Vacation: All I Ever Wanted

Merriam-Webster defines the word vacation as “a scheduled period during which activity is suspended”… which leads me to believe that neither Merriam nor Webster ever had small children.

We just got back from a sojourn to Martha’s Vineyard with our five kids, and both my wife and I are totally spent.

First there’s the prep work… then the packing… then the driving… then the unpacking… and then the whining, tattling, complaining, hitting, shoving, pulling hair, forgetting to go potty, refusing to sleep in a strange place, and general chaotic delirium that naturally develops among even the smallest assemblies of toddlers when they’re over-excited/over-tired and out of the normal throes of life.

Trust me: it’s rough.

Not that I’m anti-vacation. Quite the contrary, in fact. If anything, I’m the one who pushes the annual family vacation – insisting they’re essential to building great childhood memories. When my brother and I were kids, our parents took us on vacation every year; usually for a week, sometimes even two. In the early years we went camping at some Yogi Bear-themes campground in Massachusetts. Then when we got older we did the whole rent-a-cottage-by-the-beach thing in Rhode Island. And those last few years, before I went off to college, we took even longer trips to places like Provincetown, Virginia Beach and Ocean City.

All of our vacations are cataloged somewhere in my father’s meticulous array of photo albums, and just about every picture carries with it some innocent memory of the four of us: my parents, my brother and I. Every now and then I’ll look back on those photos and remember just how fun and adventurous, how carefree and relaxing those vacations were… and I’ll think to myself: what the hell happened? When did these vacation things turn into such a giant ball of stress?

My parents laugh whenever I share these laments with them, usually accusing me of having a selective memory.  Apparently my father nearly had a panic attack every year trying to put the goddamn tent together; and when it would rain (as it inevitably did every time we’d go camping), the tent would leak, thus forcing us into a nearby motel. Then there was the year the muffler on our station wagon fell off and we drove home going 20 miles-per-hour… and the year I spiked a fever and never left the hotel… and the year my brother and I cried on the ground, making a public spectacle out of a blown call in a wiffle ball game… and the year my brother poured orange soda into his ear… and the year I hurled sand at some lady sitting on the beach… and, of course, nothing could top the year my parents’ lounge chairs flew right off the top of the car smack-dab in the middle of I-84.

So while our family vacations may have been fun/adventurous/care-free/etc. for us when we were kids, they clearly weren’t a picnic for my parents. Yet thankfully, year after year, they managed to toil through - leaving my brother and I with a treasure-trove of lifelong memories.

Yes - my kids were a little crazy, and yes - my wife and I were a tad frazzled, and yes – we vowed several times to never ever ever go on vacation again; but then our daughter popped her little head up from behind her brother’s car-seat and declared: “Mommy, I have fun in Marfa’s Vinnerd”…

And in that instant, it was all worth it.