Every year we travel to the Midwest to see my family in Kansas and M’s family in Nebraska. The trip is a nice break from Houston’s heat, and a fantastic chance for M and I to share our four rambunctious and inquisitive kids with their grandparents for several days.
In the past couple years, it’s felt right to add more and more to our trip itinerary. After all, four BORED, rambunctious and inquisitive kids are always harder than those with a full schedule.
So, on this year’s trip, we tried to do it all.
We visited tourist attractions and saw real-life Midwestern farm animals. We met our parents and siblings and cousins at fun dinner places that we don’t have in Texas (and M ate a lot of Beer Cheese soup). We packed impromptu picnics of BBQ with coleslaw and fresh fruit and marveled at the cool, dry Midwestern air.
We visited college friends who we rarely get to see. We talked and laughed and caught up on our lives as quickly as we could. “Do you like your work? Will you stay in this house? Who is your community nowadays? Are you good? Good! Love you! See you next year!”
We shopped, cooked dinner from the ingredients I bought at the Farmer’s Market, toured a train park with the cousins, saw movies, and sped around the lake on the boat.
We caught so many fish, we began to expect nibbles as soon as we dropped the line in the water. The kids tried waterskiing, and tubing, and toad-catching. Sometimes we succeeded, mostly we just got dirty. And wet.
M and I went a date where we acted like we were young thirty-year-olds who went to concerts and casinos, and stayed up later than midnight.
Doing all this stuff was nice, but it wasn’t what we needed.
It wasn’t until the very last day, two weeks into the trip, that our family finally relaxed into the negative spaces. For the first time in a long time, we let the blank spaces of our lives, the quiet spaces, define us.
When M and I finally uncurled our fingers from our tight grasp on schedule, here’s what happened…
After dinner, we didn’t get up and clear the table immediately. Instead, we all sat around telling stories. M told about all the crazy stunts he’d tried to do waterskiing as a kid; I told about every time I have thrown up because I ate too much of one food (really, it’s a LOT of times. Don’t even say Nestle’s Butterscotch chips to me.).
That night, on the very LAST night of our vacation, we didn’t follow the iron-clad schedule to get the kids in bed…”Bath! Pjs on! Brush your teeth! VitaminsCombyourhairandlet’ssayprayers!”
The kids, relaxed by our example, found the blank space and nestled right in. They got ready for bed quickly (quicker than the hour it usually takes), sat on our laps and talked about their favorite parts of the trip. Even though we were staring down the SIXTEEN-hour car trip for the morning, we didn’t let that invade our blank space. M and I didn’t grit our teeth and say, “Get to bed! Tomorrow will be the longest day of our lives. And we have to PREPARE!”
Relaxed by the vacation, we lived in the blank space.
The next day, on that monster road trip, the blank spaces still defined us. Our family had rearranged itself from quick breathing to deep breathing. We had finally dug deep enough to discover the well of cool relaxation, flowing as a current under our lives.
Let me tell you, this current got us home because that trip was HARD. The Kansas police had already welcomed us to their state with a speeding ticket on the way TO our vacation.
On the way home, we hit the other travel snags: painfully slow service at every fast-food stop, bathrooms so dirty, I was tempted to have our kids pee in the ditch to save us some e.coli exposure, road closures in Dallas creating massive traffic jams, thunderstorms throughout Texas, and a gassy Greyhound. There was a particularly harrowing trip into Buc-ees, still wearing our pjs from the night before. Let’s just say the greater Huntsville area is very clear that Nate wants an ICEE!
But our family’s undercurrent of deep breathing, patience, and peace got us home with smiles on our faces. And as we drove, we didn’t reminisce about the fish we caught or the friends we saw, or the delicious dinners we ate.
We talked about that last quiet night, when we all FINALLY relaxed, and we didn’t really do a thing.
