Both my children are at sleepaway camp. For the first time since I became a parent seventeen years ago, my husband and I are a childless couple. (And this is how I spend our opportunity for a second honeymoon, you ask—writing a blog post?)

Since my son’s first experience, at age eleven, sleepaway camp has been the highlight of his year, and I hope the transformative power of a super-long sleepover party will work its wonders on my eight-year-old daughter, too.

As we drove away from my daughter’s camp, the head counselor said, in her charming Australian accent, “No news is good news.” We have not heard a quack, so everything must be ducky.

I didn’t worry when my son hadn’t contacted me (he is seventeen, after all), even after I e-mailed and texted him asking for confirmation that all was well. When he did call, I knew something was wrong.

“One of my campers had to go to the emergency room in the middle of the night,” he told me. “Asthama attack. A really bad one.” With the senior counselor at the hospital all day helping the boy with the medical crisis, my son had to take care of the remaining seven campers in his cabin by himself. He didn’t get his usual hour off in the morning, but he got someone to cover for him right before dinner, so he could make a quick call. I was touched to be the one he reached out to.

I didn’t get a call the next day, which was a good sign. But the day after I did. “The boy went back to the emergency room,” my son said. “I’m by myself again.” He sounded tired.  “Don’t get me wrong,” he said, after complaining about his sleep being interrupted again by an ambulance. “Everything is great here. I’m not sorry I came. I’m just venting to you because I can. I have to be strong in front of my kids.”

His kids. The phrase sounded funny. After all, he is my kid. “It’s super fun here when the kids do what I ask them to,” he said, “and frustrating when they don’t.” He didn’t say, “now I understand what you go through as a parent,” but I could hear it in his voice.

We were going to the beach. So we needed some beach reads.

Not for me, but for my eight-year-old daughter. And not for lounging at the beach, but for driving to the beach. Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts is a long way from Charlottesville, Virginia, especially with a stop in New York City along the way.

The afternoon before departure, we went to the Charlottesville Central Library and found one of the most important people in this town: the children’s librarian. When she suggested familiar books, Ella said, “Don’t you remember? I read that last year,” as if anybody could keep a running list in her head. (I certainly can’t.) Finally, we descended the grand stone stairs with four books (Matilda Bone by Karen Cushman, Night Journey by Avi, A Drowned Maiden’s Hair by Laura Amy Schlitz, and A Girl Named Disaster by Nancy Farmer). Though Ella doesn’t get motion sickness, we also borrowed an audio book (Peter Pan) just in case.

The traffic was horrific. After the seven hours to New York City, what should have been a forty-minute trip from Manhattan to Newark to pick up my in-laws at the airport took hours and involved standing still for more than forty minutes at a time. I found Ella a bathroom downtown, and when we returned, the car hadn’t moved. We worried about running out of gas. But what kept us from screaming at each other and at the unhelpful police officers was our little girl in the back seat, making not a peep about being bored. After all, she had books to read, whose titles, with words like “journey” and “disaster,” seemed wildly appropriate to the situation.

Once we arrived in Martha’s Vineyard, for the family reunion, it was Cousin Time: decorating attic bedrooms with “no grown-ups allowed” signs, collecting dismembered crab carcasses to decorate sand castles, playing hide and seek until dark then poker until the eyes drooped. Halfway through the trip, we visited a charming used books store and bought Ella a pile of paperbacks for the ride home: Mildred Taylor’s The Road to Memphis, Lynne Reid Banks’s The Farthest Away Mountain, Gary Paulsen’s Woodsong, Scott O’Dell’s Streams to the River to the Sea, Avi’s Poppy, and Avi’s Poppy and Rye. When Ella started to read them in the five-minute drive back to the rental house, I had to hide the stash so she would have something fresh to read through the traffic jams we would encounter on our return to Virginia. But she managed to find a cousin’s book (Rick Riordan’s The Red Pyramid), and I wish I had taken a picture of her with two of her eight cousins sprawled on our bed, reading it together.

But I do have these three pictures of reading, two on vacation, and one at home. Every time I look at them, they make me want to pick up a book.

I walked out my front door today and saw purple flowers with a flame of yellow. “That’s why they didn’t bloom in April,” I said. “They’re not daffodils, they’re irises.” I had given up hope with these bulbs. The stalks had shot up in the early spring, but when no flower came at the end of daffodil season, I thought they were duds. Not enough sun. I  planted them upside-down. Maybe I left them out in the sun too long before planting. The squirrels must have nibbled them.

“It’s a parable,” my husband said. “Like the ugly duckling.” So many parenting lessons in gardening, aren’t there? Your two year old will not always be a bossy pants. Really, your teenager will outgrow all those hormones. And here’s another: Wait to judge your mother’s parenting until you’ve tried it yourself.

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom. It’s only now, as a mother myself, that I can appreciate all you’ve done.

Eight years ago today, sharp pains woke me in my hospital bed at 3 AM. The doctor said, “Call your husband and tell him the baby will be born in 30 minutes.” James arrived in 25, just as Ella’s head was starting to poke out.

Ella is now older than I was when my father died, so if I die she will remember me better than I remember him. It’s a morbid thought to have on a day of birth. I wonder if other people who’ve experienced death at such a young age think this way, too.

As a child, I kept expecting more people to die. This is what grown-ups did, right? I wondered—with a regularity that now seems neurotic—who would take care of my brother, sister, and me once my mother was gone.

Ella will never meet my father, who shared my red hair, liberal leanings, and rebel spirit. He will never take her hunting in the woods of Northern Michigan, never teach her how to weld or navigate by the stars. He never did these things for me, either, but I like to imagine he would have. I can imagine whatever I want.

My father favored tomboys, and Ella is a girly-girl, but he would have loved her, anyway. He would have taught her to make white bean soup and grilled cheese sandwiches, the way he taught me. He would have taken her into the forest, expecting her to keep up with his pace, four steps for every one of his. It makes me tired just remembering.

He would have inspected her room for cleanliness, with a military exactness. He would have made her eat everything on her plate. He would have tolerated no crying, ever (“You want me to give you something to cry about?”), but especially not on a joyous occasion like Ella’s eighth birthday.

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“I’ve never won anything before,” Ella said. “Not in my whole life.” Seven entire years. “Not even a raffle.” When she got the good news, about a month ago, one of her first questions was, “What will I wear?” (And who will you thank? I wondered. At the Oscars, the winners always acknowledge their mothers.)

“Only 36 poems won,” Ella told all her friends after that, “out of 160.”  Her poem, written on the theme “heroes,” is called “Hamster-Explorer.” Its ten lines about a fearless, furry rodent, are on display to fearless city bus riders throughout Charlottesville.

The transit center, where the reading took place, was standing-room only. The age range was first grade through retirement, dominated by high schoolers. The youngest boy wrote about his teacher, who stood next to him. One man, who is a three-time winner, introduced himself as “chronologically mature.” His poem was about his parents—four years of education between them, raising five African American children in the deep South in the 40s—as his heroes.

One of my neighbors and a wonderful writing teacher at WriterHouse, Carey Morton, read a surprising poem about a feisty neighbor (not me!). Sarah Crossland, who was in a class with me at the University of Virginia, read a lovely poem about her grandmother, likening her hands to mother of pearl. Grandparents and parents dominated as heroes. (No need for an Oscar-style thank-you speech; the gratitude is embedded in the poem.) Some of the high school readers seemed surprised at the earnestness of their words, as if they had been outed as closet sentimentalists.

Susan Berres, the organizer, said, “What I love about poetry is its accessibility. Everybody’s got time to write ten lines.” You might not be able to commit to National Novel Writing Month in November. But a poem can be pieced together in snippets, like Frank O’Hara’s nervy and elegant Lunch Poems (written on his lunch hour). I loved the community feel of this event, of poetry not as elitist, but populist fun.