Aviva cried and wet the bed. She was homesick. Aviva scratched mosquito bites until they bled. She was immensely tall for a Jewish 8-year-old, with a bowl cut. We couldn’t escape her wails; a dozen girls nestled in the Wisconsin woods for three weeks of overnight camp. Didn’t she know the best time to cry was late at night when no one could hear?
Counselors told us to be nice. We half-heartedly tried to include her, but we mostly avoided her. How could she not like a sleepover every night? Smores? Color War?!! Linking arms? We had found our summer family; but she unsettled us.
Somehow, we ended up alone in the bunk. She was crying harder than usual. I sighed, anxious to swim.
“My dad is in jail.” She was crying so hard, I had trouble understanding.
“Huh?”
She repeated it.
My dad is in jail.
My whole 8-year-self tightened; my heart sped up while time slowed down.
I had a choice, a specific before and after. I could stammer sorry and bolt. I could keep my truth buried, safely hidden under big smiles. Before this moment, I could pretend I was like the other girls in my cabin—not like her.
That morning: How many pancakes should I eat? Now: Should I unleash my biggest and scariest secret?
I hated uncertainty. I calculated the costs in my head: What if I tell her and she tells the other girls? How much information should I share? What if she thinks we’ll now be best friends? What if I become like her, angry and writhing? Would we be inextricably linked?
This decision would not be reversible.
We teach children generalities: Be nice. Say please. Smile. We don’t teach them that they’ll have mere seconds to make giant choices.
Rather, we should get down low and say: listen, courage is risky; you’ll feel it in your bones, down your spine or in your belly. You will not have much time. You’ll think the ground will shatter when you stop pretending who you want to be and instead reveal who you really are. It won’t. Remove your armor child, heaviness can be shared.
“My dad is jail too.”
She stared at me, eyes wide in disbelief.
“He calls me at camp sometimes,” I whispered. Once a week, I’d sneak to the kitchen phone, his voice like a jolting ghost. And then I’d return to the mess hall, pretending I had left to refill the water pitcher.
We did not have the words to express this moment. We were 8. But we both understood our shared misfortune, externally caused, beyond our control, by parents who neglected their one role: protector. Names blazoned across front-pages. Deviant guilty dads. Gone dads, but not dead dads.
Our families were disgraced, individually and collectively. We cannot slough off this shame, untangle our broken hearts. Not yet. We are 8. But we have this moment—this moment when someone says, you are not alone.