RUNNER-UP: Mom Camp

The women blindfolded each other.

“'Mom Camp' is a surprising and moving, smartly cinematic story. Enigmatic in all the right places, it is delivered in a voice both wry and wise. Memorable.”

—Canisia Lubrin


T

he women blindfolded each other. They manipulated their bodies into child-sized superhero costumes. They spun and pinned the velcro bottle closest to the nipple of the mom next to them. “Turn left if a diaper ever exploded in your face!” Curiously, many of the moms staggered right, bouncing off each other in their shiny spandex. Reluctant to view their lives as jokes, mothers preferred to make themselves the objects of ridicule.

Unable to watch any longer, Amélie went for a walk on the internet. Along a muddy path by the lake, she booked a quick trip home to see her mom and sister; after a nap on her bunk bed’s plastic mattress, she confirmed shipping on a few Etsy sales; with a tea in the cafeteria she completed the required time on the breathing app she’d been assigned. Back in the domed meeting room that held a hundred moms, Amélie already felt a little more clear of mind. The women were doing partner yoga but she was here for one reason: to sell her crafts at the Mommy Market. If she were to gain something more profound from this weekend it would be sleep.

Amélie triaged the women. Some wore bright leggings and full-service running shoes. They were at Mom Camp to achieve something. Others were in stylish sweatpants or kimonos. These women were eager to let go of themselves. Amélie was looking for the women in hoodied crop tops and animal ears, the ones who would skip dinner and go straight into the lake. These were the women who were here to transform, and those most likely to have drugs on them. Amélie herself was wearing blue medical scrubs. Dental hygienist, some might have thought, and that was fine. Nurse, others would say, and she didn’t mind. The scrubs were her colour, they were comfortable, and they approximated her identity in a way she felt she couldn’t anymore.



A week before Mom Camp, Amélie could not have imagined such a thing existed. Who had time? She’d spent three years at home with her son and so time had lost its calculable quality. She had set an alarm on her phone with one month ticking down to her expected return to work. Her team of rehabilitation doctors had advised against this. They had said, “Don’t do this.” They recommended baby steps. They said: try cutting vegetables for soup, instead of buying the soup. They said: don’t worry if you leave him a few minutes alone. He’s three and you threw out all the knives and scissors years ago.

Today her baby step was explaining to her three-year-old son Didier that crayons were mediums, not toys. She was doing well. She was already starting to see the working mom she would become. She had been practicing for the promotion to head district surgeon she’d been promised by teaching her son to hold his fingers ergonomically around a cylinder. She didn’t look forward to losing all that fuzzy mothering intuition she’d cultivated, the one that said throw out the scissors. She knew she would turn mothering into a procedure, carve out the parts of herself with a scalpel that she needed to hold a scalpel, and leave behind those she needed to change a diaper. She would be two people, and that would be fine. Three years ago she’d lost the part of her that was her, so what was the worst that could happen when she split this new part into two? Quarters, she thought. She had not forgotten her math.

She knew she would turn mothering into a procedure, carve out the parts of herself with a scalpel that she needed to hold a scalpel, and leave behind those she needed to change a diaper. She would be two people, and that would be fine.

She opened her computer and checked in on her Etsy shop. Two new purchases of the cheesecloth she’d made from Didier’s reused baby clothes and one return on a ready-to-assemble Zen garden, her first attempt at a line of more creative items, which she’d called Amelia’s Remedials. By turning her products away from only baby-facing items, she hoped to entice the mom who had everything into noticing she had nothing for herself. The first product to sell was a clever synecdoche. By sawing his crib to pieces, she’d made a miniature replica of the whole, including baby powder as soil and one of his first combs as a rake.

So much packaging! the Etsy user returning it had written. This product was expensive and smelled like chemicals.

Amélie weighed the comment as she cleaned the breakfast nook. She had little choice of material when sending long-laboured and messy products through the mail. She could only suggest a delivery if the user happened to live nearby. Who was this terrible person?

The porch door rattled. The wind wanted in. It had picked up off the creek that fed the mountains to the ocean and was sliding through the slats of the deck to pursue her. Amélie grew up on the coast of Normandy and had thick, black, permanently tangled hair, always a dozen thoughts in her mind, never a seagull not around. She surrendered the knob and unloaded a sigh into the late morning, massaging her chest, then her lower back, and found herself all at once folded forward over her legs, shaking her top half out like the dirty rag she held.

“You are not cold,” she said out loud and so she stopped shivering. “You are relaxed,” she said, and her shoulders settled. She could create dangers out of nothing and then pierce them with a needle. This was something she had learned to do, forgotten, and was learning again.

Didier’s scream came from all directions.

“You can’t always run to him,” she scolded herself, slowing down long enough to shut the door, to put the cloth down, to fold it. Though she relied now on systematized self-talk, she used to have an instinct she could trust. She referred to it as her moral boner. Her mother once worked for an internationally-touring psychic who claimed D’or would have a seeing daughter. And it’s not Jeanne, her mother had told her.

There were two crayons up Didier’s nose, lodged right into the bridge so she could only see the tips: royal blue and fire engine red, the French flag.

“Walrus!” he shouted, swelling with a sob.

She welcomed the familiar adrenaline. She wandered the house languidly, picking up shoes, keys, a hairbrush. With her son a sweaty ball in her arms, she found all the items easily.



When she was a child, Amélie would accompany her mother on what D’or called her pélégrinages, circuitous half-hour journeys along the chalky white cliffs and back to her regal pink armchair where it turned out she was the saint she’d been praying to. The pace was frustrating, her mother stopping at each bench for a cigarette, but it allowed Amélie the chance to push through the brambly bushes and edge out on the cliff to watch the birds, and the waves, or more specifically, the nude beach below. It always took D’or a cigarette-length time to notice her missing daughter. She’d string together a clothesline of swears as she lilted out over the bushes, her top half twice the size of her bottom. They would stand side-by-side, bravely facing the Atlantic, and it was there, where they could barely hear each other, the wind whipping their hair into each other’s eyes, that D’or told her, for example, that she was having another daughter.

“With who?” Amélie asked, five-years-old.

“Oh, a man. You know how it works?”

It was there that Amélie confessed she’d like to be a doctor.

“Whose doctor?” D’or asked. Then, doubled over laughing, like the birds below.

It was there that the wind blew open her mother’s jacket wide enough that Amélie could lean in past the sticky, thick skin and sarcastic, crass humour to some deeper message being communicated. What was it? Why had she still not discovered what it was?



After dinner and a few glasses of boxed wine in the dining hall, Amélie accepted her placement into a group of three for a sunset activity on the lawn. Phaedra, who wore a sports bra and sweatpants, reexplained the activity they’d all just been explained with an air of competence that came from her connection to a long lineage of mom camp moms.

“We don’t have to do this well,” said Phaedra, “we just have to do it.”

The other member of their group, Candice, an eager woman in her fifties, nodded along as Phaedra spoke, then pulled on a wig and a pair of clown pants, such that they now had no choice but to pivot to her idea for their “Mom Band.” Though Amélie hated being a part of a team, she kept getting told by her husband raising a son was not a one-person job.

“I’ll do the posterboard,” said Amélie, and set about creating a satirical advertisement for Candice the Clown, a children’s entertainer Candice said lived somewhere inside of her.

Strangely, Amélie always thought of the person inside of her as her youngest sister Jeanne. She cast a version of Jeanne as the protagonist in the thrillers she wrote when off duty in Emerg. But Amélie hadn’t written a word of murder or intrigue since Didier’s birth, almost three years ago. Where had Jeanne been hiding all this time? In France, Amélie supposed, and she was glad she’d booked that ticket to check.

There was a commotion near the stage. Having created their band concept in moments, three almost-naked women posed for their album cover: Charlie’s Angels, crosswalk, a wobbly pyramid. On their bodies they’d painted—in what time?—words and images of motherhood: healer and caregiver, the water bearer and the multi-headed Hydra. The women were white, in their late fifties or early sixties, and very evidently the organizers of Mom Camp. As the three women toured the crowd, Phaedra turned and filled them in.

Chelsea, the woman with the oldest skin, tangled hippy-length hair and difficulty smiling, was one of the original matriarchs. “Chels wants to keep everything the same. OG Mom Camp.”

“It’s her baby,” prompted Candice.

“Revel, who’s trans, wants to revamp,” continued Phaedra, motioning to the woman with blue hair and pink pasties with soothers dangling. “She’s had to fight to be included. Most people here are like Of course, I support you, but some are like We were fine before you made this complicated.”

“Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater!” shouted Candice, painting in her smile.

“Can you make it cuter?” Phaedra snapped.

Candice added dimples.

“And her?” Amélie asked, pointing.

With short, dark hair, men’s track shorts and a baby’s water wings, she was the lead in each of the poses. Beautiful and muscular and much younger, she didn’t smile in her poses.

“That’s D, Chelsea’s half-sister and Revel’s partner. They’re non-binary. And a bit of a bitch. In charge of the Mommy Market. They’re going to be the tie-breaker. Trad Camp or something new.”

“Mom’s a mom!” cried out Candice the Clown in her clown voice.

“D’s the money,” said Phaedra solemnly. “They used to be an international model slash soccer player. They pay for this whole thing.” She waved liberally, at the clapboard cabins, the small lake below, and the mountains beyond. This was not a spa or even a resort, just a clearing in the woods a couple hours from the city, abandoned until the summer when children would return. Still, Amélie understood what she meant. For this weekend to exist, someone needed to imagine it, and someone else needed to invest. Money did things: D was a doer.

Amélie kept watching the three leaders. “They each have different words and images,” she muttered at last. “They’re making the scandal public. They want us to decide amongst ourselves.”

“So, the imaginary band we created is really just Candice, who’s kind of a children’s performer?” shouted Phaedra as Candice performed her squats, strong-man poses and sad clown faces. “It’s a commentary on how much mothers are asked to juggle? Sadly, we didn’t have balls. Candice’s music would be repetitive and entertaining, with undertones of repression and nostalgia.”

On the outdoor stage, Amélie had no choice but to face the other moms directly. It was the dumbest thing, standing there and shouting “Bienvenue à la clown Candice!” just to gain cultural cachet for their team. But like the moment she realized she was pregnant and looked at Neil, her mop-haired Classics major, and said the clichéd phrase “We are a family now,” here she was again, unified and uplifted by a “team” she hadn’t meant to belong to.



Amélie’s Etsy site was full of warnings and preclusions: the size and age of a child who could manipulate any given object. The conditions of a return. The fees for packaging and shipping and the exceptions surrounding all these rules were they not to fit the customer’s needs. She didn’t want to rule anyone out. She wanted to make homemade, organic items for the masses. Amélie had dreams of etsy.fr, or more precisely, moving back home to the seaside village where she could lease a market stand, a grey tent flapping in the wind, her hair, somehow, still at last.

“The walrus you showed him on Planet Earth?” Amélie slowed for a yellow light. “You know three-year-olds become the creatures they love.” She turned away from the highway, toward the slow road along the ocean.

“I’m at work,” said Neil over speakerphone. “What are you shouting?”

She looked in the rearview mirror and smiled at Didier. She did not need to shout. She was calm in moments of panic. Carefully, she explained what happened, using details and timelines. She specified, for example, that the crayons were a natural beeswax. She gave a Prismacolor number to describe the exact shade of Didier’s cheeks.

A cyclist cut in front of her. In the mirror she saw Didier reach up for—

“No!”

“Is it—” Neil yelled. “Can you—”

Amélie tried to mimic the relaxed anatomy of the woman on the bike ahead of her as the cries overwhelmed the car. She attempted to breathe with the ocean as it reared up and then backed down.

“I’m taking him to the emergency room, Neil. He needs medical attention.”

Each tone Didier sang out spoke to a different fear she’d had of motherhood, fears she was now transferring back to her impending job as surgeon. What if her hands failed her? If her mind went blank in a critical moment? This was her safe place now, while before it had been the operating room. Where would it be when she moved back and forth between the two? The knot in her stomach reared up and she pulled the car into a steep driveway.

“Are you going to your emerg?” Neil worked through the screams to ask.

“I don’t feel confident performing the maneuver myself right now,” she whispered.

“But if you see Alva—”

She would not cut herself in two. She would use one of her selves to pull out the other one. She would reach through her surgeon to her mother and pat her on the back, lift her chin. She would work, maybe, a little more from the heart.

She would not cut herself in two. She would use one of her selves to pull out the other one.

Amélie hung up on Neil and climbed downhill into the backseat, where she placed her lips on her son’s mouth and blew in a gentle but consistent breath until the crayons dislodged on to her cheek. She held him until they’d both calmed down. They took a short nap, in which she dreamed of putting him back inside of her and returning to work pregnant.



The first-night campfire degenerated as quickly as it was lit. With the weekend schedule questioned and country songs sung, the three organizers stepped out of the circle, granting permission for whatever chaos the women needed to take hold. Amélie didn’t need chaos. She wanted drugs and needed sleep. She watched with exhaustion as one mom stepped forward and poured vodka to stimulate the flames, while another harvested coals to create a material obstacle for the women to traverse. Trying to responsibly cut more firewood for the drunk women, Amélie was nudged and groped from all directions, as though her body here was everyone’s, secondary to her life lived within it. The scrubs were hidden under her thin sweater so she had to name her city, her husband, her name for them to know her. She wanted better questions from them—not what are you, but who are you—but as the women surrounded her, she found a sudden shyness take over without Didier next to her, her most useful referent and conversational point after the scrubs. She must have seemed to them so cold and diminished, because she was now wearing three coats from three different women, had one’s arm around her, another on her lap, a third chin on her head.

“The doctors call it codependency,” she told the women. “But if I actually rely on my son for an identity, how could I be here?”

She looked down and it occurred to her that she wasn’t really. Only her body was here. She hadn’t brought anything important with her. A sort of horror storytelling began, and the talking stick was fast approaching. Amélie knew she’d have to find something to latch on to. She applauded Phaedra, who had told a very long and emotional story about a dropped first-birthday cake and was now rolling her eyes to stop the tears.

“I am a mom and I have a story,” Amélie murmured in chorus with the women. “And the story goes like this...” She tried to pass the baton to the woman next to her, but Candice would not accept it.

“You have to go,” she insisted. “You were just telling me a story.”

Amélie denied it.

“You’ve told me this story three times today!”

It wasn’t untrue, but Amélie was only practicing what she’d been told was a cold bedside manner. Whenever she found someone, like Candice, who spoke as consistently to herself as her own mother did, she ended up speaking back to them, in harmony, with liberation. They wouldn’t listen, she always thought; they couldn’t.

But Candice had been listening. Candice whispered the tale back to her, as the other women’s knees heaved up and heels slammed down to the chant of “Do your best! Do your best!” Amélie accepted a shot of tequila, closed her eyes and pictured Didier: sticky and round, the tilt of his head when she breastfed him, the way he said so many sounds wrong and rolled before he crawled.

“He thought he was a walrus,” she concluded.

The women groaned as though the punchline had been too obvious. When a smore hit her face, Amélie knew she must make a confession worthy of Mom Camp. She had to break through something and enter a new relationship with herself. She knew these terms well. She had been swimming in them for over a year. And she knew the place in which to retrieve her confession, so shameful yet sure of itself, blaming and pitying her like an elbow to the inside of her ribs.

“My mother had a difficult childhood,” Amélie continued on and on. “We never got her full attention. I don’t want to be the same. I want to give him all of me.”

The women hushed and cooed. Done, Amélie buried the stick in the dirt and no one protested. She retreated to her car, curling her tiny pliable body into Didier’s car seat. She texted her son goodnight emojis and sobbed into his smell. She wished she was huddled at home, Didier babbling codes on her spy cam, Neil attempting to download a movie, a mom-friend she’d texted moments before showing up out of the blue with a bottle of whine. Was that all it took, to be a mom? Just staying home?



Weeks later in Normandy, Amélie would be startled by a figure kneeling at the glass coffee table next to her mother’s pink armchair. A child doing a puzzle? Her mother sorting through her coasters? No: Jeanne and her headshots. Amélie slapped at the window and Jeanne dropped to her stomach, then reappeared with her nose against the glass.

“What are you doing here?” Jeanne’s voice rose. “Did you leave your family?” She waded through open-mouthed suitcases for a pair of pants. Would Jeanne-Bébé ever grow up? Amélie slipped past her sister to look at the headshots. They were quite good. On top of them she tossed the photos of her son she’d printed for D’or, who didn’t like screens. Jeanne picked them up as Amélie settled by the armchair and waited.

Do you know how special this child is, you who won’t have children?” Jeanne asked in an American accent. “Do you wonder how this kind of love could exist, you who breaks with everyone who loves you?” Jeanne snorted.

D’or stepped on the top stair and Jeanne tossed the pictures down. She made one of the low back-of the throat groans that go on forever. D’or entered flourishing a pink cape-like scarf. It fell to the ground and revealed her body, warped into a full-length black leotard.

“Hot flash,” she said as she folded herself into her armchair. She peeled the fabric audibly from her chest and it snapped back. “Jeanne takes me on my walks. We go past the corner store. The lottery is my only hope.” She leaned forward with some difficulty to pat Amélie’s shoulder. “If I win I will come to Didier.” She relaxed her feet into Amélie’s lap.

“We bought you tickets last year. You missed your flight, remember? You were sick of people telling you what to do?”
D’or let the memory fizzle with the wave of a wrist. She squinted at the image.

“So you’re still walking,” prompted Amélie. “What else is new?”
D’or turned to Jeanne. “That’s it. We’re not here to entertain you.”

Jeanne blew kisses to her mother. “I just stay here. I work for Maman and she gives me allowance.” She grinned so her front teeth with the gap between them would show. She waited for one of them to say, Jeanne, why do you stoop so low? or Jeanne, you can do so much better.

“Jeanne,” Amélie said instead. “Stop smiling in your mugshots.”



Didier ran through the rows of the E.R., stopping in front of people with interesting injuries to ask them questions. “Do you do that?” he asked a woman in a neck brace, bobbing his head forward. “Why not blood?” he asked a pregnant woman. Neil had a newspaper spread on either side of him. A seven-year PhD candidate in Classics, he had little bearing on the current world and thus feigned an immense interest in it. He often joked he was a doctor first, professor second, but he wasn’t a doctor in any sense of the word, nor was he yet a professor. Amélie sat behind Neil, concealed from the view of any personnel except the very attractive Nose, Ear and Throat Specialist.

“I liaised with Spinoza today,” said Neil. “I was listening to a podcast,” he clarified. “But I think you’d enjoy him. Mister Spinoza...”

“When do you find time to listen to podcasts?” she asked.

“I have them in my ear when I work.” He craned around. “You didn’t know that?”

“Such a fundamental thing about you!” she exclaimed. “But how do you write your dissertation with a voice speaking to you?”

Neil was quiet. Alva was paged to the front desk and Amélie looked intently at her phone until Neil’s silent concern was overbearing.

“You might talk to her,” he said. “Just to check in? Let her know about the apps?”

She knew he was right. A quick conversation with Alva in the right mood could buy Amélie another few months.

“In a minute,” she said, and typed up the Etsy reply she’d reworded multiple times.

I appreciate your critical eye, she wrote to the anonymous asshole. I have a new item I think you’d like better. Could I deliver it to you to avoid packaging? I can travel.

“Amelia!” Alva sauntered out of her office, applying lipstick blindly, and when Amélie stood, landed a fake slap on her cheek and one to the butt. “Four kids I birthed and each one I felt like killing but I didn’t. Did I? I didn’t. Instead, I went back to work to raise surgeons.” She was walking away and Amélie hurried after. Alva stopped to drink from the water fountain. “Two of the kids aren’t talking to me, but I have a job,” she said, her mouth full. “So instead of killing, you come in and save lives.” She repeated this twice before disappearing below the front desk.

Alva’s life stories always felt like preaching. Amélie dried her eyes.

“It’s just I don’t know that I will save any,” said Amélie, leaning forward. “I’ve become a little enmeshed in the process? These cycles of remediation, these apps they give me, they’re not exactly finite.”

“You know as well as I do that performing surgery is more refreshing than a spa day.” Alva lifted from her squat and slammed her clipboard against the cement wall. “Amelia, you’re not sick. You’re just a mother. And a good surgeon.” Alva pulled a wad of papers from behind the sink and waved them in Amélie’s face. Jeanne’s Death, the title read. “You’re on the schedule for the first.”

There was nothing more she could do. If Alva told her she must, then she would. Amélie sat back behind Neil, defeated.

“You tried,” Neil said in the car. “As Spinoza would say—”

Her phone buzzed. I organize an annual mom camp in the mountains, the user had replied. I run something called the Mommy Market. Booth = no packaging. Come sell yourself! DM me for more details.

DM? thought Amélie, for she read it as MD. But it wasn’t; in fact, it was the direct opposite. And could she be? The very opposite of a surgeon? A mother, through and through?



All day leading up to the next campfire, the women came to Amélie, confirming that when she’d gone deep she’d uncovered something for them, turned a mossy stone on its head. My son too, they said, or, like the big-lipped woman in that TV show, My mother, my mother. The women blurred one into the next, spotting Amélie on the parallel ropes, stretching her bow in archery, a chain of moms drinking out of novelty-sized champagne bottles, crowning each other with tree branches, donning matching onesies. By the time Amélie understood she was not only linked to this amorphous being, but the temporary head of it, she was sitting on Phaedra’s shoulders painting the eye of a mom mural on the side of their cabin. She was nominated as the model for a plate of nachos the size and shape of a mother’s body. Eating brownies on Candice’s top bunk until the slats gave way, they slid slowly through the frame, moms on moms. But someone was cut and bleeding and they chanted in a circle beneath the moon, billowing a blood-stained sheet between them. One mom tried to call home and the others tore apart her phone until the woman drove off down the logging road. The most responsible moms chased her to say the phone they’d broken was not her own, but a burner phone with which one of the least responsible moms had purchased all the drugs. The mother reluctantly returned and they swaddled her. The closeness of the group reminded Amélie of the crew of nannies she’d imagined for Jeanne in her books. Each tome a different woman’s story; each murder the women’s revenge.

D, Chelsea and Revel were nowhere to be seen on this extracurricular night of events. While there was no immediate need for them, Amélie felt as Didier might have at her absence: cold, perhaps, or hungry. Phaedra led Candice and Amélie by the hand to show a two-floor log mansion on a cliff overlooking the lake. Through the warmly-lit picture window they saw Revel singing karaoke, D rolling a joint, Chelsea lounging on the couch on her phone. A white van rolled up a back road and delivered them pizza.

“They’re so themselves,” whispered Candice.

“They’re assholes,” said Phaedra.

“Are their kids grown up?” asked Amélie.

Walking back to her cabin with a limp and poison ivy rash at first light, Amélie could see that, despite their absence, this had all been a part of the organizers’ planning. The day had been a pretense for the night. This nocturnal childlike state was the moms’ chance to act out the life they would have led had they not borne their children. They had, in some way, returned. Climbing into bed, she set her sights on today’s Mommy Market. There she would take what she had of Didier and sell it. And then? The decision of whether or not to return to work would present itself, clear as though it came from her.



A seagull coasted by and dropped a mussel shell at Jeanne’s feet.

“I would like to come to this camp,” Jeanne said. “You might have invited me.”

She ripped the mussel half and placed the two shells on her eyes.

“I look good,” she said, but Jeanne didn’t look good. Her hair was wet and matted, there was sand stuck to her forehead, and the bowls beneath her eyes were darkened. She’d gone through the whole breakup and back again.

“Jeanne,” said D’or, pacing behind them. “You will not have kids.”

“Is it a threat?” Jeanne asked, smiling sadly at her toes.

Amélie turned back. “What did you say? What did you say to Jeanne?”

D’or flicked her cigarette around her head like a halo. The clouds got caught up in it. “Kids? Not Jeanne.”

“What are you two?” asked Amélie. “One minute a comedy duo, the next a married couple? Jeanne, why don’t you move out?”

“It might be a prediction,” whispered Jeanne. “She often knows these things.” She rolled to her knees and began to make a sand castle.

“Jeanne won’t have kids because she is one!” yelled D’or. “She is my baby still, look!”

“Maman, regarde, it’s a house for my children! All the children I won’t have!” Jeanne was cackling now, crawling around her new creation. The seagulls circled too. D’or grappled with a small step up to the promenade, to reach another bench.

“Did they like you?” Jeanne asked. “At this camp for moms, did they say Amelia, you have such a perfect life, how do you do it?” Jeanne was squatting over her sand castle, both its queen and the princess trapped in its tower.

Amélie stood up. She knew better than to answer these questions. What were the chances her sister, sensitive, sniveling, would ever become a mother if she knew the details?

Jeanne looked up at her. “Did they say, Amelia Bedelia! You must have a little sister you played house on to grow up to be such a wise and wicked woman!”

She was still shouting nonsense as Amélie helped her mother up the step. They sat on the bench and D’or smoked a cigarette and Amélie watched Jeanne move slowly toward the water, as though doing so was a dream she once had. This seaside, industrial-turned-tourist town and these two strong, larger-than life women had made and not quite broken Amélie, but prepared her for a life with small fissures she was finding and stitching up. How was Jeanne going to heal?

“You should go to this camp,” Amélie told D’or.



At breakfast the mothers held their heads together in adult hangovers. Amélie ate her eggs and watched the tables unfold and rise in the woods for the Mommy Market. She opened her morning app, then put it aside. She was paying close attention to her body. She was already breathing. Today she felt sturdy and fully-formed, made out of a material that could not be reshaped like clay.

Amélie made a plan as she dragged her Rubbermaid bins through the mud. She would count a float and put it in her lab coat. She would spread Didier’s infancy upon the table. She would take Mom Camp for what it was: a camp full of her target market. She put away all the standard best sellers—the baby-scented hand cream and the baby-butt egg timer—and only displayed her new line for mothers.

Moms floated past her table as though on a slow train ride. They wore expressions they’d practiced at their children’s science fairs and carried with their travel mugs an ethereal disregard for anything that wasn’t already or soon-to-be theirs. They picked up the round candles with thick red wicks made from all the formula Didier had rejected when Amélie was having trouble breastfeeding. They prodded the massage balls made by dismembering the rubber dinosaurs from Didier’s mobile.

“Is this part of a vacuum cleaner?” The women stood transfixed until they could no longer hear the chime.

“It’s seventy dollars. Made from my son’s first stroller.”

Amélie looked for the first time at the booths around her. These were, what, gift items? A collection of ceramics representing math concepts. Puppet characters of extinct animals. But this was a Mommy Market! To be a mom, one needed to be oneself first. Her products were there to remind the moms of themselves.

Amélie kept an eye on the showy log mansion until at last D loped down the hill in a vintage Adidas tracksuit, smoking a vape pen, carrying a fishing rod.

“Ten dollars for your tables!” they hollered.

But as Amélie went to intercept D, the fishing rod knocked the product from her hands. It exploded on the hard-packed soil beneath them, a ten dollar bill floating to land on top.

“What was it?” D asked, squatting athletically to pick up the money. They held up a blue crayon and a red one.

“A small life raft for your bath,” stammered Amélie. “To hold your joint, or soap. Tiny wicks to light as a candle if you prefer. A replacement for the smelly zen garden.”

D looked at her. “The French Etsy girl. Thanks for coming.” And they walked off.

Amélie glued the raft back together because she was not someone who fell apart. She was someone who was nimble with her hands. She was reminded of the feeling she had when she first built the Zen garden, as though she’d both created a puzzle and solved it. With a surgeon’s precision cut, Amélie approached D on the dock.

“Reduce, reuse, recycle, renumerate. Children are a multi-billion-dollar industry—why not their mothers? Small-scale, slow-manufactured mommy items made by moms for moms. Minimal packaging.”

D tapped at their canoe with the fishing rod. “I don’t invest in products. I invest in people. Your brand isn’t there yet.”

Amélie sat next to D and looked down into the lake, where if Jeanne were here in her books she’d be floating. No matter what she did, Amélie couldn’t picture Jeanne as anything more than an outgrown teenager, impaled from a tree, or devoured by vultures on the beach. Why did she do it, kill her sister in her books? It was preservation, wasn’t it? It was the worst thing come true; it was her own hand instead of another’s. And of course, the chance to save her, for she never finished these books, never really killed her, never really saved her either.

Why did she do it, kill her sister in her books? It was preservation, wasn’t it? It was the worst thing come true; it was her own hand instead of another’s.

With a bravery Amélie would ascribe to her protagonist, she stepped into the canoe. It rocked so wildly she sat down. With an almost imperceptible nudge of their expensive sneakers, D pushed her off.

“Am I not branded enough for you?” Amélie cried out as she and the canoe drifted away with the wind. “What do you want, a tattoo of Mom Camp on my neck?” She searched around her for a paddle and felt the crayons in the newly-glued raft poking at her through her lab coat. She pulled it out and tossed it in the water. It did not float. “So I’ll go canoe!” she shouted into the breeze, though she knew that without a paddle she couldn’t. “Is that why you made this camp? Will canoeing make me a better mom? Will I watch a droplet create a ripple effect and think of all the consequences of my past and future actions?”

She knew she was too far out to be heard now, but she was on a roll. She was the main character in her thriller novel. She was Jeanne. The distance grew between her and the other moms. They lined the beach shouting instructions on how she could return to them, but she didn’t listen. She also didn’t do her breaths. Instead, she dove gracelessly and kicked.



A drinking game was set in motion at dinner. The constraints determined, the women fell into silence, grinning over their soup and wine. The looming announcement about Mom Camp’s future provided easy conversation.

“Will they open up the camp to dads?”

“What about women who don’t have children?”

“I think there could be more activities,” Candice suggested. “Like horseback riding, or a shooting range?”

“I’m a—bearer of children—and I have duties beyond drinking and drugs,” said Phaedra. “I want to be here, but I wish my daughters could come with me.”

“You have daughters?” asked Amélie. “You want to bring your children to Mom Camp?”

At the M-word, she downed her wine and looked around for more. The tables had mostly cleared. Even the leaders were zipping their announcement into their windbreakers and pulling down their tuques, closed to further suggestions. The surveys they’d completed were left unread under a rock by the garbage can.

“I’d like to start a revolution,” Amélie told Phaedra as they collected armfuls of Baby Duck from the kitchen for the final campfire. “In response to their announcement, don’t you think there should be an outcry?”

“Don’t make me say a mom-word,” Phaedra warned. “I’m so drunk.”

They passed a bottle back and forth as they crossed the grass.

“Who is this revolution for?” asked Phaedra. “And who is it against?” She stopped walking. “Are you a mole?”

When Phaedra slipped into their cabin to get a jacket, Amélie settled on the deck. From here she could look down at the fire pit, and also up at the log mansion above. If her sister was here, that house would not catch fire fast enough. She didn’t need to hear the decision: she knew the history and fate of Mom Camp as well as she knew her own. The journey she’d unwittingly undergone in the canoe was personal, and she didn’t wish to share it with others so they could all feel a sense of forward motion, or growth. She knew now that no matter how much moms and caretakers sifted and shook each other, their sediments were the same, murky and malleable, and she was ready to settle back into form, no matter the shape.



When Didier would tell her, years later, that he had never noticed her gone that summer, Amélie would say, “What summer?” She would refuse to share the memories of Mom Camp with her son, whose existence had permitted her attendance. She thought speaking to him of her time there would let him join her around the fire, and the fire was hers and the women’s. He could sit, screaming, in the bough of a tree, and she would not turn and run to him. She would not even hear him. So she said, “What summer?” and left it at that.

About the author

Véronique Darwin is a fiction writer with stories in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern and PRISM International. She is looking to publish her short story collection Mom Camp and her short novel by Seabird. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph, where she completed a mentorship with Sheila Heti. She writes, teaches, and makes theatre in the mountain town of Rossland, BC.