Exhibit A:
Looks deceptively tranquil, no? Let me disillusion you:
It is February school vacation week. We are staying at a house on this very beach. Little S is napping happily indoors (after spiking a fever during our much-delayed and logistically infernal voyage and throwing up in the rental car at 10 pm after we have driven unwittingly through Carnaval traffic on what turns out to have been Mardi Gras) while her father unhappily does some work, and Big K is sitting with me moping on his paradise-like beach, complaining that there is too much sea-grass in the freakishly warm and dazzlingly clear water in which swim beautiful tropical fish that she’ll never see because she refuses to put her head under water despite the semi-professional mask and snorkel we bought her at her insistence that she just couldn’t wait to go snorkeling. (Sometimes a run-on sentence is a necessity to capture the mood.) I would like nothing better than to spend the next hour strolling along the beach by myself, splashing my toes at the water’s edge and letting my mind wander. I’d like to think about the characters of my next book, about the dance pieces I’m preparing for an upcoming show, about the book I’m reading (Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones). Or maybe – gasp – about nothing at all. But I have this 7 year old child with me, and apparently this is entirely my doing. So I try to engage her.
- Hey, I have an idea. Let’s go for a stroll down the beach and see what we discover!
- Oh, yeah, great idea! [She jumps up.] Oh, wait. I don’t want to carry this camera. Let’s go upstairs to drop it off.
- Nah, I don’t want to risk waking S. Why don’t you just put it in your pocket. It’s small enough.
- Nooo! It will fall out.
- No it won’t, it’s really small.
- But Mooommy!
- You can handle it.
- Fine then. [Shoves the absurdly small digital camera she was given by an overly generous uncle into her back pocket, where it fits perfectly. We walk five steps.]
- Mommy, I think I need to go pee first.
- What do you mean, you think you need to? Do you need to or not?
- I need to go to the bathroom.
- [Sigh.] Ok, go ahead, I’ll wait here.
- No, come with me, please. I need my sunglasses and I don’t know where they are.
- K, keeping track of your belongings is your responsibility.
- But Mooommy! The sun hurts my eyes.
- Good grief. Ok, let’s go. [We go upstairs. Find sunglasses. K uses the bathroom. The wind causes the door to slam and I cringe, expecting S to wake up. Thankfully she doesn’t. J still at his work computer. K emerges.]
- Mommy, I’m hungry, can I have a snack first?
- No.
- Please?
- No. You will not starve on our walk.
- But Mooommeee!
- Gah! Ok, choose something quickly and bring it with you.
- [K chooses one of those chocolatey, sweetened cereal boxes from the multipack that we get her as a treat on vacations. Looks like chocolate rice crispies. She crinkles the bag excessively, right outside the door to the bedroom in which S sleeps, to open it.]
- Here, give me that. I’ll open it downstairs. [We head back down, through the breezy outdoor lobby with its comfy couches on which I could be curled up with a book, down the jungly walkway back out to the beach.] Which way do you want to go?
- That way. [We walk five steps.] The sand is hot and pokey.
- Pokey?
- Yes! It’s poking my feet.
- Why don’t you walk in the water with me?
- [She scrunches her nose disdainfully at the rim of seaweed that lines the water’s edge.] Nooo. [We walk five more steps.] Actually, let’s go the other way.
- Huh? Ok, fine. [We switch directions. We’ve now walked back and forth the same 25 foot length three times.]
- Even though I have my sunglasses, they’re still letting the sun bother my eyes. [Note the way she blames the sunglasses for actively allowing this egregious affront to her eyes. I ignore her. She snacks loudly on her cereal packet. Suddenly, she is hopping around madly.] Ow! Ow! Oweeee!
- What now?
- [She holds her toe dramatically but is nonetheless careful not to drop her snack.] Oweee! I hurt my toe on something sharp!
- Something sharp, or something pokey?
- Mooommeeee! Stop! It’s not funny!
- Hey, look at that pelican! It just dove down from up high to catch a fish!
- Oh, where? [She puts the massively injured foot back down in the hot, pokey sand. We walk ten feet. She loses interest in the pelican and feigns a limp. I point out a fish jumping out of the water, which she fails to see. We discuss the use of hammocks as sleeping furniture. We talk about what constitutes a bay versus a gulf. There is discussion of the Caribbean Sea versus the Gulf of Mexico versus the Atlantic Ocean. She forgets to limp. I start thinking this might work out after all.] Ok, let’s turn back.
- Oy! Already? What do you mean, turn back? That was nothing!
- Yes it was. That was a walk. [She points to the house fifty feet away.] Look how far we went. Let’s go back and you can play Boggle with me.
- Why don’t we sit here first for a while. Here, you can finish your snack. [I pat the sand next to me.]
- [She looks down dubiously.] But my camera is in my pocket. I can’t sit.
- [I bite my tongue, force a pleasant voice.] Give me the camera, please, and sit down.
- [She complies. Munch munch.] Thanks. Hey, this is nice! [Munch munch.] Ok, now can we go play Boggle?
You are a brave soul. We didn’t take our children on “relaxing vacations” until…well we still haven’t taken them on one and they are 10. We try and do a family thing and if we are lucky we’ll beg a grandparent to watch them so we can disappear for a long weekend. Maybe next year mine will be old enough to fully understand the joy of relaxing.
Brave soul, or foolish soul? The seven year old has been dragged on “relaxing” vacations to Vieques (which actually WAS relaxing, somehow, although very mosquito-ish), the Bahamas, Jamaica (where she flatly refused to have the smallest speck of sand touch any part of her body) and this same location in the Yucatan, where she suffered from heat rash and slept only in 29 minute increments. Somehow we don’t seem to learn. And then there are the trips that were never designed for relaxation: India last year, France a couple of times. At least we have lots of good stories to share, and children with some perspective on the world. I hope. But let me tell you, I can’t wait until I can send them both to sleep-away camp!
We take our little monster with us wherever we go. This includes a very long list of countries. By the time she was one she had already circled the globe. Was it 100% enjoyable… No. But would we do it again… Yes. We had to make another choice on taking her to China for 6 months and also decided this would be best. Thanks for posting, got me thinking.
I agree, Nate, I would do it again, too. And I will. But I don’t know if I can speak for my husband. He’s still traumatized by one trip in particular seven years ago!
Serves you right for going to paradise without the other half of the commune!
Meanwhile, back at the ranch we were all suffering through various versions of the same cold. I’d still take your week over ours…
Hey, soup lady, didn’t I try many times to entice you to join us? You think we LIKED leaving you behind?
Anjali, that story makes for wonderful reading! I love it, as I always love what you write. Here’s the solution: stay close to home. Rent a cottage near some water on the Cape. And bring an active and intrepid friend. For us it was Christina Pitts. If anyone didn’t feel like hiking (I want to stay home in my nightgown today), or whatever, Christina had already gone up the trail and back a couple of times. Her energy and enthusiasm unfailingly infused the trip with a sparkle that was hard to ignore.
Ah Nancy, you know me. It’s hard for me to stay close to home. We do go to the Cape quite often (in fact probably 5-6 times in the past 7 years) but the pull of other places is too hard to resist. As for friends, yes, that’s the key. We’ve done many trips with our quasi commune, and it makes the whole difference. In fact, we’re headed somewhere with them later this year.
p.s. and please expand this essay into a book!
Ack, another book idea? Do you know how many I already have? At the current rate of 10 years per book, I’ve got two publishing lifetimes ahead of me.
Uh-oh, I have scary (but funny) foreshadowings of our trip to Vieques next month. Mosquito-ey? Who said anything about mosquito-ey?!? If I am able to laugh as much during that trip as I was during this essay, I’ll have fun. Relax? Probably not. Have (some) fun? Yes. We still want to try to travel WITH you sometime. Maybe we could sic V on K and see how K deals with V’s demands! That could be amusing . . .
Dara, there were a fair number of mosquitoes in the evening. However, that was only really a problem for us in that we had a studio “casita” and therefore had nowhere to go, other than the porch, once K was asleep. In the end, it worked out fine. We went to bed early and caught up on sleep.