Meeting My Kid Self on Family Vacation

And a big thank you!

Before I launch into today’s post, THANK YOU THANK YOU to all the new subscribers! I am so humbled and grateful. And to the subscribers who’ve been here awhile. You are all helping me get closer to my late-in-life dream of being a full-time writer. On that front, I have some big news in store that I am not quite at liberty to announce. Stay tuned!

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A few weeks ago, right before we left on our current family “vacation” (are these ever really vacations? No), my friend Angela visited with her two children, 7 and 9, a boy and a girl.

Angela is a hardcore parent. Her kids don’t have any screens. They watch like one hour of TV a day. They do chores. They eat vegetables. They bathe regularly.

Usually I am able to dismiss such super-parenting by comparing its results with those of my style of parenting—which basically involves non-criminal neglect and lots of broadband and processed food—and seeing little difference.

But these kids were like the poster children of children, living propaganda for reproduction, the gauzy daydreams of couples expecting their first child. Frankly, I am not convinced they aren’t animatrons Angela busted out of the It’s a Small World ride at Disneyland.

Just a little too adorable. Suspicious.

They greeted me politely. The girl complimented my outfit. They received my gifts as if I had just popped out of a lamp and offered them three wishes. They noted the artistry of my decor. I took them on a walk in the neighborhood, and they gushed over every tree and flower as if they had recently emerged from a lifetime in a nuclear fallout bunker. I felt like some kind of magical fairy that could do no wrong.

Or else a really, really bad mother. Because my kids… do not behave like that. There might have been a brief window, perhaps of a few months, after the age at which everything terrified or exhausted them/me but before they became jaded and learned to roll their eyes, during which they were capable of being enchanted. And we probably missed doing anything enjoyable during that window. The weather was probably bad or my back hurt.

We have been on many, many trips. To far away lands. To amazing places. There has been little enchantment.

Before you have kids, when you think about being a parent, one of the things you find most appealing is showing your kids around this astounding place we call Earth. Everything is new for them, and you imagine seeing things anew through their eyes. Especially favorite places, places of happy memories, the gumdrops of childhood that still taste sweet in your mouth.

For me, of course, that was Kenya. We’ve been twice now, and fortunately my kids loved it, too, mainly because there is very little use of your legs involved. You mainly ride around in a car and look at animals and eat. But also because I told them ahead of time I would feed them to those animals if they did not at least pretend to adore this place most dear to my heart, this piece of me I strain to hold onto. They somehow understood its importance and for once in their lives found the wherewithal to cooperate.

For my husband, in addition to his home state of Arkansas, it’s the great national parks of the West. Two years ago, we made a big trip around Colorado, and this summer it’s Olympic, Cascades, Tetons, now Yellowstone, and onward from here, for almost 3 weeks.

My husband remembers fondly going to these places as a child, sitting in the backseat of the family station wagon, unrestrained by a seatbelt of course, watching the Rockies rise up like a tidal wave and blowing his little boy mind. So once the kids hit a decent age, he started mapping out these trips in a spectacular, grand vision of family travel through these United States, a strategy so brilliant, so over-arching, Dwight Eisenhower would be impressed.

This particular phase he began planning a year ago. He doesn’t do anything half-assed either. When I plan a trip, I do a quick google search for Top Sites, hit up Expedia and Airbnb, book some places, get some plane tickets. Boom. Done. Kevin, on the other hand, spends hours and hours and hours researching every place, every activity, every hotel, changing lodging right up to the very last moment if he finds something better, buying guidebooks and gear and plotting out every step of every way. He does a very, very good job.

And then things go awry. Roads are closed and forest fires ignite and rain moves in and heat waves descend and there are crowds and mishaps and life happens.

And more crushingly, children complain and whine and are not enchanted. He points excitedly and gesticulates frantically and gushes and enthuses and throws down Fun and Amazing Facts like Clapton throws down licks. He reaches back into the past grasp the hand of his little boy self, whom his mother declares was “the perfect child,” and looks into his awestruck eyes.

FAMILY FUN

And then the little boy morphs into our little boy, and also our teen girl, and my husband’s hand just hangs there in the air and his eyes are met with looks of intense boredom and underwhelm. There are inquiries about the presence of wifi and the lengths of hikes and informational updates on levels of hunger, thirst, and energy.

And I confess, I am not always his ally in this demoralizing war of attrition. I want to be here, I really do. I love nature and I love my husband and I even love my kids, especially now that they can roll their own luggage around and grasp exactly why they need to Shut the F Up when it comes to that.

But, I don’t know why, my cooperation is often begrudging. Sometimes I’m just tired of the relentlessness and togetherness of family travel. That is for real, and on this trip, you add the millions of other people. I hate hate hate crowds, and for some reason they are even more annoying when surrounded by natural beauty. It just seems like a waste of a potentially spiritual experience.

And I feel myself reverting to my childhood self, and unlike Kevin’s Boy-Scout-Choir-Boy childhood self, that b*tch was really unbearable. While Kevin was being enchanted and no doubt enchanting, I was often trying my very best to challenge my missionary parents’ Christian love.

When I was 10, we went on a family death march, er, vacation through Europe. Now, my parents’ First Cardinal Rule of vacations was that the ratio of travel time to time at location should be around 2:1. They are all about minimizing cost and maximizing efficiency.  You get there, you look around a bit, then you get the hell out. There is no point in lounging about or even sleeping or eating. Much to my dismay, we rarely went to the beach (my parents hate sun, sand, and laying around doing nothing), but when we did, we drove for an entire day, stayed like 5 minutes, and came home.  And why not, it’s the ocean, it’s there, it’s the same every time, you see it, you maybe eat some shrimp, take a dip, done.  No need to waste your life contemplating your smallness as you gaze out to sea. 

Similarly, we swept through western Europe faster than Hitler.  There’s the coliseum, there’s Venice, there’s a castle, there’s an Alp, have a pastry, go home.  Paris was a 12 hour layover. We gutted the Louvre like a pregnant wild sturgeon. Moscow was harder because it was glasnost, they didn’t give us a Soviet guide, nothing was in English, and gypsy children kept attaching themselves to our legs.  But even there, we got it done, man. There’s that weird Dr Seuss castle, there’s the massive line at McDonalds, there’s dead Lenin, buy a stacking doll, get on the plane before someone recruits you as a spy.

The main thing I remember about that European trip was that I tried really hard to make others miserable. Like I remember this distinctly. I had been (almost certainly) misdiagnosed by a missionary doctor with German measles soon before we left, and I seized upon my recent and severe illness to justify incessant whining and also the purchase of some cool European sunglasses, you know, to shield my overly sensitive, measled eyes from the ravages of the sun. I have a very vivid memory of my mother getting in my face and threatening my life at Linderhoff Castle in Bavaria after I had informed her, while wearing my cool European sunglasses, that it was really unfair of her to demand I walk more than a few yards on German-measled legs (even though we were actually in Germany). We have some fun family photos from that trip, in which I am smiling wanly and bravely through my faux German measles.

Fortunately, Kevin enjoys lounging about and spending money more than my parents, so our family trips are not quite as intense. There’s honestly nothing to complain about, ever. We stay in nice places and eat good food and do fun things. If he and I went here by ourselves, it would be the time of my life.

So what is my deal, I’ve been asking myself, as my inner 10-year-old creeps out of hiding like a raccoon waiting for the trash to be put out. What is my deal. Is it just the burden of parenting? Is it being faced with my children’s lack of gratitude and wonder and blaming myself? Is it not being in control because I have not planned the trip? This last one, I think I can rule out. I actually don’t like being in charge. When I have planned the trip, I am usually even less pleasant.

Honestly, I’m not entirely sure. But I also have this sense that anytime we travel somewhere else, we didn’t go to Kenya. We could’ve gone again. And of course I get why we didn’t go. We’ve been already. Twice. I have friends there still, but my parents came back long ago. I have no home there. We have our wonderful friend Moses, who is a safari driver, take us around to all the parks. But there’s no point in doing that year after year, rationally speaking.

But it still makes me sad. We go to my husband’s home in Arkansas, at least twice a year, every year. The kids swim in his lake and attend his church and play on his football field. I don’t have that. I am a tourist in my home now, and if I am honest, I always was. I never belonged there. My parents now live near their childhood homes, in West Texas. I spent the worst years of my life in the town where they live. Not only is it not my home, it is a place of bad memories and dark emotions. I have to screw up my courage every time I obligingly return.

So that is my working theory as to why I’m not more grateful and enthusiastic to be seeing the astounding sites of the American West. This is a beautiful land. I’m lucky to see it. I’m lucky to be an American.

Or maybe I am just a a whiny, petty 10-year-old in a grown-up body. Always a possibility.

For your closing amusement, this is a parody we made two years ago after our Colorado trip: