Mutterschaft

While one can experience many things at the Radiocamp (from learning in the workshops to producing audio pieces, from having the best conversations while drying dishes to paddling a boat on the beautiful lake), this testimony focuses on my experience of collective care and multi-generational ‘motherers’ among people meeting for the very first time (strangers!).
1. I joined the gang just as I saw them walking out of the camp to get ice-creams! Miri said she has been coming to RadioCamp ever since she was a child and adults used to take her and other kids to get ice/creams and now it was her turn! You know this feeling that you just walked in an already existing beautiful tradition? I was there! She was taking my child, and her child to get them ice-creams and the day after, she took another kid and her own. I am not sure if I was more moved by the continuum of this “praxis” or the kindness of the act itself. Whichever, I felt like my child and I made new “kin”s there and I even dreamed that if the three kids meet even once a year, they are still present in each others’ lives!
2. Long after midnight, people are still sitting around the fire. There appears one party mix box of chocolate for everyone to pass around and share! All day long there is more than enough food, snacks and everything but this person thought about this moment and obviously didn’t just think of themselves (and I use “them” purposefully to de/gender the act); no wonder the same person does the most invisible task when it is time to cleaning up after ourselves on the last day of the camp and despite their age!
These instances motivated me to ask if living less alienated lives in the present atomizing conditions was possible? Could we create a community that is explicitly inclusive (also for children)? How can we experience “kinship” among strangers? These questions, I shall bring with me to a Radiocamp “open space” conversation next year as well!