Mom Camp Takes Seattle

What's Mom Camp, you ask? Well, it all started last year when I decided I was getting these friends of mine together for a girls' trip if it was the last thing I did. I had been begging them for what seems like decades to come visit me (I'm the one who moved so gosh darn far away from them all).

Over the last few years, we had toyed with the idea of getting together and going somewhere fun, but our schedules just never seemed to work out. We had little kids, we are teachers, we are wives, we had busy schedules. During Covid, I think we all kind of came to the realization that we aren't on this earth forever and we need to make time for ourselves and our loved ones.

I finally convinced 6 of them to just throw caution to the wind and meet me in Asheville, NC for a few days. When I had booked the Airbnb and my flight, I told me daughter the plan. She was like, "A  trip with your friends?" And I just said, "It's like how I send you off to summer camp, except it's me who's going this time." And we laughed at the thought of moms going to summer camp.

Thus, Mom Camp was born. Now, don't get me wrong. We have a couple of us who aren't moms in the traditional sense of the word, but they 'mother' nonetheless. One of them is an elementary school teacher and the other is one of the most caring people I know - they both definitely fit the role of mother, whether they have children of their own or not.

8 of the 10 of us are school friends, some of us knowing each other since we were babies. The other two are friends we picked up over the years and have come to be part of our badass girl gang.

We had such a great time in Asheville last year that we decided to go every year! We have a Facebook group where we put out a vote and everyone picked Seattle as the majority of us had never been. We added 4 to this year's trip and we think that 10 is just the right number. Any more than that and it's hard to get everyone to agree on where to go, what activities we want to do, and find a house big enough to hold us all.

We typically like staying in a house so we can all come together and have dinner at night under one roof. We know that not all of us want to do the same things during the day and so we split off into usually two or three smaller groups to go have fun and then meet up at the house for dinner and what we call "hot tub confessions" where we spill our guts.

We talk like women do when we get together. We share our deepest secrets and great recipes, and parenting wins and fails, and marriage highs and lows. It's a lot and there is never anything off the table. We've shared parent, child, and grandchild losses; medical diagnoses, and so much more.

These women know me in a way no one else on this earth knows me. They knew me as a kid, a teen, a young woman, a young mother, and now as the mom to a couple of young adults. Some of them are grandmothers, some are divorcees, some have been married for years.

The things that we all are? Supportive, empathetic, and open-minded. You can't have that many friends for this many years without having those three things in common.

I absolutely recommend going on a Mom Camp trip with your besties. It's the absolute greatest thing in the world for reminding you of what an adorable badass you are. They raise you up, for sure.