. Each day was the same. The counselor tore her out of my arms along with a piece of my heart.
“Does she have something she loves? A doll? A stuffed animal? A blanket?”
Her scarf. I immediately thought of the delicate scarf dotted with blues and greens and browns and oranges she’d appropriated from my wife. She slept with the scarf. She took it everywhere looking like Linus of Peanuts fame but as a fashionista. Once we washed scarf and she wailed until we brought it upstairs to air dry. We hung it on her highchair and she stood next to it, holding the precious fabric to her cheek, her free thumb stuck in her mouth. I brought scarf with us the next time we went to camp and scarf helped turn the tide.
“She was so much better today,” her counselor said. “She cried for awhile but it tapered off. She even stuck her toes in the water.
In fact, Sienna didn’t even cry when I’d picked her up. She’d smiled and said, “Daddy!” She still wanted to be held. She still didn’t want me to go, but there was a difference. She felt safer and so did I.
By the end of camp Sienna no longer screeched or sobbed when I dropped her off.
“Bye, Daddy!” she’d say cheerfully before I walked out of her classroom door leaving her in the company of children her age, teenage volunteers, her counselor, loads of games and toys and books.
And I felt chilled, the cold hard fact of her no longer needing me. Dropping off at camp had, as her counselor predicted, transformed into a quick and happy goodbye. No wild reaching for me. No teardrops. No looking back.
Sure she still ran into my arms each time I picked her up from camp, still buoyed my spirits with a happy yell of, “Daddy!” when I entered the classroom, but my little girl couldn’t wait for camp, music, snack, the pool.
One day, right before the end of camp, I stood there after Sienna had darted into her classroom with a smile and a “Bye-bye, Daddy!” and I realized this was a microcosm of life; one day, the little girl who’d once relied on us for everything would walk, 18 years old, onto her college campus, give me a hug, a smile and quick “Bye-bye, Daddy!” before turning towards the rest of her life, not looking back.
I stood staring through the small rectangular glass of her classroom door, fingers trembling from separation anxiety.