Tag Archives: humor

Family Vacations and the Headlock

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I know there are families who travel well together. They move in unison as one organism in pursuit of meaningful time together. Our family, on the other hand, slams into each other like molecules in boiling water. Our trips are often prickly, loud, and always include more headlocks than expected during a vacation.

The first headlock occurred when our oldest son, Leo, was about ten. Leo ambushed my husband, Matthew, with the classic vice grip as he walked into the living room, beginning one of our longest-lived family traditions. It starts with the surprise headlock and ends in a wrestling match. Now that the boys are older, the contest is more focused between Leo and Eli.

Matthew, the elder silverback, worries about his neck – and losing.

The headlock appears at random, but occurrences spike when we are on family vacations. There are no off-limits places for this male-bonding behavior. It can occur while waiting to be seated at a restaurant or on the beach in front of bewildered normal families. I watch, horrified, while the girls record every moment for their snap-chat stories.

I’m a planner by trade. People actually pay me to organized events. However, when I think of planning this year’s family summer vacation, I’m paralyzed by the intensity of it.

My husband is already trying to opt out. He fears that his co-dependent bulldog, Otis, will die of a broken heart if he leaves him longer than a weekend. Matthew looks to the future and our impending empty nest. His ideal vacation plan includes a small RV tricked out with a satellite connection for his work and a custom, shot-gun seat for Otis.

Given our family’s collective temperament and the headlock ritual, vacationing together is a planner’s nightmare. Our kids don’t want to be seen with us but somehow they’re always making a scene.

Traveling with teenagers is an unnatural arrangement and comes at a time in the family lifecycle when tired, middle-aged parents and antsy teens both long for their freedom and space. And yet there’s something very necessary about having to learn to get along; to sow the seeds of a common narrative, a running joke, and shared experiences that form the stories that will be recounted over the decades.

Creating that narrative has to happen in real time and there’s only one take.

The best thing I ever did for my sons’ future relationship was to bring them on a three week road trip through Yellowstone, Grand Teton, and Glacier National Park when Eli was thirteen and Leo was nineteen. They fought and occasionally got along, but it was during those three weeks that their friendship truly took root.

So I will brave the boiling waters of our togetherness, the headlocks, the arguments and complaints, all the while reading RV catalogs and calling the kennel to check on Otis.

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PostScript:

My three guiding principles for a manageable vacation with teenagers.

1) Plan a vacation that allows room for each teenager to safely have time to themselves. Choose destinations where they can explore together and alone. Think twice about that camping trip that includes carrying a 30lb pack and sleeping in the same tent.

2) Don’t take every complaint about being bored or mad seriously. I used to waste a lot of time worrying and trying to prevent all forms of discomfort. Now I realize that it’s just the teenage mind ping-ponging from one thought to next, fueled by hormones and crushing self-consciousness. The same goes for the middle-age parent.

3) Give teens a couple of days to decompress and get used to the new schedule and surroundings. I have found that it take at least 48 hours for everyone to synch up and stop bitching about what they are missing.

Blog Posts from our National Parks Trip

https://daysinthefifities.com/2013/08/02/20-miscellaneous-things-that-i-learned-on-our-road-trip-through-grand-teton-yellowstone-and-glacier-national-parks/

https://daysinthefifities.com/2013/06/29/life-on-the-verge-road-trip/

https://daysinthefifities.com/2013/07/30/the-unexpected/

https://daysinthefifities.com/2013/07/06/absolution/

 

Another Minivan, Please

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When I was a newly minted parent, living in downtown Minneapolis, I balked at minivan ownership. I thought that it was much more hip to drive our old Tercel that didn’t have heat. During the winter, which is all year long in Minnesota, we used to dress Leo as if we were going on an arctic mission to get to his daycare. Many mornings we had ice on the inside windshield and we could see our breath as we drove to work.

Nothing says hip like frostbite.

Today I consider my minivan my mobile home. It has seen me through four kids’ activities, sports, road trips, and general family upkeep and maintenance. It’s part living room, garden shed, confessional, dressing area, study hall, storage unit and kitchen. Everyone talks about the importance of eating meal togethers; well, in our family much of that necessary togetherness takes place in the minivan.

I was expecting to own one, ONLY ONE, minivan.  I planned to drive it until the last day of my pre-college parenting duties and park it next to the empty nest. Like cinderella’s carriage, it would turn into a biodegradable pumpkin overnight, or a Volvo C30 hatchback.

The minivan had other plans.  On a return trip from Houston after celebrating my twin nieces’ third birthday the minivan sputtered at a stoplight on the feeder road. It had been showing signs of decline before the trip, but surely with a little duct tape and WD40 it would drive me across the finish line.

I’m fifty, I understand wear and tear.

We did what all non-mechanical people do – opened the hood and jiggled tubes and cables. Our low-tech placebo seemed to resolve the issue, until the next stoplight, when we saw smoke. I’ll skip over the hours of sitting on the side of I-10 while mulling over our options with the helpful people at AAA.

If you believe in divine intervention, the powers-that-be wanted us to have another minivan. We learned from the kind voice on the other end of our AAA lifeline that we were less than a half mile from the Honda dealership in Katy and, better yet,  the first mile of towing was free.

Matthew, our two daughters, and I all smushed into the cab of the tow truck and the burly talkative mechanic brought us and our broken minivan to the dealership. It only took minutes to get the scrap-heap terminal diagnosis.

Three hours had passed since the beginning of the end of our minivan. It was now six-thirty in the evening and we needed to get back to Austin to our dogs and Sunday night homework.

Matthew and I had a quick huddle. We told the salesman that we would trade in the old van and buy another if he could do it in an hour – seriously.  No bullshit, just sell us a minivan and let us get on down the road.

We were minivan refugees and didn’t care what they threw at us. We were going to be tougher.

My husband is a math genius so he quickly won the wonky financial back-room shell game. He’s barnacle stubborn and actually likes reading the fine print. I gave the girls permission to do gymnastics in the long hall of the waiting area and agreed to their request to drink the coffee in the hospitality station. We did our best to be polite and respectful but we really needed to get home.

We said please.

We were shown the only three minivans on the lot that met our specifications. The first was metallic navy blue, the second was white with same color interior and looked like a giant wheeled marshmallow, and the third was the most hideous shade of bodily fluid brown. Ninety minutes later we were driving our metallic navy blue minivan into the night toward Austin.

It wasn’t an hour but pretty darn close.  

 

The photo was taken in Galveston, years back, in our first minivan. My son is running after us as his friend, Quinlin, races me to the beach.

Just Another Morning

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3:37 am

The dogs are scratching at the back door and poised, once again, to pursue the possum family who lives under our shed. It’s a good deal for the dogs, all the challenge of a wildlife encounter and yet the game is rigged and they always win. Otis, sweetly dim, doesn’t understand his role in the ever-looping possum death-and-resurrection act. Opal, the brains of the pair, has it figured out and is still an eager participant in the nightly ritual.

I’m prepared for the predictability of their canine missions because I wake up at 3:20am more nights than not. It’s the exact time of my last night feeding when I nursed our twins. It doesn’t matter that it was twelve years ago, my body still remembers.

3:52 am

The dogs’ storming of the backyard cues our dieting orange cat to lumberingly leap up on to our bed. She begins kneading my belly while practicing for the world’s loudest purring contest. She wants food and her face rubbed.

4:20 am

My husband, Matthew, decides to come to bed. He can sleep anywhere at anytime, on command. This sleep superpower allows him to keep odd hours and often he works late into the night. It’s like a parade coming through our bedroom. His toothbrushing process is unexplainably noisy and bright. The dogs burst into our room and immediately remember the menacing possums.

Thirty seconds later, utilizing his sleep superpower, Matthew is in a deep slumber and I’m awake, waiting to let the dogs back in the house. Eventually, the dogs scratch to come in and curl up on their bed next to us. They also have Matthew’s sleep superpower.

I’m a fragile sleeper. Ideally I need blackhole-like darkness and silence, as well as a constant room temperature of sixty-eight degrees. I found my perfect sleep environment only once. It was on a cruise ship, of all places.  Surprisingly, my tiny room at the bottom of the ship hit every one of my sleep metrics and added another to the list.  A gentle hammock-like rocking is now another must have for my sleep utopia.

4:30 am

I remember that my daughter’s jeans are still wet in the washer and decide that I better get up and start the dryer so she doesn’t suffer another mother-induced fashion nightmare. Yes, she is in middle school. I make coffee and feed our ravenous dieting cat. There are a few dishes to finish from last night and I catch up on emails. It’s quiet, dark and cold so I should be sleeping but I’ve had too much coffee.

5:30 am

I continue to putter and start on my to-do list. This is the calmest, most productive part of my day and the only moment when I’m not surrounded by animals and people.

5:50 am

I’m instinctively fidgety because my body knows what’s coming. It’s time to rouse the three teenagers sleeping upstairs which begins our daily version of the Jerry Springer show. Each of my children wakes tired, argumentative, and usually mad at me for a reason yet to be discovered. One of our daughters is ridiculously organized and driven crazy by her twin sister whose optimal morning functioning hovers at feral. The feral child’s morning routine has me yelling, marine-sergeant-style, at every turn in the process.

Our fifteen-year-old son gets up eight minutes before we pile into the car. He and I argue every morning about him cutting it too close. More often than not he’s the first kid ready. He sits on the couch, the victor, waiting and gloating.

The rest is a blur of breakfast choice complaining, signing papers I don’t read, a million items lost and mostly found, and bad lunch-making reviews. It all comes to a crescendo with me hollering out the countdown to the minivan’s departure.

Matthew is up now and has words of sunshine and happiness for the kids as they finish loading their backpacks. Somehow he is always the good guy. He’s miraculously rested after his micro-nap. In contrast, my head is spinning as the kids exchange last minute barbs and we push through the front door.

6:55 am

The minivan pulls away from the curb while the automatic side door is still closing. Our organized daughter continues her lecture on my soft, ineffective parenting style. After a few merciful miles into the drive, the girls find their way to a truce and recap yesterday’s lunchroom conversation.  Eli, sitting in the passenger seat, informs me that now that he’s taken Driver’s Ed he realizes that I’m a terrible driver and that if he was a cop he would follow me around all day and give me tickets.

7:18 am

I drop off the kids and breathe deeply in the splendor of my empty minivan. I spend the drive back home thinking about ways to tweak our morning routine to go more smoothly.  All my analysis and best plans don’t have a chance. Animals, teenagers and parents of teenagers are not rational beings and time management theories do not apply to this stage of life.

My twenty-one-year-old son serves as the light at the end of the tunnel. As a teenager, he was just as surly and pushed back with as much gusto. Today he is a well-adjusted, functioning young adult who actually likes my husband and me. Resigned to five more years of morning anarchy, I remind myself that kinder, awake teenagers will return home this afternoon.

 

I took the photo at Graffiti Park, Austin, TX.