It has been said that family vacations are the triumph of hope over experience. For our little family of four, we have had our share of holiday hilarity, heartbreak, and health scares, but the biggest struggles have always come after returning home, especially for mommy.
It takes my husband a few days to unwind and unplug at the start of our vacations. Last year at the West Palm Beach Hertz, there were huge lines just to leave the rental car property. My usually unflappable spouse was on edge, jaw muscles clenched. I felt like the vacation Dalai Lama as I opined, “It is a privilege for us to have this wait. We are in a car as a family on a vacation, escaping the cold weather. So what if it takes over half an hour just to get on the highway? We are all together with no schedule and no responsibilities.” Kumbaya, hakuna matata, pura vida… I meant it then, I really did, and I (usually) keep it going through most family trips. That is, until…
…we get home. We throw our luggage and children in the door of the apartment in one big heap. One spouse takes responsibility for feeding and washing and bedding down the children, while one works on untangling the rat’s nest of food, gum wrappers, chargers, electronic devices, and papers that were once our carry-ons. The laundry and mail are piled to the ceiling and I have been known to put darks in with the lights, and throw bills in the recycling in my rush to get through it all. I have even washed a bill or two. There hasn’t been a vacation from anything–merely a pause, pileup, and restart of the day-to-day of running a household, a career, a life.
I am as guilty as anybody of posting vacation photos, but can we all please post the post-vacation pictures on Facebook too? The ones of the kids eating stale dry cereal for dinner while Daddy runs out to get milk and coffee for the morning? The one of Mommy doing laundry naked because she peeled off her barf-and-apple-juice-soaked plane outfit?
Don’t get me wrong.
The next few days I am a bit of mess, as is my apartment, even if my husband brings the suitcases down to the storage locker like I asked him (SIX TIMES!). I am certain the kids feel as off-kilter as I do, a little lost and a little lonely after being together in a hotel room for a week. For the first day or so, I, too, have a sense of “Where did everybody go?” Leading separate daily lives is relatively new for families from an evolutionary perspective. Family vacations speak to our primal urge to gather together in one cave and hunker down in a multi-generational human pileup.
Family vacations–short or long, budget or luxury, mundane or exotic–are certainly a privilege. It is privilege to spend precious time with the few people on earth with whom you have really chosen to spend time. After all, some weeks doesn’t it feel like you talk to your coworkers more than your children? Your commuting buddies more than your spouse?
So in to the wee hours of morning when the kids are asleep, the laundry folded, the bills paid, messages answered, I climb in to bed next to half-asleep hubby and say, “Where are we going next?”
