The other day, my daughter started her first-ever “official” summer camp. Like most parents, we had asked our friends for suggestions, pored over promotional pamphlets, and scoured the Internet for shreds of information that we hoped would align with her interests. Unfortunately, her interests in any sort of summer camp or after-school activity are seemingly… limited.
We started with dance classes. This was truly a source of great internal turmoil for me, as I was never a dancer and had the (completely misguided, I know now) impression that my daughter would absolutely LOVE whichever activity I placed her in first, thereby sealing her fate to becoming a professional ballerina and me to forever spending my life carrying around dance costumes filled with glitter while making my millionth “non-wispy” hair bun.
Well, the joke was on me because that most certainly did not happen. Instead, I endured an entire school year of constant whining about how much my daughter “HATED!!” dance and “NEVER” wanted to do it again. This would have all been completely fine, of course, had I not already paid an arm and a leg on said class. And while other more tolerant mothers may have cut their losses and allowed their child to stop going, that thought never even entered my mind and so, we endured.
Then we tried gymnastics. Things were going swimmingly for the first few classes, until something dreadful happened. The teacher – are you ready for this? – actually asked my daughter to… DO SOMETHING!! Oh, the horror!! She tried to teach my daughter how to do a cartwheel – which is something she desperately had wanted to learn. While another child may have been excited and, oh, I don’t know, maybe paid a little attention? during this class, my daughter instead spent half of the class telling the teacher that she’s “got it,” then proceeded to fall over herself as she illustrated her prowess. When I dutifully told her that she did great and would become even better with a little practice, she informed me that she was now a “cartwheel expert” and no longer needed to return.
Despite how difficult it was to keep a straight face there, I somehow managed to do so and decided to move on to karate. Everyone I talk to tells me that karate teaches discipline, self-control, self-confidence (which I guess we don’t need) and obedience. How could I say no? So off we went.
This time, I had gotten wise to the whole after-school activities game. For karate, I did a free trial class, likely because I knew in the back of my mind that we had zero shot at continuing this. I think we made it through 18 minutes of the one-hour class before my daughter left the room mid-lesson and skipped over to me, enlightening me that she was “bored.”
Onto our next attempt. My husband decided that maybe she should try soccer. When the idea was suggested, she responded with an emphatic “NO!” I’m not sure how, but somehow my husband interpreted that as “ABSOLUTELY!” and decided to enroll her in a town league. He even signed up as the coach to make it more enjoyable for her.
Did it work? Well, I’m not sure our feet touched many balls the whole season, but we sure did a good job of weeding the field with our hands during that time.
“You should just learn your lesson and stop this madness,” is likely what you’re thinking right now. But no! “Let’s try SOFTBALL!” volunteers my husband. My daughter again says, “NO!” and yet he somehow hears “YES!” and so began multiple weeks of agony as she spent more time decorating her bat with stickers than she did actually hitting anything with it.
The only moderately successful class that we took was one at a local farm, where her job was to feed the animals. Ironically, this was also the only class where I wasn’t allowed to watch (hmm… could there somehow be a connection there? Nah…), but all I know is that when I went to pick her up the last day, she was carrying a goat that was almost double her size and looked like she was about to drop the poor thing right on his head, so I’m not sure it was a positive experience for him even if it was for her.
So back to present-day. Since summer camps seem to fill up in, like, November of the year before (whyyyy??!), I thought really hard and eventually found a Disney-focused performing arts camp for a single week. Seeing as my daughter seemingly loves the limelight and is ultra-dramatic, I figured that this might be a good fit, and since it was short, we’d be able to get a sense of whether we actually liked it before signing up for something longer.
On Monday, she came home from a long day and proudly exclaimed that she “LOVED IT!” On Tuesday, she returned with an emphatic “IT WAS AMAZING!” And on Wednesday, she walked out and said she wanted to “COME BACK AGAIN!”
“This is incredible!” I thought to myself, as my husband and I congratulated each other on a job well-done.
But right after dinner on Wednesday, I casually asked my daughter why her backpack had a folder in it. And it was then when it all fell apart.
“Oh, that’s my folder for practicing! We have a performance on Friday! But I don’t know any of my lines.”
“No problem,” I replied. “We’ll practice them now.”
“That’s OK, Mommy. I haven’t been participating in any of the practices this whole time.”
“I’m sorry – what?”
“Oh, they just looked too hard so I told the teachers that I was just going to sit this one out and drink my water,” she responded.
I’m not entirely sure what my face must have looked like when that happened, but it must have been impressionable enough to elicit a “was that bad, Mommy?”
Let’s just say that it was extremely challenging to restrain myself from lunging across the couch after realizing that I had just spent a small fortune so that my daughter could enjoy some drinks and a show.
And so here we are, the morning of the performance, just sitting and waiting for the hammer to fall. But on the way in, I unwisely made a comment about how this is the “same road we used to take to go to dance” and how happy she must be that she’s now finished with it “FOREVER!!” and sure enough, she grew suddenly quiet.
“Mommy?” she asked after a moment of dangerous silence.
“Yes?”
“I actually really like dance. Can we do it again next year?”
Please excuse me while I bang my head repeatedly on the steering wheel.