Something I have been thinking about a lot this summer is decision-making.
Tonight, as I watched our first session TM campers give their speeches at the TM Council Fire, I was struck by how related my preoccupation with decisions were with their reflections on their time as campers.
Every single day at Birch Trail, your daughter is making decisions. How will she contribute to this community? What does she need from it? Who does she want to be in it? And unlike a lot of places in her life right now, those decisions are genuinely hers to make.
At home, it can be hard to find space for that. The stakes can feel too high, the schedule too full, and the instinct from teachers, coaches, and yes, sometimes even parents, to step in is too strong. At Birch Trail, we design our program around letting them practice. We guide without taking over.
Here’s how that has played out these past few weeks.
I watched a camper decide to tell the truth to a friend, even though it was hard and she knew it would lead to a difficult conversation. She did it anyway, and that is not a small thing. That is, actually, a very hard thing that a lot of adults still haven’t figured out.
I watched a camper decide to be vulnerable, to say out loud that something was bothering her instead of keeping it inside. She was met with her counselor, her big sister, and a cabinmate who walked with her, comforted her, made her laugh, and helped her through it.
I watched so many girls decide to branch out and find the people who make them feel like themselves — not who they think they should be, or who they’ve always been at home, but their actual, comfortable, unguarded selves. That kind of belonging doesn’t just happen. It’s chosen. It was at the center of so many TM speeches tonight: friendships formed on the very first day of camp, and friendships built just this summer with people who now feel like sisters.
And then there’s this: I watched a camper accidentally drop a single drop of paint on her counselor’s sweatpants during face paint. The camper was devastated. Without missing a beat, the counselor picked up the paintbrush and rolled a giant glob of paint all the way up her own arm. It’s not a big deal, see? The whole thing dissolved. That counselor was soon covered head to toe in paint, the entire cabin was giggling on the airstrip, and a moment that could have become a memory of shame became something else entirely. She made a split-second decision about what that moment needed, and she got it exactly right.
These are the decisions that don’t show up in any activity schedule. But they are, I’d argue, the whole point.
But the cabin is, perhaps, the most central place where our decisions meet impact.
Your daughter has been living in close quarters with a group of girls she may or may not have chosen, but who she now knows in a way that really only immediate family knows one another. She has been making the real kind of compromise; not the kind where everyone gets what they want, but the kind where the girl who needs silence to sleep has to find a way to live alongside the girls who are still hyped from the evening program and spending some extended flashlight time together. (As my former counselors and cabinmates may recall, I fell squarely into the former category.) The girl who isn’t too worried about where her things land has to contend with cabinmates who feel differently. Everyone has to figure out what role they play, how they contribute, and what it means to be responsible to a group and not just to yourself.
This is hard. It is supposed to be hard. And it is one of the most valuable things that happens here, especially when it doesn’t go smoothly. What she’s learning right now about how to show up, how to advocate for herself, how to give a little, how to repair something when it breaks, she will use that for the rest of her life.
The remarkable thing is Birch Trail girls look forward to doing not only this, but in putting all that learning and decision-making to the test as Tamaracks, living together in one big cabin. They look forward to it. And tonight TM stood up and spoke, movingly, about what those decisions led to: choosing to push themselves onto a life-changing Isle Royale trip, choosing to get on the bus to camp in the first place, choosing to move through really hard moments, choosing to be open to friendships they didn’t see coming.
Their speeches left me with this thought:
The more opportunities we give girls to make decisions that affect their own lives, and to see how those decisions play out, the more resourceful, resilient, kind, brave, adventurous, and compassionate they become. They grow more capable of creating spaces where others belong. They grow more comfortable and confident with themselves, which allows them to lead and to be role models for the girls coming up behind them. This is the work we get to do each summer with our BT campers, and then summer after summer, through their time as a TMer, they build up these skills. And then, hopefully, they will come back as counselors to do this work on behalf of future generations of Birch Trail campers.
Tomorrow, our first session campers will head home. We will miss them terribly, but I am filled with pride knowing they are carrying with them all that they have learned about themselves from their own decision-making from this summer back to their families, friends, schools, teams and communities. And we are so excited to welcome our second session campers into this joyful, silly, thoughtful community on Sunday.
