Camp Week 2 - Phobias

A friend of mine just blogged about the danger of using the word "fine".
          the-f-word
But transparency is really hard, especially when it hits those things that others aren't going to easily understand. There is a spectrum of connection out there. For instance, many get it when I can say that I am frustrated that my attempts to shrink my jeans size through diet and exercise are not having the results that I had hoped. That one has almost universal connectivity, at least among people my age.

There is a whole lot less of a connection when I say that the bounce house terrifies me. I don't mean, frustrates, or concerns me, I mean terrifies me. In the way where my jaw starts to clench, and the bile starts to boil up into the back of my throat. Yeah, people don't understand that one. Not exactly a common fear: a bounce house full of pre-schoolers.

This last week has been one where fear has raised it's head. From the things that I simply find uncomfortable, to things that are full blown phobias. And I have fought it: some days I've won, but other days the struggle has been a draw, and still others I've been beaten.

Some of them are somewhat understandable. I fear campers getting hurt. It's what drives me to watch the waterside or the wading pools on water day - to make sure no one collides, or is pulled under. It's what makes me confront parents who pull their campers from the safe zone to walk by the pond during morning drop-off. It makes me bark at my volunteers who are trying to use the carts as bumper cars. It's what makes me watch campers who are prone to running away like a cat watching string.

I fear not doing my job well. I am afraid of not finding the right tools to help, or reacting with the wrong response. Knowing when to pull out a firm voice, when to allow a camper to cry it out, when to contact parents, they are all difficult to answer when you are dealing with children who have special needs. I fear doing the wrong things, of not knowing enough, having the right set of experiences to draw on. I fear making a situation worse rather than better.

There is the fear of doing additional damage to the child misperceived as a problem, as disobedient and willful, when I know that it isn't the entire picture. When I know that child's brain is wired differently. That it doesn't ever take a break, that it spins in patterns and gets stuck there, that noise and light are assaults to be endured instead of the forms of input that the rest of us experience. And there is a fear of the damage that child can inflict unaware of right and wrong, needing a sense of pressure that drives the pushing, hitting, and scratching that we try to prevent.

I fear what others say and think of me. I know I shouldn't. I know it's narcissistic and broken. But it's there and something I grapple with. And I project the negatives from my own mind and past onto the quiet conversations in the corner, even though those conversations are probably about the distribution mechanics of hot dog day, not the failings that I see in my own character.

Then comes the march of the irrational fears.

In my youth I read of a circus strongman, who fearing that others would think his weights rigged, went to lifting human beings in the circus rings. That picture has made an indelible impression. A consciousness of weight loads combined with a highly over-active imagination makes crowds difficult. It gets added to the stories that soldiers could not march over bridges so that the resonance would not collapse them. Having a father whose own imagination helped him train schools after the Columbine aftermath brings an added dimension. I am cognizant of support beams, of doors and line of sight, and the idea of a shooter in a gym with six hundred children and four hundred adults haunts me. And then there's that horrid bouncy castle. . .  I am beginning to dread Friday.

Sometimes the only way to stop the thoughts is to avoid the circumstances. So this week instead of watching campers show off their week in dances and artwork and cardboard armor, I moved the snack storage out of the sensory room in alphabetical order. Possibly because I have OCD tendencies, but also because that order was a little way of fighting back against fears I find overwhelming.

There is a fable about two wolves.

One evening an old Cherokee told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people.
He said, “My son, the battle is between two wolves inside us all.

“One is Evil – It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.

“The other is Good – It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith.”

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather: “Which wolf wins?”

The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.”

I find that this parallels some Biblical advice: "Whatever things are true, honest, just, pure, lovely, with good recommendation, virtue, and praise - think about these things."

Funny thing is that verse is sandwiched by others that talk about the presence of "the peace of God," and "the God of peace" in our lives. There is a way to combat fear, that which is rational and that which is not. And it isn't in my own strength, but in remembering the God who holds the oceans in his hands. So I am making an effort to leave my fears in those hands through prayer. And I am attempting to feed the things in my life that are true and good.

I have to remember that it is better to try and fail with children than to not try at all. That failed attempts mean we are just learning what doesn't work. I need to remember that the imagination that sees shooters in the shadows also can come up with camp themes by the dozen and game and craft ideas with ease. And that walking a line close to the things we fear helps us see how to keep things safe. That line is a slippery one so to keep from slipping over into paranoia, I am going to focus on the words of a very wise young camper.

His family was going camping for the first time and there were fears of the dark, so mom was explaining that they would have flashlights when our preschool camper smiled and said, "We don't have to be scared, God is always with us."

Truth from a 4 year old.


In a slippery, scary world, that really does balance everything out with the security we need doesn't it.


"Be strong and courageous. Do not be frightened, and do not be dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.” Joshua 1:9

Camp Week 1 - Mad Scramble Mondays

I have the amazing privilege of working as a special needs director at an incredible summer camp. I love the job. Which I still find somewhat surprising, because I never would've seen this in my future a few years back.

It's been years with a lot of learning, about myself, about others, about the world we live in. I've learned that Mondays are hard. I work primarily with preschoolers and while we have some registration forms where parents fill in their campers needs and they do a good job of listing out special support the child might need, we have a lot that go blank, for a lot of reasons.

Sometimes, parents don't know their child has needs that don't fit in the range of "average." They haven't experienced school or large group situations where they can compare and contrast their child with others. They have been with their child since birth and the fact that their child moves constantly and doesn't like lots of noises, covering their ears when the vacuum or television comes on is just normal. Kids that age do that right? Kids this age are picky eaters. That's just normal.

It isn't until comparison in a larger setting occurs that one can see the rest of the kids that age seated in a circle for story-time, while yours paces a pattern in the carpet in the corner of the room. Or that other children do eat fruits and veggies occasionally, or at least ham and cheese sandwiches, they aren't locked into pre-processed foods and only certain brands of those. They don't refuse to eat their fruit snacks when the company switches from corn syrup to cane sugar in their recipe. When parents see their child covering their ears and rocking back and forth in the middle of a group of other children who are sitting and laughing delightedly at a puppet show. It isn't until that happens that the differences become clear.

For many, preschool day camp may be their first exposure to the range of age appropriate behaviors. And for the first time their child is being talked about as "different," "special," "having some needs." I have to say that I dread these initial conversations with parents. They are hard. I pray about them, and go into them with a knotted stomach, because I remember the first time someone said that about my child. I remember the surge of emotions, I remember the denial, I remember thinking that the person talking just couldn't see the reality of my daughter, that they were the ones that didn't understand how to reach her. I remember what it felt like. I remember the time it took us to acknowledge that our eldest needed help that we could not give her. And I remember the pain, the grief, the feelings of shame that you couldn't pin down - because it wasn't her fault or ours - it just was.

Others know. They have the IEP from kindergarten. They have already been through the diagnosis stage. They are no longer unaware or in denial, but they hope that camp will be different from school. It is more active, more fun. They think that what wasn't working at school might work here because it is a different environment. They hope that they can take their child off of the ADHD meds that he hates taking, because camp will be different. They don't give us a heads up, because they have a hope that we won't need it. That this will be the environment that their child thrives in and becomes part of the "normal" crowd. And sometimes they are right. There are children that thrive here where they didn't thrive in pre-school. But for every one that thrives, there are a lot more that still struggle. There are still sit-down times, there are still rules. There are still places to be and groups to stay with. But in my gut, I understand the hope that "this time it will be different." Because you cling to that, sometimes for a long time.

Some parents are afraid of giving out the information. They are afraid that we will call them back and  say their child can't come. They are afraid of rejection or labeling and how that will impact their child. They will be silent because they feel that giving the information will set their child up for failure rather than success. That wearing a tag of "autism" or "sensory processing disorder" will hurt them more than help them. And so these parents are silent, fearing the phone calls, the labeling they don't want and sometimes cannot accept. Hoping that this time nothing will happen and no one will say anything. Hoping that their child will blend in and not be the one in the group that is different.

Some parents don't understand the camp environment. They don't realize that we have water day and make slime, and have dance parties to Disney songs in the black light room. They don't realize the number of triggers here for sensory challenged children. They don't realize that we simply tell a group that if they need to use the bathroom, right now is a good time to do so. We don't track who went and who didn't, unless we know a child is struggling in that area. They think that we have enough leaders  to have a 1:1 volunteer with each child that is having a rough time. And some weeks we can do that, but more often we are stretched further than that. And even when we can do it, it takes time to figure out where those 1:1 volunteers are going to be placed on a Monday when the notes are all blank.

Which means that Monday is a scramble day. There are parents to meet with at check-in. Especially those that did say something about their child's needs.  Parents whom I need to get information from about triggers and stims and key words and coping mechanisms. There are the cases of separation anxiety that crop up because there are campers brand new to the program coming in alongside those who have already been here. There are velcro parents and helicopter parents and parents who are 15 minute late for work already, and cannot understand why Monday check-in is so much longer than any other day of the week. There are the walkie talkie calls as we realize that one of our undocumented children is a flight risk. . .
And we are outside. . .
And the campus pond is triggering their fascination with all things water.

Mondays are mad scramble days.

But they are also the start of wonderful new journeys.
Because that child with the "autism" label, he will change you this summer.
The flight risk will give you heart-attacks and make the story of the prodigal son real in ways you never could've understood before. You will learn to be thankful for the staff member who guards the pond faithfully every morning, a job that goes unseen most of the time.
Your prayer life will deepen. Your trust in God will grow. Because you will start to realize how totally and completely out of control you really are.
The work you put into finding out what works for a child having behavior or sensory issues, will draw you closer to them.
And in that closeness, you will find out unexpected things about yourself, and about God.

To my staffers and volunteers and Student Leaders in Training, brace yourself for Monday, but don't brace too hard, because the guy standing behind us is God, and he works miracles on Mondays.

He puts the right people in the right places. What looks like chaos to you and I, is all figured out in his hands. He has the right person with the child facing separation anxiety, the right volunteer buddy with new one coming in with autism. He knows exactly when playtime is going to be over and he works out the details of who gets inside with which leaders, which campers are going to be in the same activity groups and which leaders are going to have "hopping" rooms this week and which will have the ones that are more sedate.

And dear parent who leaves the notes section blank for whatever reason, please know we love your child just like the rest, even though they are not the rest. They are wonderfully distinctly themselves, and we are glad they are here to walk with us through this week, or longer; to teach us things that we never could have learned without them.

The pathway here. . .

There are some days when you sit down to blog and you could go a thousand different directions. Today was a day that spent me spinning down paths of rejoicing and paths of grieving, pathways of finding confidence in God and pathways of questioning Him.

When you attend the funeral of a father of an 8, 6 and 4 year old, you ask God, why?
When you hear of brokenness and abuse and little ones harmed by those who should be protecting, you ask God why?
When you look at a family struggling through a process of grieving over a child that will never grow up to marry and have a family, or hold a job due to disability, you ask God why?
And you can ask why over and over, loudly, in anger, in grief, quietly in the night, and the silence always answers back.

There are pathways that we have no answers for. And perhaps looking for those answers isn't the right way to go. Because that seems to bring us to the place where we start saying things like "God will bring good out of this." And sometimes that seems too trite and convenient a thing to speak into devastation. Sometimes all you can do is cry.

Reading that back it seems bleak and a bit fatalistic. I do believe God works for good in our lives. I really do. But I am at a place in life where I feel that what he can see, what he knows will be good, is so far outside of what we can understand sometimes that there is room for swallowing those words and letting the sadness and hurt seep in and walking alongside others allowing them the dignity of a true struggle without trying to lessen it.

That was one part of the day. And my thoughts do keep turning on it, because the other was a path of joy, of a homecoming for me in some ways - a homecoming because of past struggles, a road that has taken a long time to walk.

When I was 8, I wanted nothing more than to be an astronaut. I lived through the glory days of the NASA shuttle program. I was 11 when Sally Ride became the first American woman in space. I was 14 when teacher Christa McAuliffe died in the Challenger shuttle explosion, on her way to talk to  kids from space. At 17, I realized that I didn't have the math skills needed to head to Huntsville's "rocket school". And I started looking for other career paths, trying to figure out what I loved "the next most" to looking at the earth from orbit.

I realized that my time as a camp counselor at our summer Bible camp ranked pretty high on the list, and was ecstatic to find a Christian College in Wisconsin's northwoods that offered a degree in camping. My parents helped me pack, drove 1,500miles and dropped me off at a campus I'd never seen before. The next day I found out that the Camping program was only for male students. A combination of guilt, embarrassment, and stubbornness kept me there for the first semester, and some other erroneous, but widely preached ideas that you should finish what God had you start, kept me there through a degree in education.

Camping still called to me though. Every summer I would apply to work as a camp counselor at the Summer camp that operated on the college campus. And every summer I would be denied. I didn't understand it at the time. All I knew was that it hurt. I felt they saw me as deficient, defective, too different to fit what was necessary to minister to kids. So instead I worked campus services, cleaning toilets, or in the kitchen washing dishes. Close enough to keep looking on and wondering why I couldn't be a camp counselor. Hoping when attendance swelled, that I would be one of the workers they pulled to help run a cabin full of pre-teens or squirrelly junior campers.

I never was, not there. And those cuts burned for a long time before they started to heal. The pathway forward carried a disastrous year teaching in a Christian school, where once again I left broken, questioning what I was good for, not understanding - grieving for a bunch of broken dreams.

I got older, got a job in the business world, where oddly enough - I grew up a lot, not in the cradle of Christendom, but corporate America. I graduated from that into full time parenting with three amazing little girls who also grew and got bigger and bigger. And then they went to camp. And I threw my hat in the ring to go help out with them. Only it didn't happen exactly the way I thought it would.  My hat lay in the ring where I thought I would do the most good and it got dusty. No one took me up on my offer in that ring, and being focused on what I thought my abilities were, I ignored offers from other quarters.

Old wounds reopened, exacerbated by 2 degrees in education and a round of fruitless interviews in that field at the time. I questioned myself, my worth, my abilities. I questioned God and he was silent.

Or maybe he wasn't.
Because someone offered me again a job that I had rejected once before. . .
in camp. . .
with preschoolers.
I resisted.
Preschoolers were not conscious of personal space, they were like herding kittens and needy. And all of that freaked me out. I knew my sweet spot was at least upper elementary and really 5th -8th grade. It took crashing and burning - needing to be totally desperate for a job before I said yes.

And it was one of the best things that happened to me.

Today, camp staff training started. It was good, so good to see the staff come back, to hear them doing ice breakers. See them taking things in and building new friendships and strengthening the old ones. It has been a long road to get to this place of feeling that this is the job I was made for.

I resonate some with Moses, who felt his calling earlier than it arrived too. We both made some painful, scarring decisions, and the waiting was hard, and when the opportunity came back  - yeah I get Moses reticence, it didn't look like what he imagined it would, and he was full of self-doubt by that time. So full of it that he argued with a burning bush.

And once you get past the initial call and acceptance - well I don't know if Moses ever got back to that place of saying "I was made for this." In my imagination he does. Stop and think about the training he was given in Pharaohs courts, training for leadership. But what I do know is the uncertainty of a path that took him before Pharaoh and into a leadership that was ever so much more difficult and frustrating than he could have imagined.

And also miraculous.

And amazing.

And epic.

I know that even though God actually did speak to Moses - he didn't give him all the answers he wanted. He didn't explain the path. He didn't make it smooth of bumps and struggle, and pain, and grief. God was silent far more than he spoke.

And oddly enough I find that comforting. This scary path forward. It has been walked before, by others. I am too little to see the design. Too finite to feel the pattern that the up and down of life brings. Some days too saddened and other days to silly with joy to grasp the epic story that he has at the end of all of it. But I trust him. I trust him through both ends of the human experience, and on the pathway between them both to walk with me,

even if it is in silence.