every moment

Enjoy every moment. Savor it all. Carpe diem!!

Thus were we exhorted when I shared that Mike and I had decided to take the kids out of school and head off to a nearby state park for a midweek mini family vacation. We wanted to go away together before Mike begins a new clinical trial in New York next Monday. This treatment's goal is to get his cancer into remission so that he can safely have a stem cell transplant (read: many potentially harrowing months ahead for my family). His cancer has the worst timing, and we've had to cancel woodsy mountain idylls over two consecutive summers. So this was the first time we'd had a real family vacation in well over two years.

But just two days? Well then, squeeze as much delight and family love and adventure in as you can! 

The problem with "enjoy every moment" is that we are still ourselves and, related to this, life simply isn't enjoyable all the time, even on vacation, even when you really appreciate being able to go at all. It's a bit of pressure, isn't it? Enjoy every minute! 

Now, I know that everyone who expressed this sentiment did it with a loving heart and sincere happiness that we were finally going to get a goddamn break. I recently read an Anne Lamott essay about a family with whom she is very close. Their two year old has cystic fibrosis. She describes the time before and after diagnosis, when they made the irreversible journey from the universe of normal, sometimes-pleasant-sometimes-stressful family life to the Land of the Fucked. 

Boy did that make me laugh. Ah, yes. The Land of the Fucked! I know it well.  

And people who love us can see us bumbling around in this uncertain, treacherous territory from out there, where most of them live, in the more predictable world of work and kids and family and vacations. So when we shared that we had found a temporary exit door and were going to return to where families take vacations (the midweek, September nature of it belied our continued alien status, but still), our friends and family celebrated this triumph with us. And they wanted us to have some Serious Fun, to take the edge off life in the valley of the shadow of death and squeeze all the pleasures there were to be had out of forty eight hours in French Creek State Park.

Let me make a confession. Within the past week I've told not one but two friends to enjoy every minute of their upcoming adventuresome international vacations. I know now that when I said it, some meanness and aggression were behind the sentiment. I think I felt resentful and small and stuck in the Land of the Fucked. You know about Mike's cancer, right? You know that we can't plan more than three days in advance ever, right? So enjoy your trip. Some of us don't go on trips. But you do, like, all the time, and if you waste it with fights over where to go for dinner or space out and forget to appreciate all the amazing architecture, it will be a moral failing and an offense to every last denizen who shares my new address.  

Anyway. I'm a little ashamed about that. I'm sorry. My heart shrinks sometimes. 

So back to our trip: people I love are telling me to savor savor savor, and I'm making a packing list and looking for sheets that will fit the cabin bunk beds and a bigger cooler and glancing at the confusing directions and the time is growing short and I might not get to run before we pick up the kids at school and go, not to mention it's still raining, and I'm wondering why I have to do everything around here anyway, and I am feeling very irritable. 

Enjoy every minute. Right. So far, not so much. But we made it there, and despite the drippy weather the children were all delighted by the cabin and proceeded to leap off the bunk beds over and over, to break the place in. It was too wet to make a campfire so the older kids held marshmallows over matches to set them on fire, and Beatrice and I snuck into the cabin and used the microwave to blow up our marshmallows and make them squishy. Mike sighed in disappointment at our quickness to turn to modern conveniences in the middle of the woods. Voila! S'mores! We're on vacation!

Beatrice, who has moved too many times and faced too much uncertainty for a three year old to comfortably process, began to melt down right and left, every time she asked for something (a book, a snack, a toy) that I hadn't brought with us. I finally figured out that she thought we were moving to this little cabin in a state park permanently. New house #5. The bunk beds are nice and all Mama, but you didn't even bring a box of crackers! We are lost!

We all reassured her, we all sympathized, and we all got annoyed, too. We suggested she retreat into the bunk bed room to cry, so we could properly enjoy our microwaved marshmallows and the peace of the woods. That didn't really fly.

The next day the rain had stopped and we went hiking. Beatrice protested wildly. Initially Frances and I took turns giving her piggy back rides and reminding her not to choke us. Mike felt tired. We discovered that the Boone Trail I had chosen was actually 6 miles, not .6 miles.

I remembered that I get annoyed at my husband when we travel. I remembered that hiking with a three year old is pretty touch-and-go. I tried to accept these things, take a deep breath, and notice the riotous beauty everywhere I turned instead.

And I did. And you would have seen it too. The woods in September in Pennsylvania, if you can put your own enjoyment-shortcomings aside, are spectacular. Yellow leaves drifted down continuously through the stands of trees, and the smell of earthy wet decomposition was pervasive, an additional transparent color layered over everything. We were present on the brilliant cusp of autumn, when the summer is at its wettest, richest, greenest height, just beginning the tip and slide into a time of warm autumn colors, of greater stillness, of death.  

Beatrice decided she wasn't too scared or tired after all, and that she'd rather walk. It was fun, because there was so much to see on the forest floor, including little adorable toads. Gabriel is our most gifted observer of the natural world, and he led the effort to spot these charming little guys. By the end, it was a thirteen toad hike.

And things continued from there. We were still our anxiety-riddled raw-edged selves, but we began to relax into this new space with greater harmony. We skipped (and hurled) rocks at the lake. We ate a lot of sweets. We played cards, and drew pictures, and some of us spent hours futilely working on a campfire, watching it spark to life momentarily only to hear the wood begin to hiss, a harbinger of fire failure. Too wet. But such heroic efforts! Mike and Gabriel definitely made some smoke, and eventually humor, the absurd and ticklish kind that sometimes, thanks to grace, comes with big disappointments. We giggled helplessly about the doomed campfire. We lit paper plates. We sang songs around the ashy firepit in awful rounds and I snuck back to the microwave to make another squishy marshmallow for Bea.

The next day was even better. The morning hike was glorious, peaceful. We didn't see another soul on the trail - just us, walking a carpet of soggy leaves with those elegant trees overhead, the smooth  lichen-covered rocks, some caterpillars and spindly daddy long legs, brilliant springy moss, a toad or two, occasional splashes of sunshine. You had to give in. You just couldn't help but enjoy it.

It was a good vacation.

 

And I've been thinking about this. It isn't reasonable to expect a family of human beings (especially the one you are a part of) to enjoy every moment. But you might aspire to accept every moment. 

To try to be present for at least most of the moments. To resist running away from the moments, even when the little one lies down on the trail and wails, or when the almost-teenager shrieks about the lack of privacy. 

Don't run away from the moments when you feel yourself shaking with anger or heavy with unbearable sadness. Because those too are gifts. Take it from me, a citizen of the Land of the Fucked, a stark place where everything gets stripped away. See through this rawness. In my post-vacation, heart-healed state, I now speak not with judgement but rather gentleness: if you can, set aside the expectation. Instead accept every moment, that your heart might open wider and wider still, that love might scour you out, and fill you up.