Like Franklin, the mouse who tells stories in that kid book, I gather all the sights and then I barf them back onto here so you don't have to go on vacation with us and live through the reality.
The good parts of vacation
all the voices in the next room when you wake up. Especially voices that are muffled with some laughs and the sounds of pots and pans so you know you're getting up to some food already half made. There's a gramma's house quality to that sound where you know you're cared for yet your toes are still horizontal and rubbed against each other in gentle glee.
The other good part is all the kids. Kids eating cereal. Kids on the couch. Kids playing pretend bar and serving you milk with mayonnaise in it. Kids playing water volleyball and basketball and pickleball. Some of those kids are your actual kids that you slaved over to make them into these viable, loveable kind beasts. Some of these kids are rentals that are the cousins and so you have no worries about filling their stomachs, someone else is on that. They are for filler and for comic relief. They're funny and interesting and they fatten out a lively nest.
The hard part about vacation is all the people.
At some point in a big house with your whole extended family or most of them on one side of your family anyway, at some point there is a level reached where you can't be in the middle of the pond anymore too many ducks quacking. So you go outside with a book and float in the pool for about 20 hours because the pool is so warm and the sun nice and you have a new hat from the thrift store that you're hoping has no lice but you gotta take some risks in this life.
Then you can have your break from having to function.
Some of the fam like B can sit in the shady porch area and command conversation for all day as the people come and go from the lazing couches. He's either reading, having a relaxed thoughtful conversation or cooking. This isn't a bad side of him. I've never seen or heard so much from him since the 70s and I met him in '91.
The hard part is hauling dementia mom from the bed to the chair in the morning and vice versa at night. It takes three of us and a sling under her. It's like hauling mechanical Jaws out of the water who is broken and rigid rubber and needs fixing. But no special effects guys.
I am glad she's there but I am sad she's less herself than ever. Her presence is there and as the only surviving daughter (there was only ever me) I still expect her to turn back into herself. As a kid of a mom you always always think your mom is going to be there for you and come back. I see that feeling and I have no control over that feeling. It is just genuine belief. Like Santa. Which I still have.
An unchangeable real feeling of faith, and a good thing.
The bad things are being annoyed by weird personality quirks that in the long run, on the car ride home on flying tires, those minor opinions that clash with your own, well, they're in the right place, back with the people who own them. You are safe in your car with your way of seeing the world and back in your dreamy gloved life, feeling around for your own truth and sometimes hitting gold. That's all we can do.
We're so lucky, really. I like those voices in the next room.
I love coming home to the horses and the slow routines of regular days. Even though when you come home and your house doesn't look like an unlived in immaculate air bnb you momentarily have a heart squeeze. Look at how much work there is just to maintain this level of lived in. This takes alot of work.
But then B is sleeping in a chair he's so tired and the girls are passed out on the couch and the tv is on some show they are loving right now but no one is awake and I haven't been on my phone for 4 days except to take pictures and I sit looking at stupid shit and wondering simultaneously why watching people do stupid shit on my phone matters at all. I think it's how cavemen looked at the fire. It's just flickering. It's like intermission.
On this trip there was some pool talk about marriages and babies. This seems foreign. My kids are the babies. But I listen. Because I guess this is the ocean talking, coming forward to bring new things, washing back to tell the rest of the water. What they saw.
It is good to give yourself to a group no matter how many quirks there are. Take a library book, especially one about a fat australian comedic singing actress that you don't even love, a memoir about trying to have a baby and liking boys and girls and also being fat and having that cool accent. What's not to like. It's so fun to read the story of a life and think about your life, while floating in water while someone else cooks.
She hit on all the things that matter. Food, especially sugar, babies, hollywood, love, figuring out what matters, traveling and innocence.
Just like the whole vacation.
