Having a Lousy Time, Wish You Weren’t Here

Today’s post is by one of the funniest people I’ve never met. Tanya is part of a small group of friends, spread all over the world, with whom I keep in touch through e-mail. Rants, victories, rants, questions, and rants are exchanged regularly. Someday, hopefully soon, we will meet face to face, and the world will be turned upside down. I can’t wait. Please enjoy her post while I continue to accomplish things in my off-blog life.

What the postcards don’t tell you

A guest post by Tanya Laing Gahr

Family vacation/ˈfam(ə)lē vāˈkāSHən

(noun, expletive): an expensive and ill-conceived excursion from which one returns needing a vacation from one’s family

I’m not sure where the original disconnect took place. In my mind’s eye, I imagined that a trip to California with our sons to visit my husband’s family would involve happy, relaxed adults sipping wine and beer and barbecuing in the sun while the boys entertained us and themselves, and all were generally fulfilled by the formative memories being created. Instead, there was a lot of ass-hauling around Disneyland, lurching half-awake and mostly hungover from one promised event to another, hissing at my husband to not drive so fast it’s not the Grand Prix for the love of Odin, driving back and forth to the skate park, and getting my face in between two young men with that deep, primal, not-quite-a-whisper voice to say, “If I have to tell you One More Time to stop touching him/copying him/making faces at him/spitting at him/stealing his food/making whatever noise that is with your nose at him, I swear to God that you will never see your home again.”

“And this time, I mean it.”

Of course, it’s my fault. Had I taken even five minutes to cast my mind back to my own childhood vacations with my family, I would have remembered the tedious 10-hour drives to visit aunts, uncles and grandparents—completed with no stops except for gas because my father wanted to “make good time.” (Granted, I now have a bladder that can hold roughly my own body weight in fluid, but that’s not necessarily a win, medically speaking.) My parents were smokers back in the day, so we would arrive at our destination smelling like we had travelled via ashtray. The rest of the vacation would involve being either hustled around to rocky beaches (fewer crowds), dodgy restaurants (to save money) and the occasional roadside motel that may or may not have been murder-free for more than a month (what? we’re just there to sleep! and I’m sure the man outside with the chainsaw is just the resident lumberjack). To pass the time, my brother and I would poke each other, copy each other, make faces, draw spit pictures on each other’s arms, sneak food away from each other and make irritating noises with various parts of our body in an effort to not be the first one to say, “Muuuuuuuuuum! S/he’s bugging me!”

It’s not the vacation that’s the problem; it’s the family. Look, we all love our families, assuming they haven’t shown up on the evening news with neighbours saying, “They seemed so nice—kept to themselves a lot.”

For the most part, we make peace with their quirks: the fascination for video games that try as I might, I can’t bring myself to care about; the questionable political stances; the terror that they’re going to say something embarrassing that will leave a stain on you for years to come. It’s just in close proximity, those little idiosyncrasies become magnified. And when several generations of extended family come together for a visit in an enclosed environment, every adult reverts back to their childhood role within the family, leaving the actual children no choice but to revert back to toddlerhood. It’s a fascinating study in human development. It’s important bonding time for everyone. It’s a great reason to remind oneself why they’ve moved hundreds of miles from the place of their birth. But it’s not what one could consider a holiday.

We’re home now, and the kids are back in school and the fistfights are at a minimum. I mean between my husband and myself—what the boys are up to, I have no idea. Peace has descended again and all talk of a family vacation has thankfully ceased. At meals, we smile benignly, even warmly, at each other. We bask in the glow of each other’s company and then retreat to our corner of the house, enjoying a little mini-vacation from our family.

Tanya Laing Gahr is a professional writer, communications consultant, actor and director. If you’d like to hear more from her, and you should, check out her website. You can also find her on Facebook and Twitter.

Creative Commons photo courtesy of Dominus Vobiscum.