The entire time that we worked at Camp Eagle, Zack and I were technically “on call.” If something were to happen in the middle of the night that required phone calls to be made and/or our presence at main camp, we would have been there. We never had to be, though. Outside of the occasional lunch break interruption phone call, I never had to abandon my time off/wake up in the middle of the night to take care of anything that was happening at camp.
Until very, very early this morning.
Eight months after leaving Camp Eagle, I got a call from my uncle at 1 this morning, frantic because there had been some issues at camp with his granddaughters (so, my second cousins?) and he was concerned about them. They weren’t in physical danger, but had faced some (I’m being vague on purpose) emotional hardships during the day and told my uncle about the stresses. They ended the phone call saying that they would call him back but never did. He was understandably concerned–it’s hard to be 6 hours away from your two 9 year old granddaughters and trust (highly trained camping professionals who are) total strangers with their safety–especially when you know they aren’t bounding through fields of non-cavity causing lollipops and cartoon butterflies.
At 1 a.m. after being in bed for 2 hours, I’m surprisingly dysfunctional. I rolled around in the bed for a while trying to think of what it was that I should be doing to fix the situation. My natural (motherly) reaction was to comfort my Uncle. Their family had been really comforted by the fact that I was on the camp’s property last year, and so I started out saying things like, “It’s okay that I’m not there, those are good people, the twins are being taken care of, yadda, yadda, yadda.” About 5 minutes later, I realized that he had called me with the very specific purpose of getting a phone number to try and contact them. I remembered that I have all the Camp Eagle files on my computer still from when I used it as a work computer, so I got out of bed, and dragged myself to the computer where 34 billion rays of blinding light shot out of the computer screen and melted my eyeballs. I swear I must have dug around in my computer files (still blind as a bad from the light) for 10 minutes before I was able to find the file called DIRECTORY.doc. HOW HARD IS IT TO FIND DIRECTORY.DOC? I must have referenced that file on a weekly basis for the entire two years that I worked at camp, but all the sudden, it’s 1 a.m. and I’m Ray Charles trying to find a docu-needle-in-a-haystack like it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done? Sweet heavens, I was some kind of out-of-sorts last night.
Needless to say, as a result of the phone calls, I have decided that I’m not ever going to be ready to have kids. Kids turn into teenagers, which generally warrant middle-of-the-night phone calls, and If I’m so dysfunctional that I can’t even find a document at 1 in the morning, I have no place thinking I could make proper decisions about whether or not I would let my theoretical teenager sit in jail over night after being stopped for jaywalking at 4 a.m. because he/she snuck out of the house with their best friend (who got away) to go get cokes from the coke machine up the street. (NOT THAT I EVER DID THAT.)
(Just so you know, the nieces are fine. Situation’s all sorted out. See? I called it in the early-morning air. Highly trained camping professionals, they truly are.)
