Day: June 11, 2018

Surprisingly, this is the first time I’ve felt in any way alone in the last few days. That is one of the untold secrets of vacation. There is little actual downtime in terms of collecting yourself and having moments of private reflection. I wondered aloud why I could not write more than 10 minutes at any point during this vacation and the answer was the same as the one for why I was looking forward to getting back home today.

Vacations are wonderful and afford me a chance to get away from the routine of it all. Vacations also arrive with hidden pressure and expectation. This is not the straightforward ‘I need you to do this now’ but instead the subtle and oft self-generated pressure of wants. I wanted to spend time as a united family. I wanted to have one on one time with my partner and fall deeper into her. I wanted to spend time with three (dem franchise!) boys. I wanted to play card games long into the night and grill and walk on the beach and dig beach forts (man’s last outpost against the waves). I wanted to take walks to my coffee shop. All of these things–these wants–vanish in the simplicity of daily routine. As I recently discovered, when there is nothing going on there is plenty of time to think about why and just as much time to figure out what to do about it.

I have a very happy and healthy home life with my family. It could be much better. There are routines and restrictions that should be embedded to ensure that fun is effortless yet all of our responsibilities are well met. We should be growing, not stagnant. Here in the last hour and a half of vacation home space I recognize that vacation puts all of that on pause and throws us together in a way that presents entirely new demands which are themselves exhausting. Here, hours past dawn, my kids are sound asleep. This never happens at home. We have done as much as we can. We’ve had as much fun as we can take.

It is time to come home.

In the story, A Small Place, Jamaica Kincaid riffs on the idea of seeing Antigua from a tourist’s eyes. It is in essence a guided tour through that world from that perspective. She leads you unerringly through the good and bad, the real and the unwanted. She writes, “The thing you’ve always suspected about yourself the minute you become a tourist is true: A tourist is an ugly human being. You are not ugly all the time; you are not an ugly person ordinarily; you are not an ugly person day to day. From day to day, you are a nice person. From day to day, all the people who are supposed to love you on the whole, do.”

All of these words swirl around my thinking the days I spend on vacation. It hits me less in the beginning than in the end as I prepare to go home and return to my daily life and routine. I find myself realizing that the person I’ve been and those who are with me have been while on vacation is not necessarily great. I just walked into a situation where my boys (two by blood one by relation) were digging holes in the sand and waiting for someone to fall into the hole. It was originally explained to me as a small prank where their brother would step into a small depression that couldn’t hurt him, but I soon realized they’d made other holes that were not small. I immediately required them to seal these up.

What makes a person think its okay to set up someone like that? What is it about being away from home with the freedom to be anyone that leads many people to be the worst version of themselves? I worry about my kids when they are like this and I worry that it is more than just them.