Camp isn’t all just about fond memories. There are also moments you are tested

Her face was sunburned and her legs were a mess of blood-encrusted, well-scratched mosquito bites. She smelled like showering had been possibly optional.

Her head hung low, her arms crossed. My eight-year-old seemed far away, deep in thought.

In the aftermath of picking up my two daughters from their first time at overnight camp, I was searching for clues that we had done the right thing. Had they been too young to go so far away from home for a week, particularly the six-year-old whose bedtime routine we had still been heavily supervising prior to her departure? And had camp been just too much for my older, quieter child?

I had great personal investment in the answers.

My husband never went to camp. Didn’t understand the fuss. I, on the other hand, had reaped the financial benefits of having a brother who refused to go and was thus offered the opportunity summer after summer.

My first sleepover camp was on Lake of Bays, about 2-1/2 hours north of Toronto. It was the kind of place that offered everything from sailing to archery, where nature was teacher to 60 urban kids.

And it was to this camp, more than three decades later, that I had decided to send my own children for their first taste of such an experience.

I was a tad worried. As much as I loved camp as a kid, as a mom, I was fighting those helicopter-parenting urges to protect at all costs.

Because to be honest, my memories weren’t all friendship bracelets and campfire songs. I had, on my very first night in a bunk bed, rolled off the top — back in the days before safety rails — and awoke concussed. Who knows if they even called my parents? Days later, I was mortified when cabinmates discovered Bobby, my teddy bear, and hid him from me for days. Even years later, when I went back to that camp a third and final time at age 15 as a counsellor-in-training, I experienced a heavy bout of homesickness, with the awkwardness of the teen years and a desire to fit in making every encounter emotionally fraught.

And then there were other things that seemed fun — Sadie Hawkins dances, kangaroo court — but that no longer jibed with modern sensibilities.

“I loved it back in the day, but it was a little ...” I paused, seeking the right word while on the phone with the camp administrator, trying to suss out whether this was a place to send my kids. We laughed at how the ribald “Meatballs” movies had come to define sleepover camp in that era. But he vowed, “Oh, it’s nothing like that these days.”

I wanted my daughters to feel the exhilaration of hiking over the side of a sailboat or canoeing in the rain, the community of eating in a mess hall and performing skits with cabinmates, the awesome beauty of sleeping under the stars and waking up with slugs on your pillow.

I knew I wouldn’t be there to protect them, but I wanted them to be safe, even as they figured out how to navigate social situations or nurse a blister or decide if brushing their teeth was truly necessary or live with the disappointment of failing a swim test.

This is what camp does — in between the fond memories are the moments you are tested. When, for maybe the first time, there isn’t a parent or caregiver or your best chum to swoop in. You can’t help but grow, change.

So, 15 years ago, when we picked up our daughters for the first time, they seemed different.

On tenterhooks, I waited for my eldest to speak. Did she hate it? Would she ever want to return?

“I miss it,” was all my teary-eyed girl could manage.

They had been gone for only a week, but they were already more self-sufficient, confident, mature. Maybe that’s how I looked to my parents. (It was certainly the last time Bobby went anywhere beyond my bedroom.)

Both daughters went back, many times. The youngest eventually got her 10-year pin and worked as a counsellor. Things were not always rosy or easy — there were infected cuts and social anxiety — but every time we picked them up, they’d be brimming with stories, and I suspect their experiences contributed to sculpting them into the young adults they are today.

It’s the reason why I don’t think camp is just a frivolous opportunity, and it’s also why I contribute to the Fresh Air Fund, whose goal this year is $650,000.

When Toronto Star publisher Joseph E. Atkinson launched the initiative 123 years ago, he did so to help children escape the fetid heat and squalor of the city. That first year, $1,025.50 was raised and 26 children found some respite on a farm in Whitby.

It’s hard to imagine that those kids, and all those who have benefited from the fund since — many of whom have faced life challenges of poverty or illness — returned home unchanged.

Camp allows you to learn about who you are, what you’re made of and who you can be.

And who wouldn’t want that for a child.