The Vacation Conundrum – Family Trips and the Illusion of Relaxation

Ahhhh holidays and if you’re a mom and you have either went camping, to an air bnb, hotel, cabin or pretty much just about anywhere with your kids, all you have done is changed location. Pessimistic as that may sound, it is the same crying that I hear from a child having a tantrum at the ice cream store because she is in fact not a baby and her mother bought her a baby ice cream cone. At home it would have been because she got her ice cream in orange bowl instead of a pink one. The mother frantically tries to appease her screams and says what everyone is thinking, “well then no ice cream for you”. Then the screams turn into terror as the child realizes that she has gone too far and there is no turning back now, she has refused to eat the ice cream the way it was given to her and if she ends up eating it, she submits to defeat of her original stance and she submits to the power that her mother holds over her. The little girl is thinking, how dare she, I am the boss and she must submit to whatever I request, at whatever time, wherever we are. She doesn’t care that her mother is on holidays from her day job, nor does she care that instead of just having the dog as an audience she has about twenty other families just trying to get through their own ice creams without a tantrum from one of their group.

I look around the camper kitchen and I see a dirty pot on the stove from noodles last night, melted cheese and bread stuck to a cast iron pan from lunch yesterday, and in the sink there is a falling tower of porridge bowls, milk glasses, and forks, knives and crumbs. Beside the sink there is about 6 or 7 recycling bottles that have not made it out to the recycling bag outside. There are toys and shoes strewn about the floor. Dirt and sand, underwear and wet swim trunks laying all over the floor and small bathtub. The phone buzzes with other things that need to be done at home and someone is begging to go mini golfing and to the beach while I stare at the mess. Is this really a holiday? Do we work at our day jobs all year long for these couple weeks of absolute bliss? Wow it’s really amazing isn’t it, I feel so well rested and when I get home to unpack, do all the laundry and put all the floatie toys away, I will be so grateful for such great relaxing time. Ha,ha, I hope you can read the sarcasm in my voice as I write that.

If we were lucky kids, like I was, our mothers did this for us and we had great childhoods with tons of wonderful memories of relatives, lakes, open fires, smores, and daily ice cream and treats. Our children then deserve the same. They deserve the same experiences and we push ourselves to make it the very best that it can be.

Here is the thing though, I won’t be writing that camping is pure bliss and I love it all. I most definitely do not like anything about getting ready for it, the lists, the shopping, the preparing, packing everything we need, finding out when you get there what you are missing and trying to problem solve your way out of it. Then I get the added bonus that once I have the family ready to go, Kevin has a break down on the baler, we are delayed by three hours, arrive in the night, try to back up the camper and get set up in the dark with flashlights while we slap mosquitoes on our calves and yell out orders. This added bonus I get is pretty much every single year, we never arrive in daylight no matter how hard I try to get everything ready. The girls and I had the truck hitched up to the trailer, fully loaded with bikes, firewood, lawn chairs and toys, we had strapped the fridges and made sure they were closed, we had locked all the cubies so they wouldn’t fly open like last year when there was literally bullets of bud light flying down the highway. Nope this year I had the system all beat, I was more than fully ready so I could get there peacefully in the evening, set up, put up my string lights, start a fire and check out the water, beach, store and sign in while it was still open.

I was so disappointed that once again we would go through the stress of setting up in the night and we did in fact even get in trouble with the park mother ranger who was roused from her home at 11 and had to put us in our place literally and figuratively because we were parked in the wrong spot.

I ended up being hangry, angry, unbearably mean, rude, and every bad behavior I can think of. I was the little girl who got the baby cone when she wasn’t a baby, who got the orange bowl when she asked for pink. Just like the little girl though, there was nothing anyone could do about it. That is what was ordered and that is what we got. No amount of tantrum I was about to provide was going to change anything, it never has changed anything and it never will. My bid for power is fruitless and maybe that is where the screaming and tantrum comes from, both the little girl and I had a realization that there was no going back. It was us that had to change to get a modified version of what we wanted.

We don’t all get things the way we wanted. On this trip alone there was the opening night fiasco, a bee bite, a foot injury, a finger cut by a can, a new iphone dropped in the lake, a snake that swam by me and there was tantrums, some from my children and some from myself. These vacations while our children are young will never be the pink bowl we asked for. They are work, sometimes they are tough going, and just when you think what is even the point of doing this, you realize what it is. It may not have been the pink bowl but you were given an orange bowl and with that you still get some sweetness. If you throw the bowl to the floor when your mom hands it to you, for sure, you will not be getting any sweetness at all but if you take a few deep breaths, you may get the same thing you actually wanted just in a different form. You are going to have to take that form because there is absolutely no other choice and if you give up totally and throw it to the ground, it is only you who loses. There is no power struggle to be had when there is just no other choice. If you want to eat, you have to give into the baby cone and the orange bowl. Otherwise you would miss the good stuff. The crackle of the fire, the memories good and bad that bind us together, the smell of the trees in the morning when you have the first sip of coffee, the cold water hitting your parched skin on the beach, or the breeze on your face as the waves hit the shore. You are not at the office, you are not in a laundry room, you are not working in the field, you have indeed changed location and you can pick out all the sweet amazing moments from the work it takes to get there. You see it may not be the pink bowl but otherwise it is exactly what you wanted, a change from the everyday demands and a chance to soak up some summer.

Chat again soon,

Michelle