Awhile back, Black Hockey Jesus wrote a post about returning to his childhood home in Michigan, and how his adult skin shed to reveal that he was still just a boy, despite having reached the age of 37.
It resonated with me, that post.
Some kind of barometric change grips me when I’m within shouting distance of my family. I’m edgy, over-sensitive. Quick to anger and tears, which are for me sometimes one and the same. I am suddenly 15, truculent and grudging. I want to pull them closer than they want to be while at the same time pushing away their outstretched hands.
The family vacation — an invention of the devil.
Part of it is the build-up; I wait for months to leave the flatlands of Chambana behind me for the pounding rhythm of the ocean. I crave it, yearn for it. I pin my hopes on it. Truth is, I like being home. What I really want is for my home to be here, on this Cape Cod sand dune.
This place has become so precious and symbolic to me that it can never measure up to the dreams I conjure sitting in my pocket square of a backyard, sun beating down mercilessly on the treeless patch of grass punctuated with what Realtors will misleadingly call a “patio” of rough, gray concrete.
When I get here, it is never as I imagined. With two small children, I still spend my time cooking and cleaning, only here the pressure to maintain order at all times is intense. This is not my house. This house belongs to my mother, and my mother likes order.
I like order, too, but it isn’t easy to achieve in a strange place with one arm full of baby and the other being pulled on by a four-year-old so excited that she can barely get her words out. In my quest to wring every last bit of fun from my summer vacation, I decided to spend 10 days here without my husband, who cannot afford to take 21 days off from writing his dissertation.
Everyone offers to help; I feel guilty. No one offers to help; I am enraged.
Best vacation ever!
At night when I finally crawl into bed, my head feels like a nest of hornets. All I can hear is their high, ringing buzz. My shoulders are pulled up into my neck and I can barely keep my eyes closed. It isn’t helping that I have a new editor at my paid gig, and my best self isn’t really showing up for work right now.
I know this sounds like the insane (inane?) complaints of a spoiled child. I know you are saying, “So stay home, stupid!”
I say those things to myself, too. But there is a part of me, a part that has the capacity to be endlessly disappointed, that keeps hoping that someday I am going to figure out how to manage being a daughter, sister, wife and mother all at the same time.
Truth is, I don’t think there are many of us who can manage that with grace. I think there is some part of us all that retreats to the well-worn (toxic?) patterns of our youths when we are with our family of origin. Complicating the situation is the fact that while we are all the same as we used to be, we are all vastly different, as well.
I am not the same person who set out for Chambana in August of 2006. I look the same, I sound the same, but my fractured heart mended in ways that make me also entirely different. At home I feel (mostly) capable, confident—adult.
Here, in the summer playground of my youth, I feel insecure, incompetent—childish.
I’m stuck somewhere in the middle, between girl and grown-up, parent and child, sibling and self. I always think it’s going to be different this time, but it never is. I never am. I am always the same, naive child who thought she had the power to make everything better, if only the grown-ups would listen to her.
Now I am the grown-up, and I’m still not sure anyone’s listening. Only now, I’m not sure why I care if they hear me, or not.
{ 13 comments… read them below or add one }
This is fantastically insightful. Now, get home. We miss you here.
Thanks for saying that stuff – it makes total sense.
It’s never the same when you go home. And, I’m not sure if it was harder before or after my parents divorced. My dad lives in the last house I lived in before leaving for college, but now there’s different furniture and a woman I hardly know from Arizona is sleeping where my mom used to. My mom’s house, on the other hand, is completely new to me, so I think that’s easier to adjust to. Weird, isn’t it?
I was doing a whole lot of nodding as I read this. First of all, I HATE the way I revert back to my old, moody, stubborn ways when I go home. It’s like puberty all over again. Ack! The fact that I’ve been excited about going home and have built expectations around the trip only make me feel more miserable and trapped with my worst self.
And although I can completely imagine telling myself I should “just stay home” if I’m going to be so miserable, it’s never as easy as that. We have such complicated needs and desires, and they’re plunged into such complicated realities. Of *course* a part of you wants to be in some other place (and even time) than the one you find yourself in. The trick probably isn’t to stop feeling that way; the trick is to learn how to roll with those feelings. I sure haven’t figured it out yet!
If you guys ever get a chance to move back “home” you, it will be different. Well, at least it was for me. When we visited it was always so hard. I struggled with where to fit in. But now that I am back here, in the thick of it, I think I am doing better than when I was here before we were married.
Good luck hon. xoxo
I very rarely visit my parents’ house, the same house I spent my entire childhood growing up in, anymore because they have too much stuff, and my kids like to get into stuff. Plus, it’s like walking on eggshells on top of it.
It is so very hard to parent in “public,” even–probably especially–when that public is your own family. I hope the ocean can still work its magic. Take care.
Precisely why I don’t take vacations with my extended family any more.
Gah, I am saying (along with most other people, it looks like,) I HEAR YOU!! It’s so frustrating. I have exactly the same experience when I go home. Enjoy the cape anyway, I’ll be looking after the other coast.
i MOVED home. after 15 years away. and no place in the world can make me feel so small and insecure. and yet…and yet.
this was a beautiful piece of writing about a hard thing.
Totally understand where you are coming from. In fact, I feel like I may have had your vacation this year. Life is about managing expectations.
I don’t know if this helps, but I think for me, I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that I can’t really be a daughter, sister, and mother all the same way or at the same time. For me, at least, it’s a matter of priorities–and right now, mother comes out on top. Everything else is secondary to that, so that I don’t worry so much about being the best daughter or best sister possible– they had me in those roles for 25 years before I got my new gig. And, once my kids are grown and moved out, there will be time to turn back to those old roles again.
From one pessimist to another? I totally get this. I am constantly fighting being disappointing, yet still enjoying myself. Is never easy.
Hugs to you.