My Rock by Monika Dutt

Overnight camp is all my idea, not yours.

I imagine you in a canoe, hiking through forests, making friendships that will last a lifetime, just like the website said. I imagine you without screens, realizing your skepticism at the purpose of walking in a forest was misguided.

You do not want to go. Eventually, you resign yourself, seeing I that am not changing my mind. You are annoyed because the camp dates overlap with your twelfth birthday. I try to make up for it and agree to have a birthday party with your three best friends at the waterpark, even though being responsible for more than one child petrifies me. It isn’t too bad; a twelve-year-old party is far different than one in toddlerhood. You slide and splash while I read a book, both of us in happy places.

***

After the party, we head out to stay overnight with my friends Sheena and Vanita, and their sons Balan and Ashwyn, three hours away, near the camp you are dreading. You become quieter as we drive.

I gaze out the window at the trees and fields of rural southern Ontario, so different from the landscape on the island of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, or Unama’ki in the language of the original Mi’kmaq inhabitants, where we have lived for the past ten years. We are in Hamilton, Ontario, temporarily for the first year of my Ph.D. In Nova Scotia, we often drive along rocky coastlines, blue-gray water flowing into eternity. My mind flashes back to Green Cove, my favourite place on the island, an outcropping of sparkling, rose-tinged boulders extending into the Atlantic Ocean. I inhale and can smell the ocean and solitude.

The next morning, when it is time to leave, your face is tense with frustration.

“But I want to stay here.” Here is with Balan where you can play video games and jump in the pool. Here is where you are every inch the rambunctious, joyous kid you are.

“No Kail, it’s time to go,” I say. You grab your backpack angrily and walk to the car, your feet dragging along the gravel, creating puffs of dust.

I try to talk with you on the drive. Your responses are laconic. I look at you in the rearview mirror. I am so familiar with that face, the dark brown shade, delicate shape of the chin, thin eyebrows. You look far away as the trees and fields fly by. We are the only ones on the road. You lean to the side, put your head against the pillow you have packed, and close your eyes.

I arrive at the camp driveway. Young people wearing bright fluorescent safety vests usher me into the parking lot. They have big smiles and talk in loud voices that lilt upwards. You open your eyes and look out the window uncertainly.

“Welcome to Camp Kawartha!” one staff person exclaims at my window.

We stop at the lice check table and a staff person runs a wooden stick through your hair, looking for insects and eggs. You stare straight ahead. I’m sure you’re hoping they find something crawling, just so you can leave. We go to the nurse’s office next to deliver your asthma medications. We stand in the same line, but I can’t climb the wall between us.

“What are you looking forward to?” I ask.

“Nothing.”

“Kail…I did this because I want you to have fun.”

“But you didn’t ask me,” you retort, eyes flashing. “You just signed me up.”

I don’t have an immediate response. You are right. I am trying to shape you into what I want you to be by signing you up for this camp. Trying to compel you to be a child who loves being outdoors rather than letting you be you are: a child who is content outdoors, but not one who would actively choose to be immersed in the outdoors for a week, especially away from the relationships that ground you.

You are almost twelve and make so many decisions for yourself now. You are in what a friend calls a “liminal space,” of pre-teenness, overwhelmed with crushes, clothing obsessions, social media demands, peer pressure. You are so close to a teenager, which is so close to an adult. I talk with you about consent often, consent to ask a girl if you can hold her hand, consent about putting hands on the bodies of others. I often need your consent too; I am no longer the sole decision-maker for your life. Yet I made a unilateral decision with this camp. I am still convinced that you will finish the week thankful, that you will learn you like activities you didn’t think you would. So I push ahead.

After the nurse’s, office it is time to gather your bags. When we get to the car, you quickly turn towards me, eyes moist, and grab my arm. Your slender fingers form an indent along my skin.

“Please Ma, don’t leave me here.”

I try brightness: “This is going to be so fun!”

I try to appeal to adventure: “You are going to love the canoe trip!”

I try to appeal to guilt: “I’d like some time to myself too.”

Nothing works. You reluctantly take a bag as I hand it to you. You still do what I tell you to do, usually, with your trust in me and sense of obedience to authority. We take your bags and walk along a short stone path to the grass where a circle of kids is sitting with your counsellor. The counsellor has long brown hair pulled into a ponytail and a tattoo of a rose on her left shoulder. She smiles at you.

“Hi, I’m Croma. That’s my camp name. What’s your name?”

“Kail.” Your voice has an undertone of surliness. I hope Croma hears you as subdued and polite.

We sit on the ground. I am the only parent, but I can’t leave yet, not like this. You hook your arms tightly around your knees and stare down into the grass.

“Okay,” Croma says. “I’m going to ask you to say your name, and then tell me whether you would want to be a rhinoceros or a T Rex and why.”

You turn to me, your eyes hard.

“This is so stupid,” you hiss. I don’t reply, but I sort of agree with you. This question is not the way to endear yourself to a bitter child. Still, you answer when it’s your turn.

“I’m Kail. Rhinoceros.” You don’t say why you chose rhinoceros, and she doesn’t push you, perhaps knowing three words at this point is a victory.

Soon it is time for all of you to go to your cabin. Your blue backpack is large and bulky against your frame. You look brittle. Breakable. The red bucket hat you borrowed from Balan shades your face, overpowering it. I’m so used to seeing you confident, looking older than your age. Now you look tiny, like you are shrinking, being absorbed into the ground. I look around and see that you are the only clearly racialized person, your blackness stark against the surrounding whiteness.

You start to walk with your group across the field. I stand and watch, thinking you may look back and wave, that you may smile. I realize I have not seen you smile since we left Balan’s house. Your energy has been a backdrop for my life for over a decade. I long to see your toothy grin, to have you start twerking in the middle of the field. You do neither. You do look back every few steps, making sure I am still there, longing to have me call you back and take you away. I know I am breaking every camp good-bye parenting rule by standing here, but I can’t tear myself away. There has always been a gossamer thread connecting us, from the moment you were born and we became a unit, just the two of us. That thread stretches now, tighter and tighter.

Then —

You are running back to me, across the field, backpack bouncing. Maybe you have forgotten something. Then you are in front of me, tears dripping off your eyelashes.

“Ma. Please. Please. Don’t make me stay here.”

You do not touch me as you adhere to pre-teen social norms. Yet I feel you clinging to me, all eleven years and 363 days of you. Your eyes skitter side-to-side as you beg, checking if anyone is watching you.

“Kail… just give this place a chance,” I beg in return. My heart is crumbling. I am sinking into a place deep inside me where you originated. That place is bleeding, seeing you in such anguish. But I convince myself that if you just try harder, this will work. This is a ridiculously privileged problem: my kid hates his expensive summer camp. Somehow, though, this feels like the crux of motherhood in a moment. An essence playing out in your clenched fists and wet face.

I scour my mind for ways to fix this excruciation. I have not planned for this scenario. I skipped past the section on homesickness in the parent guide. That wasn’t for my kid. I didn’t need strategies. I hadn’t planned ahead and mailed you packages, I didn’t sneak treats and notes into your backpack, I didn’t pack a favourite stuffie. I wonder if there is anything I can give you for solace. I run back to the car and root through the glove compartment and the dashboard. Nothing. I grab my backpack and dig into the back pocket. There, I feel a rock.

I pull it out and open my palm. The rock is mostly pink with speckled blacks and grays, irregular edges, rough against my skin. It is from Green Cove. You and I have been there dozens of times in the ten years we’ve lived in Cape Breton. We have skipped on the rocks, lain on their warm, sun-drenched surface, hid in crevices from the wind, sang out into the vast ocean. I picked up this fragment during a visit back to Cape Breton a few months ago.

I run back to you with this rock. You stand silently.

“Here,” I say breathlessly. “It’s from Green Cove. Keep it with you.”

Your eyes are empty as you look at me. You know I am not taking you with me. You take the rock from me obligingly but there is no flash of recognition, no receipt of comfort.

You turn and walk back across the field. This time, I don’t try to catch your eye. I walk briskly back to my car, even as my legs shake. I drive out of the parking lot. I have been here so long that all the parents have left. There are no yellow-vested staff. There is just me.

Just me as I pull over at the side of the road, out of view of the camp.

Just me as I put my head down on the steering wheel and cry.

***

After driving back to Hamilton, I bike downtown for dinner with friends from my Ph.D. class. We sit at a long table with the ease of people who were strangers eleven months ago but have made it through a hard first year of a graduate program together. We are at Wass Ethiopian Restaurant, across from St. Joseph’s Hospital. You were born at St. Joe’s.

After I had an emergency caesarian section for your birth, you stayed in-hospital for two weeks because the obstetrician was worried you had an infection. I spent hours with you daily, first in the ICU, then when we roomed-in together. We were a unit from your first moments. Your father and I had been in a long-distance relationship with infrequent contact, and he had stopped communicating when he learned I was pregnant. That disappearance no longer mattered.

While you were the youngest of inpatients, I started recovering from surgery. For lunch I usually avoided hospital food and went to Wass Ethiopian Restaurant. I had to cross the street to get to it. At first, my body felt like it could tear apart at any moment, my innards splayed on the street like an unlucky cat. I crept along the crosswalk, needing two lights to complete the crossing. Drivers waited. I didn’t look at them, just focused on putting one foot in front of the other.

The injera and red lentils from Wass were sustenance. I ate the dishes with my hands, ripping the spongy, sour flatbread and using it to scoop up the steaming misir wot, with its pungent aroma of the coriander, cumin, fenugreek, and countless other spices. I returned to the ICU and held you to breastfeed. You suckled the injera-infused milk and snuggled into my fragrant shirt.

Now I eat the same dish, almost twelve years later, when my phone rings. I glance down. Camp Kawartha flashes across the screen. My heart sinks.

I move to the next room, where it is quieter.

“Hello?” A question, not wanting an answer.

Mac from the camp introduces himself. I picture someone in their twenties, on the phone in a camp office, whistle around their neck, lists of camper names scrawled across papers, lost camper items already accumulating.

“Kail is quite homesick. He’s telling us…if he goes on the canoe trip, he’s going to make sure to get food poisoning so that he’ll have to be evacuated.”

For a brief second, I almost smile. Your mind likely flipped through possible options: You don’t want to break a bone because you want to play basketball. You don’t want to bleed too much, as that could be dangerous. Food poisoning is a good option: likely short-term symptoms but would achieve your goal of escape.

Mac gives you the phone.

“Ma. Please come get me. Please.”

You are crying. You never cry like this, with distress, with loneliness, with desperation. I can feel the sobs you are breathing through, the weeping that beats from your core. I want to teleport you beside me, into this warm, aromatic restaurant, so I can pull your thin body into a deep embrace.

“Oh chota. Chota,” I say. A variation for little in Bengali. You are always my little, even now, when you have reached 5’3”, looking over my 5’1” head.

I try to stay stalwart, try to encourage you, try to snap you out of it. I remember thinking I could do the same with my mother, when her voice was expressionless and she sat on the couch for hours, watching Oprah, not moving. Not understanding depression then, I thought I just needed to find the key to turn the lock, the right words that would make her eyes light up and her body jump off the couch.

I feel as helpless now as I did then.

“What is it Kail? Why don’t you like it?”

“You’re not here. Ma,” you sob. “I miss you.”

Maybe it’s that simple. You can’t name an event that triggered this visceral reaction you are having. You just know it, with every aching cell in your body.

“Hey…how about if you stay the week, we can pick up the shoes you want on Friday.” I am willing to bribe you at this point.

“I don’t want the shoes,” you say fiercely. For once, material goods, even expensive shoes, mean nothing. “I want to be with you. I want to go home.”

I realize you have spent your entire life with me, or with me in easy access by phone or video. If not with me, you have been with family or friends. I think of you as forever adaptable. You move provinces and schools easily. You make friends with kids at a basketball court in minutes. You interact easily with people of any age. Yet even your elasticity has its limits. I must still be in your perceived solar system, both of us orbiting in sight of each other. You have lost that pull of gravity and are trying to locate me.

“I don’t want to go on the canoe trip,” you say. “PLEASE don’t make me.”

Being on water rather than land is a step too far in an already desolate place. It means truly not being able to escape. I negotiate with you and Mac. We decide that you can stay at the camp rather than go on the canoe trip. You are not happy with this option, but it is an improvement.

“I love you chota,” I say softly. “I really do.”

“I know Ma,” you say. Your voice is thin. Feathery. It floats away, untethered. “Je t’aime, balo bashi, kesalul.”

You wobble through the words that mean I love you, in the combination of languages we use, French and Bengali, and a tiny bit of Mi’kmaw.

“Je t’aime, balo bashi, kesalul,” I reply. Usually, when we say that in the evenings, I am lying beside you, putting you to bed. At almost twelve, I don’t know how long you will cuddle goodnight for, but I am holding on to this ritual as long as you let me. Tonight, we say it across an endless phone line.

I press the button to hang up. The portal is closed, and you are pulled back into your lonely world. Your smile usually lights up a room. You are so docile now. I wonder if you are thinking about running away down the long, empty road that leads to the camp.

The next afternoon, I am in a meeting with my thesis advisor, planning research and courses and readings. My phone screen lights up. Camp Kawartha flashes across the screen.

“Oh,” I sigh. “I’m sorry, I have to answer. It’s Kail’s camp.”

My advisor nods. She has a young child and knows the unpredictability that comes with that. I rush out her office to a nearby room.

“Hello?” I say tentatively, anticipating hearing Kail’s teary voice.

“Hi, this is Emma, the camp nurse.”

He did it. He’s managed to get food poisoning.

“Kail has a cough and a runny nose. And he’s also really homesick. He’s crying a lot.”

I don’t doubt your sadness. I do, I am ashamed to say, doubt your cough. You likely consider a cough easier to create than diarrhea and vomiting from food poisoning. If you were at school, I would keep you home for the morning then send you to school for the afternoon. You are not at school — you are at a camp more than three hours away, with the hell of rush hour Toronto traffic separating us.

I sit in the chair in the empty room. I lean my elbows onto the desk, one hand holding my head, the other my phone. I want to just hang up. I am so very tired of needing to make decisions for another human being. For being responsible. For having to put someone else’s needs ahead of my own. I see my week of time alone disintegrating. I see the bike ride I had planned tonight through Dundas Valley vanishing. All I wanted was one week. Couldn’t you just let me have this week?

“Ma?” You are on the phone now.

“Kail…are you really sick?” Yes, that is my first question to you. My first accusing question, letting you know that I doubt you.

“Yes Ma, I am.” Your voice wavers as it has ever since you left.

“You’re not coughing,” I say.

“I’m holding it in,” you reply, and I hear the strain as you fight the tickle in your throat. “I’m sorry,” you say. “I failed you.”

Sometimes I think you manipulate me. You are old enough to know how to do that.

This is not one of those times.

You know I had expectations for this week, for you, for me, and they have not materialized. As much as I must care for you, you sense a responsibility to me. My petulance fades.

“No Kail. No. You have not. I just — I just need to figure out how to pick you up. It’s rush hour.”

“You will come get me though?” Such hope in your voice. Such relief. All you want is to leave that place.

“Yes chota, I will come and get you.”

My life is inexorably intertwined with you, this tiny human, hundreds of kilometres away.

***

I call Sheena, who agrees to pick you up so I can leave after Toronto traffic eases. I cancel the bike ride. I rearrange my next day’s schedule so I can drive back to Hamilton in the morning. I move life pieces around to accommodate you and your cough, you and your homesickness.

Does Kail look sick? I text Sheena. Irrationally, I still hold out hope that you truly don’t need to come home.

Sheena replies:

He seems ok. He said “Sheena…I was so homesick” and then he showed me his rock.

I think of you with my — our — rock. You keeping that with you, you clutching it. A piece of the earth that we have all come from and where we will return. A remnant of a world that has existed for millennia and will continue long after humans have disappeared into flames of wildfires, unsurvivable heat, floods and hurricanes that wash us away. We exist only in this moment, only in the relationships we hold. We are meaningful only to ourselves, the people we love, the people who love us. I am this important to no one but you.

I decide to pick up the shoes you wanted on the way out. Amidst all the tumult, it is your birthday tomorrow. Obtaining the shoes does not need to be based on how much pain you endure. I arrive at Sheena’s late, after almost everyone is asleep. I knock quietly on the front door. I am in the country, a forest extending in all directions around me, starry sky up above, the fragrance of lilacs enveloping me.

Vanita, Sheena’s partner, opens the door and hugs me.

“Kail is tucked into bed. He was awake a few minutes ago.”

I walk downstairs into their cool basement. I reach the bedroom where you are sleeping and slowly open the door. You do not stir. You do not cough.

I see your duffle bag on the floor and your small, spiral notebook sticking out of the side pocket. I pull it out, knowing I should not be doing this but wondering if you have written anything that might give me a clue to understanding your distress.

The first page: I miss Ma so much. I hate it here. I want to go home.

The second page: The kids here are mean. They laughed when I said “I miss Ma”. Everyone is white. The food and the cabins are cold. I think I’m suicidal.

I gasp at the last words, a loud sound in the quiet room. You’ve been bullied in the past, purposefully isolated. Called the “N-word” reflexively by an older kid at school who was annoyed at you. As a toddler, you were told you weren’t invited to a birthday party because you “looked like poop.” You shrugged off the events, forgave, and moved on quickly. I wonder if the cuts slice deeper as you grow, as you become more aware of the systems and people excluding you. I know you have friends who have talked about suicide, who have used words like depression, who have talked about their mental health. I don’t know what suicide means to you exactly, but I know this represents desolation like you have never felt before.

I walk to the side the bed. You are wearing your favourite blue hoodie and have pulled the hood over your head. Your face is still and soft in the dim light from the hallway.

“Hi chota,” I say quietly, and lean in to kiss your cheek. Your eyes flutter open with my voice, my touch. Your arms are around me in a nanosecond, squeezing my back, my chest, pulling my face into yours. I inhale you, a mix of soil and air. You hold me so tightly, like I may be a dream and you need to verify my solidity.

“Ma.” Just one word.

You loosen your grip slightly to shove one hand under the cover. You root around, searching for something. Then you pull your hand out.

In your palm lies the rock.

“I never let go of it, Ma.”

We are back to those wondrous first moments when I ran my finger along your new face. There is a both a beauty and a burden in being needed.

“Je t’aime, balo bashi, kesalul chota. So much.”

We stay like this, me holding you, you holding me. You will be twelve in one hour.

I wrap my hand around your hand that holds the rock. You close your eyes again and drop into sleep. I gently extract the rock and squeeze it tightly with my eyes closed. I put it on the bedside table, the pink glimmering. Imprints remain on both of our hands.

Image Source: Alabama Extension / Flickr Creative Commons