The Exchange: a day later

There is a good chance–cell phone, video games, social media and modern superficiality being what it is–that I will never see or hear from this child again. He will rejoin his group, evaporate like a little sigh, and be gone. Will he think of me? Will he think of the crazy Burk family and the fun times we had, the places we took him? Will he remember the beauty of the James River the way I recall the Seine? Will he grow, do stupid things that boys do on their way to manhood, get into trouble, learn humbly and well? Will he look back on this time when he is a young man and remember he has an American mother somewhere whose love is unspent?

I don’t know what is was about this boy. He was not perfect. He was not pure. He was not mine. In the endearing ways of children everywhere, he took so much more than he gave. Ah, child. I exchanged my heart for you. And you gave it back roomed. Forever.

After a while, the raw sadness went away. Will went to camp, a “Chapter Two” of sorts, of summer living boy-style (fire, water, dirt, air–elemental, my dear Mr. Watson). The quiet house stopped waiting for him to come down, fresh-washed and an hour late with a little blue backpack and his fancy sunglasses, ready for the day’s activity. I stopped listening for his laughter or the funny way he called Weel’s name, or that musical “Oui” I got when I asked him something. Sometimes I think my obsession with his time here was no more than a besottement for the French language, for the lyrical beauty of its sound and the delicious way words port their meaning. “If I were you,” said Will in reflecting later, “I wouldn’t have spoken so much French.” I am indeed a little ashamed. It was meant to be FULL immersion. Not an “almost-full immersion” with one crackpot wanna-be French speaker thrown in as a bonus. It was one more way I spoiled the boy. I comfort myself by thinking that’s how I cared for him and made his exchange better than it might have been, if he’d spent the whole time barely comprehending. One of the ways he neeeeded me.

When you substitute teach, in a classroom, you get a pretty well-delineated picture of the teacher who is absent. It’s like she leaves a 3-D footprint of how she conducts her class: strict or lenient, fast-paced or yawner, what the routine is and–more importantly, what the kids can get away with. Her notes tell me much less than I learn observing the students themselves. Throughout the day, in the way they do things (or don’t), they reconstruct the shape of her. In the same way, when you act as a mother to another, care for a child for whom you have total responsibility for the time he is with you, you start to observe the hollow around which a boy is shaped. That shape, in bas relief, is his mother.

Within moments of our first outing, Camille was shirking me stuff to hold–his phone, tucking it in my purse for safe keeping so he could run and do something, his sunglasses, his drink cup. A hundred and three degrees out and I’m carrying his sweatshirt around Washington? He never asked, he just handed it to me, already half gone on whatever activity was pressing him. It was such an automatic gesture, it spoke of a boyish security, a solidity about the way things worked. Sherpa mom. Yes, my one. I will carry your shirt cup shades phone cash what else you got? A mother holds her children’s hands for a time, and their hearts forever. He walked alongside me more than my own kids ever would. In situations where he wanted to understand (like “is there anything here but sandwiches?”, or “tell me again how you to play the game; is the bar to move or no?” Or–at the go-kart place, the lengthy pre-ride spiel: “tell me what the blue flag mean.”), he leans into me. And he listens. Just when I think he’s a cocky little ingrate with an earbud in one ear and an “I dunno” out the other, he comes, tugs at my arm, asks me to explain something. The shock that I have something someone actually wants or needs at this stage in the game delights and unglues me. I am the one.

Of course it’s possible he could smell “sucker” all over me and like children the world over was taking whatever was freely given. I would be used to that by now, substitute that I am in the classroom and have been in my own home. But I like to think of that mother. His mother. I like to think that I was lightly, gently taking a few steps in her shoes in caring for her son. At the airport, on the very last day in the very last moments I have with this boy, he has stepped around his French friends happily reunited, kicked the French chaperone to the curb and has come to find me once again where I am trying to play it cool like all them other smiling American families. He comes to find me to help him fill out the evaluation form written in English. Whaaat?! You’re standing right next to her, the woman who put the “bi” in “lingual,” who is your next mom for the next 24 hours and who carries a passport same color and size as yours and you’re pulling at me again? I was not expecting this level of need, and I don’t suppose families who hosted an older teen had it. I highly doubt Camille’s brother (17) had the mom in that house wash his skivvies. But I’ll bet he didn’t get kissed goodnight like you still do in my house or carried to the bathroom with a bloody nose, either. Did his host mom chase him through the house with a sofa pillow and blast his French tunes in the van and buy him a second tub of Nutella? Does she have the power to turn water into lemonade?

About halfway through the exchange we discovered, in introducing French boy, that we had been pronouncing his name wrong. It’s not Ca-mille or Cameeyah, it’s Kah-mee. Ka-mee. When I say it over and over to reset the mind it sounds like I’m saying “come here” with a Brooklyn accent: “Comeeyah, will ya”? And in effect, that is what I have been saying to him and to the other children inhabiting this home, the natives, for a while. Calling it as they go through the front door without a goodbye, calling it quietly through closed bathroom doors and bedroom doors, whispering it over their sleeping forms: Comeer, my children. Don’t go away. Comeer so I can love on you. I want to write and say to him get on a plane, I have your charger and your toothbrush, what more could you need? You have a pair of shorts in North Carolina. Just bring those disposable socks and get on a plane… The lake is calling your name. Come back, Camille, I was not ready. Almost, but not ready at all.

On the last day of the exchange, searing Virginia heat takes our beach trip way. Heck with the bucket list; this boy lives five minutes on bike to the beaches of St Tropez. At least that what he shows us on Google earth. When he shows me his “next” girlfriend (so says he) on Instagram, she is standing on terra cotta rooftops totally iconic of southern France. Dazzling Mediterranean setting — Mechanicsville. They’re practically the same, n’est ce pas? What could we possibly show him here? As the outing plan was originally combined with a meaningful stroll through Williamsburg, and I have now met this boy and run with him two and a half weeks, I let that go as well. Camille’s appetite for museums and educational stuff ranks right up there with sandwiches. In this heat, who could possibly cobble shoes or tan leather in full costume anyway? We are like to melt.

So on the Thursday that was so morose, when the boys sort of moped about the house, or rather Camille did while Will tried a gallant play for good cheer, fixing the go-kart, patching a pool raft, trying to make good on the day, I asked Camille what he would like to do on his last full day with us. Friday. Our last full day. It should be his pick. He didn’t hesitate. “Le lac?” It’s a question and an affirmation in one breath. “The lake? You want to go to the lake again?” I’m glad this is his choice. The last two days are practically the temperature of the sun in town, and for a little while here the Short Pump option has been an elephant on the bucket list. I know I’m being a toad. What teenager doesn’t want to troll shop with a $6 latte in hand and–what, post pictures of himself in an outdoor mall? What else do you do? I’ve never actually bought anything at short pump mall. Nothing could please me more that we are outside, on the cheap, enjoying friendship and the best of summer. This will sear the memory into him that this is the way we do things in America: lots of blue sky, fresh water and endless supply of stale bread for bait.

It was such a good choice. The boys are joined by friends: another American boy and his French compadre. Two are school mates, two are country mates at the end of their tour here, and in between the unavoidable boy besting and shoving displays that now have to occur off the edge of the dock, they compare notes in French. I have swum out to curtail the mischief, or to try to and fail, and so I am in the water around them. I can hear their banter and the little bits and snippets of their conversation, and I gather this is a little of what has gone on in their group chat, comparing their American families, seeing who’s got what and comment ca va. At first, I think I’ve heard him wrong, and then in my mind I translate it wrong, but Camille’s little comment gives my heart a jolt and I swim with it loose inside me. Une mère de mon âme, he says to the other boy. In my over-sentimentalized egoism I think that surely he is talking about me, and I feel a swell of pride at all the fun activities I managed for him. “Mother of my dreams.” What mom doesn’t want her kids to think that? I’ve been going for MOTY (mother of the year) for a while now. Ah, Camee. My boy. My boy. But it is not that. What he said. When I get home I look it up. La mère de mon âme means Mother of my soul.

He’s a 13-year-old child. And a boy at that. He has the apparent emotional IQ of a stone. But then again, I’m a 50-year-old mom with the adventurous, risk-taker IQ of roughly the same measure, and here I am at the top of an amusement park ride at 10 o’clock at night. So you never know. Like I’m saying, life does take us places. Come with me, boy. Come with me.

After he’d left and I’d gotten us through our first dinner without him I was pretty shattered. Sophie looked up and discovered a cherry tomato in the light fixture overhead. Bill found a blueberry by the stairs. Solid tears of our time together, a little late-night food fight I’m sure. So after dinner I went back to the lake a while to let go and say goodbye. It wasn’t the end of all things, it wasn’t even the end of the summer, although for all the melodrama in me it might well have been. A little boy had boarded a plane to cross the ocean. I spoke his name into the air, where I knew he would be for a few hours more. And then I drove slowly home.

Coming through the front door, laying my purse and keys on the kitchen table, it suddenly hit me. What he had meant without meaning to. It was the dream of a family. The deepest and most enduring dream I have, not from 30 years ago but right here, right now. If sea air and salt kisses are in him, it is of this that I am made: the dream of a family. A dream that this thing we built, my beloved and I, will stand as long as our lives, and will harbor the children God gave us. That we have given all that we could, or should, or possibly can, to the other keds here, who also seem to be leaving too soon. William still fills the days for me, but the laundry piles are less and the food, as we have already seen, can dip pretty low. The times at a family table are fewer, the noise in the house more pointed and further spaced. It’s premature to say “What a good run!” but I can see that we are at the edge of empty. And this little French boy came into our home, came into our life at the thinning of our family in the last year of childhood and he filled it. He re-mothered me. And for that I am truly grateful.

I am not alone in this dream. I share it with the other seemingly bubble-headed boy in our house. William. I tell you this. He came with the prayers still wet on his skin, he came just a few days shy of too late, our son, our deep sadness giving way to joy. He came in a time when our family staggered under the weight of life: his older brother freebasing in a downstairs bathroom and our family reeling, and he was our restoration and hope. I’ll tell you what his name means: defender. Even in his young years he has always defended what he knew. What he dreams of: a family. When the girls were his age, we moved as one. Bike trips and field trips and Disney, when he could barely keep up. He got dragged to every concert, race, competition, performance and event the girls had. We were a little cluster of like-breathing people, a fan club whose membership was full. I’m certain this formed his understanding of life, teamed. Which explains the confused and sad defeat when he looks around at the girls coming and going already gone: “Hey, where’s my family?” The end has snuck up on him, too.

So this summer, I answered that question for him. I answered it with a little hot mess from France. Hey where’s my family? Look son, it’s right here. Now duck, quick! Before he gets you again with that wet towel! Early on, even before our French boy came, I had wondered about his name. Camille. It’s a girl’s name. Even the American coordinator was confused by it. Sure, there was Camille Pissarro, Impressionist painter, but for the most part it is a popular girl’s name. Now, I see it as no accident he came to us. Pronounced perfectly, as close to the French as you can get it, “Camille” rhymes with “famille.”

Where does happiness come from? It comes from children. They have springs deep inside, and from them it ushers forth quite naturally. They share it easily, spontaneously, ebulliently, and it night, while they sleep it refills. When they grow into teenagers they come for it back, and with it they will power their little boats into the great wide sea. I’m grateful these three have so much stored happiness. They will power. Will. He is just what we needed.

We will see this through. We will see this through.