Senior Director Joanne’s reflections from retirement:
Every July round about this day, I invite the whole Curve (our 15-year-old-girls) to my cabin for Curve Cooking Class. They cook the dinner and eat it. Can’t recall when exactly I started doing this. 25 years ago maybe?
Yesterday the 35 Curve girls arrived right after 4th period and they cooked the entire dinner. In one hour! I didn’t touch the food. Literally. The menu never changes: From scratch, every year they make Greek salad, pasta with pesto made from fresh basil, shrimps sauteed with a lot of lemon that they have to juice and a mountain of garlic that they have to peel, and barbecued steaks.
They love the food, they love learning to cook it, but what I believe makes this experience matter for them is being invited into my home and empowered to take over my kitchen and be in charge.
I fear that today’s teens are so profoundly disempowered by social media with all its comparisons and pressures, that they are in sore need of being seen and validated and appreciated IRL by grownups who are not their parents.
Herein lies a core value of camp. When my daughter Mara was about 12, she said that it mattered more to her when her counsellors told her she was wonderful than when I told her. That shocked me. I tried to hide my sadness from her. But I couldn’t help asking her why. She replied: “Because you’re my mother so you have to tell me I’m wonderful, so I don’t always believe it. But when my counsellors tell me I’m special, I believe it, because they don’t have to say it.”
So back to the Curve Cooking Class: I do it because I get a piece of their joy at being treated as special. How lucky am I.