The Tight Squeeze of Wonder and Diversity

I've stolen a Sunday morning to sort through a 6-inch pile of mail. At the bottom was the winter's quarterly newsletter from my college. I tend to skim or read them on a delayed response, much like any of my third class post. The newsletter featured last year's commencement address, and it's message was to arrange for wonder and diversity in one's life. Bingo.

I did not attend my university or department graduations. I interpreted the advantage of a 5-year scholarship to maximize my credit hours and stayed in school through the summers (I loved those summer terms) and finished non-traditionally one year right before the Christmas holiday. And then I left the country. At the time, graduating among people in the larger University context seemed gratuitous. I've never really thought twice about that until this morning, wondering what my graduating class' commencement speech intoned, further wondering if I gleaned that innate message of Wonder and Diversity on my own, which to the best of a single mom's ability has been my MO. It makes me feel like I must be doing okay.

There was a second, less simple didactic message in the speech too: "What will support your building of a personal intellectual framework for regarding the world and those who share it with you?" Now that is a question that remains prescient in adult life, and challenges me regularly on my behalf and for my children. I'm not sure I've succeeded in building my own framework, and I tend to overlook that in pursuit of helping of the kids. Yet that children part, the nurturing of building a framework, that is tough stuff. Every summer camp, beach vacation, overnight, midweek getaway drive, after-school activity and even lazy afternoon informs this framework. This year like none prior I feel that I am facing a summer of last hurrahs. For the first time I am looking at the role of summer camps in my older-aged kids' lives as a real investment in those frameworks. It's not that I haven't been enamored of what wonder and diversity summer programs have had to offer in the past - I even spent five years offering enriching art and craft camps for kids out of my home to pay the bills - it's that I haven't easily accommodated their financial impact on my purse-strings. Navigating this stuff is overwhelming, expensive, and when contextually labeled as 'intellectual framework,' downright daunting.

So this year, having decided the expense of some quality camps in their areas of interest is non-negotiable, the question becomes what defines wonder and diversity. My firstborn goes to high school in the fall, a place where I know she will be surrounded by girls who have been afforded many more of these bought-and-paid advantages. At the age of ten she went off to her first extended overnight camp after earning half the fee herself. So it's my own doing that I taught her to work for the things she wants the most. This year, I know the thing she probably desires most is to start her new school year talking about a repeat trip out of the country with her best friend.....but at the expense of every other scaffolded summer option? At the expense of a family trip? Mama knows wonder and diversity. Mama doesn't know how to get a hug out of this one......