“You’re smart, you’re funny, you have a pretty family, you love Jesus. Sometimes this is all so hard you want to kill yourself.”
Deliverance, but everybody gets ice cream at the end
I spent a week in June at a Christian family camp in “North Carolina” with my extended family. As an atheist Jew I found the experience funny. Also, I was astonished and awed at the beauty of the former Cherokee lands and how seamlessly the European settlers have turned them to their own pleasurable use. A sparkling lake, a pristine mountain forest, acres and acres of land — just for spiritual retreats, weddings, and conferences, all registration fees paid to the Episcopalians. But, like. Everyone living under capitalism does need a retreat every now and then. I can’t hate it much. Plus, although I didn’t see it, there’s evidently a similarly-structured Jewish retreat center nearby. So my people are implicated in the colonialist project, too.
The staff fed us like royalty. The dining hall, not the lake or the wooded trails or any other part of the grounds, became my sanctuary within the first day. There were 16 of us, ten adults and six kids. Half of us slept, two families to a cabin, in decades-old cabins that are placed in concentric half-rings around the main conference center and dining hall, and hiked down to breakfast, lunch and dinner when we heard the recorded bugle blasting out of the PA system, sounding the reveille. (Not joking.) The other half of us slept at the conference center and I can only imagine how intrusive that bugling was.
Being Cared For
For the last 14 years or so, I was the personal chef for everyone in our family of four, except for occasional dinners of heated frozen french fries and hamburgers or chicken tenders made by Scot or one of the kids. I chose my labor willingly, because I enjoy cooking for more than just myself, learning new ingredients and how they interplay with the element of heat or time. Any knowledge I have of technique, I credit to Sondra Sun-Odeon and Chris Hamley, two phenomenal home cooks (Hamley is actually also a trained chef), who lived with me and cooked for me for a year when we were all punk rock twentysomething kids in Mount Pleasant, DC. I summoned what I remembered from them, bought a Mark Bittman cookbook, and took on the job of cooking for Scot and the kids like I was some amateur knight errant who got picked to go to the Crusades. I don’t know what I was thinking, serving them shredded pulled pork and lime tacos on homemade tortillas, glazed salmon, broccoli and sweet potato rice bowls with tahini-miso sauce, dry-fried green beans with Sichuan peppercorns for the love of G-d. They didn’t love any of it, frankly. Not the way I did. They might have liked some of it, but I guarantee none of those were memorable meals for them. But because I loved it, and I loved telling myself that I was feeding my family well, I continued.
This is an old story. Or, at least, a cliché one. Liberated Woman Becomes A Mom, Narrows Her Entire Universe To The Kitchen, Inadvertently Generates Her Own Resentment. But being a cliché doesn’t change the fact that when I saw the spread of pepper steak and green beans and rolls at the family camp that first dinner, I breathed a sigh of gratitude and relaxation. NOW I was actually on vacation. If it rained all week, if the Christians ended up hissing Bible verses at me, if I was set upon by leeches in the lake, I was going to be cared for by this wonderful kitchen staff. I would not have to wash a pot or stand over a stove. I would not have to nag anyone to clear their dishes or wash the dishes or unload the dishwasher.
Being Among Family
The family part was hilarious and hard and messy. Having three adult siblings, their spouses and kids, and two elder grandparents did help to sand off some of the edgy energy between Scot and me. But it wasn’t bad. We took the children hiking, canoeing, fishing, built campfires, sang songs, played pickleball, and did all there was to do at this sprawling pastoral facility. We played games and made a few crafts. The cousins had some good bonding time. We ate well. We did not look at our cell phones.
Being In Community
Part of the entertainment available to us at this place was, honestly, the Christian revivalist group that was also renting the facility for the week along with us. The group consisted of what seemed like over 100 adults, many with kids in tow, and they were SO. DANG. CHEERFUL. They were like the Whos down in Whoville. They sang from sunup until after well after dark. They loudly conversed at lunch about the epiphanies they were having in their group sessions. When, by the end of the week, I started sitting alone for a meal or two in the dining hall so as to grab some time away from the fam, they sat next to me and said brightly, “What’s your name, young lady?” I was probably older than a few of the ladies who said this to me.
I felt their gazes on our obviously not-evangelical family grow more pointed as the week went on. I would sit and write in my journal in one of the four big rocking chairs around a small table that overlooked the lake on one section of the conference center’s flagstone patio. One day, as I rose to leave my chair,
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Creative Aid Society to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.