WARNING: Grim and depressing oversharing rant. Also, this is part 2; if you haven't been here in a few days, you'll want to read the entry below first.
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You see, my mother had told me that I only had to go to fat camp for two weeks. They were a godawful two weeks, all told, but I'd suffered worse in my life; then my mother picked me up to take me to my other summer camp, a weeklong session of a camp for gifted children that is, ironically, one of my very best memories of childhood.
You want more irony? Here it is: smart children are able to look past body shape and size in a way that fat children cannot. You would think that fat children could overlook size and shape; but they can't. They've become their fat, remember? After a few years, all that matters to them is their size, and other people's size...
That very summer, at Camp Mind's Eye (which I will call by its full and proper name, because it was a wonderful place and deserving of all the compliments I can heap upon it), I learned for the first time what it feels like to be popular. Not just tolerated, not just orbiting, but out and out popular. For one week, out of my entire life, people actively sought my company and wanted to be my friend. I had a wonderful time. I ate three candy bars every day, I ran all over the place in a herd of friends, I participated in activities and barely slept, I managed to put the discomfort that was Camp Bone Spar behind.
And then came the hours that broke my heart.
My mother had arranged for one of the Camp Mind's Eye counselors to drive me into town and put me on a plane, after the session ended. When we got to the airport, I discovered that, instead of being booked on a flight home to Houston, I was booked on a flight to Dallas. To the nearest airport to Camp Bone Spar, actually.
And in my happy post-Mind's-Eye naivete, I actually didn't get it. You see, my father lived in Dallas. So I got on that plane, convinced that my father was going to pick me up at the airport and take me home from there. My mother was a busy woman, after all, and it didn't surprise me that she would need to make such a strange arrangement to get me home. She was always having my relatives pitch in to help get me places, and I enjoyed it. No big deal!
So I got off the plane in Dallas and claimed all my luggage. I had five enormous mismatched soft-sided suitcases; I was packed for two different intensive summer camps, after all, camps without any sort of laundry facilities.
No father. No mother. Hm. Oh well, they were probably just late. I had a book, I was fine. After about an hour, I heard a message on the intercom with my name attached; please meet my party at Baggage Claim C.
But I was in Baggage Claim A! Oh well, no problem. My father had always had a serious weight problem too; he wouldn't want to walk all this way, and it made sense that he would have me paged. So I'll go meet him there. I managed to string the shoulder straps of these five enormous suitcases into a string of baggage that was, literally, ten feet long, and dragged it from one end of the airport to the other. I must have been quite a sight: one little fat girl, completely alone and about thirteen, walking backwards in order to lug this huge slithering train of luggage across three terminals, a distance of almost half a mile. It was loud, it was attention-getting, it was exhausting. I've never had so many people smile pityingly at me in my life.
So, finally, wrung out, exhausted, sweaty, I made it to Baggage Claim C. Dropping the handle of the Luggage Train, I turned around and looked for my father. Didn't see him... then I suddenly noticed that some strange man with a clipboard had walked up to me and was saying something.
And do you know what I said next? I said, completely confident, "No, that's not right, my father's coming to pick me up and take me home." I had managed to completely convince myself that that was what was happening. No, of course I wouldn't have to go back to Camp Bone Spar. No.
But... yes. This man was the new driver for Camp Bone Spar. It was his very first day on the job, and his very first job was to come pick me up at the airport and take me back.
It took us about an hour and a half to get back to the camp, and I bawled the entire way. I told this poor man everything about the camp: how much I hated it, all the horrible things that had happened to me at the hands of the counselors and the other kids, how I didn't know that I was coming back...
And he believed me. Finally, finally, an adult attached to Camp Bone Spar had actually listened to me. Over the next week, he quietly spoke to several of the other campers, and they confirmed everything I had told him. Finally, outraged at the treatment the campers were getting and the treatment they were giving each other, he confronted the owners of the camp.
So of course, they fired him.
I made several whoopingly upset phone calls to my mother over the next three or four days, of course under the watchful eyes of the head counselor. It turns out that my mother had told me I was coming back to Camp Bone Spar... while I was asleep in the car on the way to Camp Mind's Eye. Apparently I'd made some sort of noise of assent in my sleep, and she took this to mean that it was just a-okay with me.
And my mother decided that I was 'only homesick', and refused to listen to my pleas to be allowed to come home. No matter what I said about the camp, she refused to take me seriously, thinking it was just a passing adolescent tantrum.
And then, of course, after the phone call was over, I'd have to have a long talk with the head counselor after that about the 'horrible and untrue' things that I'd said about the camp, and that I'd 'feel better soon' after I 'settled back in with my little friends'.
After three calls, my mother stopped accepting the collect calls. And there I was. The first two weeks had been terrible; the last three weeks were worse. But I survived.
About two years later, I was in the car with my mother, driving somewhere halfway across Houston. The conversation turned to Camp Bone Spar, and for the first time I was able to calmly tell her everything that had happened without crying. It took me most of an hour. I didn't pull a single punch. She needed to know what had happened, what she had done, even though she meant well.
I think I broke my mother pretty badly, that day. In many ways, that day in the car changed our relationship forever, and in some ways, for the better. My mother got a completely new opinion about my maturity level, and I got the small tired pleasure of knowing that finally, she truly understood what I was trying to say in those hysterical phone calls from camp two years before. A bit late, but...
Ever since then, she's always taken me seriously. Which is a good thing... if not quite worth the five weeks that it cost me.
There'll have to be one more segment to this, if I'm going to bring the story to its close, so I'll just write To Be Continued here...
