Category Archives: Travel

Mar
29
2019

One Year Later: Remembering Italy

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One year ago today, I was speed walking down the endless halls of the Vatican Museum — past hundred-year-old tapestries, the colorful Gallery of Maps frescoes and the ornately gilded painted ceilings — hoping my four kids wouldn’t kill me.

It was the second time that morning we’d traveled the endless corridor until we reached the Sistine Chapel. We’d arrived for our guided tour at 8am to meet inside a storefront just outside the Vatican’s walls. As fellow tourists poured into the office, we were separated by the language that we spoke — French speakers take this purple ticket and wait over here; Spanish speaking folks with the orange tickets over there, and so on. Finally, we were sent outside to meet our tour guide with what seemed like a million other Americans, and we slowly pushed out way through the crowds and through the gates.

It was our first full day in Italy. We’d arrived at our hotel in Rome late morning the day before and I had planned for us to roam around and check out the Trevi Fountain and Piaza Navona — plus dig into big bowls of pasta — before a tour in the afternoon touted to take us off the beaten paths of the city. We were joined by a friendly mother and daughter from Norway, and our guide — an endearing 20-something Italian hipster — showed us a flower market, took us for cappuccinos and introduced us to the narrow streets of Trastevere. It was late afternoon by the time the tour was through and we were exhausted from the time change and all the walking and asked our guide to recommend a nearby place for us to eat an early dinner.

So that’s how we came to eat hot dogs and sauerkraut for dinner on our first night in Italy. By the time we realized the type of cuisine served at the restaurant the guide had suggested, we were too tired to go look for something more “Italian.” Instead we slid into the roomy booth, order big mugs of beer and wolfed down traditional German food before the long walk back to our pensione.

Day 2 had us hitting the Vatican first thing in the morning and then a tour of the Colosseum and Roman Forum in the afternoon. I know, ambitious. But I knew that my kids were not good wanderers or spur-of-the-moment travelers. I knew they needed an itinerary and preferably a steady low blood alcohol level to keep them happy.

But the Vatican tour was boring (even I agreed), our guide — a middle-aged Italian woman who ran her tour like a classroom lecture — was humorless and was required to stretch her spiel out in the museum a little more than usual as our tour fell on the Thursday before Easter and the St. Peter’s was off-limits to us as the pope was holding a mass.

I was crushed.

I’d visited the cathedral 30 years earlier on a whirlwind European jaunt with a high school girlfriend and the day we visited the Vatican, was after a night in a Trastevere bar were we learned Italian beer was much stronger than the Coors Light we were used to at home, and that the locals could get frisky — like, aggressively follow you into the bar’s bathroom for a groping — if given the opportunity.

We arrived at St. Peter’s hungover and covered in hickeys and took pictures of each other pretending to enter the confessional, gauzy scarves draped around our necks in deference to our Catholic upbringings.

In the late 1980s, you were allowed to walk up narrow windy steps to walk around the interior of the cathedral’s dome, which is the first time I realized I suffered from horrible vertigo. To this day, I dream of sliding my way around the dome’s circumference, my back pressed against the wall and trying not to look at the knee-high wall separating me from the church’s abyss. Later, we made our way to the top of the dome and recreated the horror of circling the dome, only this time from the outside and — since it was at the tippy top, a much smaller diameter to slide around. I also learned that day the Italians weren’t keen on safety measures.

Aside from the vertigo and hickeys, my long-ago visit to St. Peter’s inspired such awe — and it’s such an iconic Roman landmark — I just couldn’t leave without at least trying to get my four children to see it.

Our guide had told us that the only way into the cathedral, without having to stand on the long line snaking outside, was to enter from the Sistine Chapel. There are two doors there to choose from: one that leads you back into the museum and the exit, and the other into St. Peter’s.

Since we weren’t going to be allowed to go into the church once we were through with the Sistine Chapel the first time, the guide said that once we got back to the main entrance, we should turn around and walk down the approximately 7 miles of hallway back to the Sistine Chapel, and then try getting into the cathedral from there.

When I asked my kids what they wanted to do, they were like: “We’re good.” They were ready to move on from the Vatican and go get some pasta and wine for lunch.

But then they saw my face.

It was like all those times I’d start to count to 3 to get them to do something, and even though — once they were old enough — they knew nothing was really going to happen once I hit 3, they complied. They were just conditioned to do, or stop doing, whatever it was I wanted by the time I hit 2.5.

“We can tell you’re gonna be disappointed,” said their spokesperson, my younger daughter. “So let’s just get this over with,” and they turned from the Vatican exit and began to speed walk down the hallway that earlier that morning took us about 2 hours to traverse to the Sistine Chapel at the end. And the place, as you can imagine 3 days before Easter, was mobbed.

I am by far the shortest person in my family, so every once in a while the kids would have to pull to the side to wait for me. Back in the Gallery of Maps, I tried to stop and admire a fresco of Sicily, but was quickly pulled away by my oldest son and told to keep walking. Even when we hit the Sistine Chapel and I tried, just one more time, to look up at the majesty of Michelangelo’s masterpiece, I got snarled at and told to move.

The whole time, I worried about what would happen if we got back to the cathedral door and found it was still locked for the pope’s mass. I wondered if the children murdered me, who would tell them what to do next that day?

Luckily, as we approached the 2 doors, the entrance to St. Peter’s was opened to the public and we strode through and I said a silent prayer of thanks. But by the time we entered the holiest of spaces, my kids were completely over it. We speed walked down the aisles and past the Pieta. We stood and looked up at the soaring dome, but I didn’t even dare to suggest we see if we could go upstairs for a walk around. Without an official tour guide, we were probably through the church and walking through St. Peter’s Square towards lunch in about 10 minutes.

Yes, my children were kind of dicks. But also, kinda sweet for not wanting me to be disappointed. I probably should have just been happy they went along with the museum tour and let them rest up before the tour that afternoon. #hindsight

The next morning we’d be on a bus to Siena to explore the Tuscan countryside for 2 days before taking a train to Florence for Easter and then back to Rome to fly home Wednesday.

There were plenty of highs — the meal we had the second night in Siena and the rooftop of the place we stayed in Florence overlooking the river, with the Duomo in the distance — and lots of lows, too (the fight two of the kids had in Florence while I tried to eat the best pizza of my life and ignore them).

I guess that’s what family vacations are all about: the good, the bad, and the irreplaceable shared experience. I’d do it again in a heartbeat.

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Sep
10
2018

On Letting Your Kid Drive Half-Way Across the Country. Alone.

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This spring, on the cusp of her 21st birthday, my younger daughter flew from New Jersey to Minneapolis, rented a U-Haul and stretched a little further west—driving a few hours into North Dakota. Then, over the course of the next four days, she worked her way back east, making her last stop along the coast of New Hampshire and then hopping on a bus the next day to Boston and finally, flying home to Newark.

Since her return, my heart has slowly made its way out of my throat and back down into my chest where it belongs.

While my third child was somewhere in Indiana dipping her toes in Lake Michigan, and visiting the National Buffalo Museum in Jamestown, ND, I spent most of the week she was away refreshing her location on my iPhone, ensuring she was alive by watching the icon I use for her on my phone — a picture of a cartoonish bear I took at Target that reminded me of her — move across the country.

For a while one afternoon, the icon seemed to stall somewhere in the middle of Wisconsin on my phone, indicating where she had been 14 minutes earlier — then 15 — but wouldn’t update to where she was at that moment. I had resolved not to call or text while she was driving her rig — I didn’t want to distract her or let her feel the wind from my hovering beating hard over her curly head from 1,000 miles away — but was overpowered by the mental image I had of her pinned beneath an 18-wheeler.

“HE-L-L-O!” she answered happily when I called, in her best Oprah-like voice, and told me she had pulled over to take a walk through a nature reserve she’d read about the night before. She wanted to stretch her legs a bit before resuming her journey to Kalamazoo for the night. “There’s, like, zero reception here,” she told me, explaining why her location wasn’t updating on my phone.

A few minutes later, she sent me a video from the top of a gorge, which panned down to a waterfall spilling into the stream far below, and then spun around to show me the sun-dappled woods behind her. It was picturesque and serene and a little too deserted for my liking. IMG_3379

While I was happy to hear she wasn’t in a fiery heap on the side of the interstate, I was also concerned that she was about to end up shackled in the back of a serial killer’s van, destined to become the sleeve of his skin suit. “Please text me as soon as you get back in the U-Haul,” I told her, “and lock the doors!”. A little while later, she sent a picture of the truck, parked in a deserted looking lot, which is exactly the kind of scene a location scout would pick for a movie about a young woman’s abduction on her journey across America.

I said a silent prayer to Sacagawea, whose image was plastered across the side of the U-Haul, to help keep my daughter safe as she rolled through the Upper Midwest towards New Hampshire, like Lewis and Clark making their way to the Pacific, except with podcasts and Spotify.

It had all the makings of a great story: my daughter, just home from a semester in Italy, was dead broke and had the opportunity to make a nice chunk of change, while touring her own country for a few days. Even though she’d spent the previous four months exploring Europe — taking a bike tour through Munich and traveling from Florence to Greece on a 30-hour journey akin to Odysseus’, minus the Cyclops — a road trip seemed like a well-timed adventure before beginning her summer internship at a big resort in Pennsylvania. And for a girl from New Jersey, anything west of Pittsburgh seemed pretty exotic

The opportunity to go on this 8-hour-a-day-odyssesy through the upper half of the country and make some money came from right next door. Our neighbor, Liz, is a bookkeeper and one of her clients had asked whether her college-aged son would be interested in the job. When he couldn’t, Liz immediately thought of my daughter and texted me with all the details.

In a nutshell, a New Hampshire-based marketing firm (Liz’s client) was looking to make an impression on some big corporations by hiring someone to hand-deliver to their marketing execs end tables with company logos, crafted by some artisans in North Dakota. The job was to pick up the tables from the workshop and travel back east, making two deliveries (Minneapolis and Ann Arbor), and then transporting the rest of the furniture to New Hampshire, all expenses paid plus a nice check at the end.

What could go wrong?

I was nervous at first, but everything checked out and in the many years that I have known Liz, she has never done anything remotely reckless. She recently spearheaded a campaign in town to encourage more kids to walk and bike to school, and wears a reflective vest when she goes on her early morning runs. I was confident she wasn’t setting my daughter up to be a drug mule.

“She might want to check what’s inside those table legs,” said my friend Dan — who’d worked a dozen years as a prison guard before becoming a personal trainer, and has witnessed horrible things on both ends of the economic spectrum. “It’s just the way I think,” he said, shrugging his shoulders.

Around the same time, a good friend was sending her husband to fetch their daughter (my girl’s BF) from college in St. Louis and drive her back to New Jersey in their car, which she’d had for the year. “You better tell her to be careful,” my friend said when I told her of my own daughter’s wacky caper.

And that’s when panic set in.

Truth be told, I am not prone to smothering tendencies as a parent. In fact, sometimes I can be a little too hands off. I keep forgetting to check my 15yo’s grades from last marking period online and still don’t know whether I need to call to check if a parent is home, every time he goes over to a friend’s house. It just seems so aggressive.

I do enjoy some casual stalking though, insisting that all the kids — even ones who don’t live with me anymore — share their locations with me on their iPhones (okay, not the 25yo boy, who thinks all of us stalking each other is weird). 

Aside from the solo aspect of the journey, I was also worried about all of that driving. I get sick when the kids are on long-distance drives, like the 8-hour haul the older two kids had to their college in Virginia. And I hate when any of my kids are flying and insist they text the minute the plane’s wheels hit the tarmac. But I also don’t want my children spending their lives standing still.

If I was going to be completely honest, I think what concerned me the most about the journey — besides all the driving and traveling by herself — was whether other people would think I was an irresponsible parent for allowing her to go.

I didn’t want anyone to think that I was a bad mom. 

When she was little, I used to refer to my third child as “The Boss” because, even at a young age, she was someone who liked to take charge — or at the very least — stand up to her older two siblings. They’d lounge around on beanbag chairs in our basement when they were little, watching Barney and Thomas the Tank Engine videos that ran on a loop, while I pried little scraps of American cheese off the floor upstairs after lunch. One afternoon  my oldest came up crying and holding his cheek, sobbing something about his baby sister, who was probably around 2 at the time. Apparently, tired of being harassed by her oldest brother, The Boss had gotten up off her pink beanbag chair and bit him in the face. And he never bothered her again.

I knew in my heart that my girl, that Boss, could handle a 2,000-mile drive across the country. That she was up to the challenge. But the reaction I got as I told people—excitedly at first— about the trip, had me questioning whether I should have even told my kid about the job in the first place.

What no one ever tells you when your children are young, when they’re offering advice about whether they should sleep on their back or their side or if you should worry when one bites her brother in the face, is that it never ends. What you never find out until it’s too late, is that you will worry about your child until you take your last breath.

And I think the only way to manage that crushing reality, is to recognize that for the most part, they’ve got it. It might not always go to way you’d like it to go, or the way you try to manipulate outcomes (“Hello, my name is Amy, and I can be a master manipulator.”) but they usually figure it out. I’ve watched a million times as I’ve tried to play the role of the puppeteer that they do what’s best for them when I drop (or, okay, they cut) the strings.

They pick the right colleges and get full-time jobs with 401ks. And if they don’t, it’s valuable information for them to use in the future.

Maybe in the end, it all just comes down to faith.

So, while my inner voice told me it would all be fine, I ratcheted up my hovering, lest anyone think I didn’t care about my daughter. And then I started to lose faith. I stopped listening to my inner voice.

As soon as she drove away in the Uber for her flight to Minneapolis, I became pretty focused on her whereabouts. I immediately started stalking the hell out of her on my phone, which I think charmed her at first and then quickly became very irritating.

Aside from the stalking, I also spent much of the week serving as her travel agent, combing the internet to book rooms and find places for her to eat. And while I tried to find the “best” places for her to go, she really just wanted to get something to eat and lie down.

She ended up at the Mall of America after a long day of driving from North Dakota one day (“I’m so overwhelmed,” she texted when she got inside. “Why didn’t you ever bring us here on vacation?”), and I tracked her location inside the megamall. I could see on my laptop where she was, and tried to guide her to good places for dinner like she was Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible and I was trying to help her find an escape route. I had all of these amazing ideas (I thought) and eventually, she stopped texting and later told me she rode a rollercoaster and grabbed some hibachi at Benihana.

She did her own research each night in her hotel room, which took her to see a giant pink elephant in Wisconsin and ate what she said were “the most amazing” beef tacos (“It’s rated the #1 restaurant in DeForest,” she texted.). One morning, she messaged asking, “Should I go see a forest or the world’s largest six-pack of beer?” which led her for that deserted walk around the woods of Pewits Nest, alongside a stream called Skillet’s Creek in Devil’s Lake State Park in Wisconsin. A place from which I thought she’d surely never escape. 

For a while one afternoon as she approached Chicago, I tried to find places for her to park the U-Haul so she could go visit that giant bean, but in the end, we determined no parking garage could accommodate her rig and that she’d come off looking like aterrorist. Instead, she pulled off at Indiana Dunes State Park and stood in the clear shallow water of Lake Michigan before spending the night in Kalamazoo.

Along the way, she stopped for lunch in Cleveland one day with her roommate from freshman year (even though I was dying for her to go to Zingerman’s in Ann Arbor), and another day had breakfast with one of her best pals who lives in Harrisburg, PA. She stopped for the night to stay at her apartment in State College, PA, to see friends and pick up bedding and stuff for her summer internship at Hershey Park.

Finally, she arrived around 8 p.m. in Portsmouth, NH after a long day of driving from State College, where she finally met the man she’d been driving across the country for who took her to get something to eat before she collapsed at a Hilton Garden Inn for the night. The next morning, she took a bus to Boston and flew home, where she promptly ate some leftover quiche in the frig, snuggled our dog and watched the royal wedding, which had happened earlier that day. 

A week later she packed up our old GMC and drove back to Pennsylvania to start her internship and we joked that the three-hour trip would feel like nothing after her midwestern odyssey.

After a day of orientation, she worked her first 8-4:30 day in housekeeping and when I asked how it went, she told me her feet were killing her.

She was on her way back to the apartment she shared with five other interns and was going to shower and change to meet friends for an early dinner, and then had to run to Wal-Mart to by an all-black sneaker to wear to work the next day.

“Well, how do you feel?” I asked as she pulled into her apartment complex and was about to get out of the car.

“I feel like a legit grown up,” she told me.

And I couldn’t have agreed more.

Do you sometimes lose your faith? Me too. Sign up to get all my latest posts delivered straight to your inbox and we can commiserate. I promise I’ll try not to tell you what to do.

 

Oct
20
2017

Girls Weekend Getaway: North Fork of Long Island

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Continuing with tradition, my trusty Ladycation squad took a late-summer getaway to celebrate yet another 50th birthday in yet another off-the-beaten-path location.

Last year, we rented a fabulous Airbnb in Woodstock, NY and ate, drank and hiked our way around the Catskills. The motto of that trip was “Whiskey & Boys” and I have it embroidered on my wall to prove it.

The year before, we flew up to St. John’s in Newfoundland where we made lots of friends, danced to Irish music and kissed a frozen cod. The slogan for that trip was, “What happens in Newfoundland, stays in Newfoundland.”

This year’s birthday girl chose the North Fork of Long Island as our destination and we drove out one Friday morning in September for our three-night stay and got out there in no time, which is a bit of a miracle.

Okay, some thoughts about Long Island: I really love it. But if you’re not already on Long Island, it is a bitch to get to from New Jersey. The traffic can be daunting, trying to navigate your way around New York City.

But the North Fork is so special – especially after the summer crowd has left – I’d be willing to brave driving there during a Friday rush hour. It’s so worth it.

Geographically, Long Island kind of juts east towards the ocean, with the ends splitting into a fork. The bottom half is the South Fork (the Hamptons, Montauk) and the top is the North Fork (Greenport, Orient) and they are two different worlds.

As you drive towards Orient Point, at the end of the North Fork, you can feel all the space. Farmland for as far as the eye can see. Farm stands. It’s not honkytonk or touristy. Having lived in New Jersey forever, I’m impressed with how much undeveloped land remains out there. Undisturbed stretches of waterfront. Really beautiful.

We stopped for a late lunch at Case’s in Southold, which we found down a long road off the highway that didn’t seem right and just when we started to doubt our GPS, we saw the water and the sign for the restaurant. We sat outside on the patio looking out at the water and drank icy cold local rose and decided it couldn’t get any better. And then it did.

If I could have the honor of marrying the lobster roll that I ate for lunch, I certainly would. But that would mean I couldn’t have devoured every last bit of big mound of perfectly dressed lobster meat on the perfectly toasted top-split roll. At the end of the weekend, we all decided it might have been our favorite meal, of a lot of fabulous meals.

 BEST LOBSTER ROLL EVAH (look, I even had to take a little nibble out of it before I could take a picture of it)

 

Other weekend highlights included our perfect Airbnb in East Marion, our day spent driving around Shelter Island and gawking at all of the to-die-for houses and the all-rose vineyard in Southold that made up feel like we were sitting in the South of France.

I can’t imagine what staying in the North Fork would be like during the summer season, much less trying to get out there. I highly recommend a late summer/early fall visit when you can rub elbows with the locals and feel like you’ve kinda got the place to yourself. One caveat: getting Uber or Lyft rides was a little dicey and another reminder that we weren’t in Jersey any more.

If you’re thinking of going, here’s what I recommend:

Stay:

Airbnb: Our rental was pricey but fabulous. It sleeps 8 comfortably with 4 bedrooms, so would be great for a few couples or families to rent. Stylish décor; all the amenities you could ask for and cool outdoor space to hang.

Breakfast:

Fork & Anchor (East Marion): Get the #15. It will change your life.

Love Lane Kitchen (Mattituck): We stopped here on our way home Monday morning. Totally charming. Awesome coffee. Put poached eggs on anything, I am a happy girl but on top of kale with avocado on the side and I just might start talking dirty to you.

Lunch/Cocktails/Nibbles:

Little Creek Oyster Farm & Market (Greenport): Unassuming set up on the dock in Greenport that’s pretty cool inside. Oysters. Rose. Cheeseboards. A little old xxx guy preparing it all who took a shine to me. On the menu, it says you can shuck your own oysters if you’re feeling adventurous, and one of our ladies asked the server, with a straight face, “Is it hard to shuck yourself?” which, as you might imagine, became the weekend’s catchphrase.

The Halyard (Greenport): We ended up here on Sunday night as a kind of consolation spot when we showed up to a nearby vineyard that had already closed and we couldn’t believe our good luck. Brand new. Insanely stylish. Perched on the sound. Killer sunsets. Ditto the cocktails. Would love to see what the rooms look like in the adjoining hotel and think dinner watching the sun set on the outdoor dining area would be beyond romantic.

Flying Goat (Shelter Island): At the Shelter Island Golf Club. Great place for cold local beers on tap and French fries after a morning hiking through the meadow (see below).

Four & Twenty Blackbirds (Orient): I don’t LOVE pie, but I would kill for this pie. All kinds to try. We had a savory pocket filled with mushrooms and a little cheese, a stone fruit number and a custardy baby pie. We sat at a table outside and said we were just gonna nibble and gobbled them all up.

Dinner:

Brix & Rye (Greenport): Another one of our top weekend faves. We stopped for pre-dinner cocktails and ended up staying to eat. A little dark and not a lot of tables but being there in off-season helps.

American Beech (Greenport): We sat outside on a very quiet night. Chic. Delicious food.

Noah’s (Greenport): Also chic and delicious.

To Do:

Croteux Vineyards (Southold): You would think that four women heading out to the North Fork of Long Island would mean that we’d being hitting up all the wineries but we only made it to one. If you can only go to one vineyard, I cant recommend this one enough. It really does feel like you are sitting in the South of France and the wine is delicious. Plus its owner, who was pouring the rose and working the register the busy day we were there, was super easy to look at. Plus, he was featured on Mo Rocca’s “Everything’s Coming Up Rose” piece on CBS Sunday Morning this summer.

Lavender By the Bay (East Marion): According to its site, one of the largest lavender farms in the country. Our Airbnb had baskets of dried bundles around the house lending just a hint of lavender to the room, so I knew I needed to go. Fun to walk around and just see all the flowers going on forever. Shop lets you buy it in all manner of shapes and sizes. https://lavenderbythebay.com/

Mashomack Preserve (Shelter Island): Covers one third of Shelter Island and run by The Nature Conservancy, the preserve offers a variety of habitats – fields, woodland, marshes and tidal creeks. What most struck me was the ingenious way that have woven technology into the experience. Along one of the trails there are stops with barcodes you can scan with your phone and listen to commentary specific to where you are. Not to mention, the scenery will knock your socks off.

Dam Pond (East Marion): Directly across the street from our rental, we mosied over to get one last look at the sound, which we did from atop a cliff at the end of a path. Cool.

Shop:

Old Orchard Farm Store (Orient): Charming little shop westopped into roaming around Orient, where I found two really awesome Christmas presents.

Mercantile North Fork (Greenport): Okay, the real reason we didn’t make it to the three vineyards we planned on hitting on Sunday was that we got sidetracked here, wondering how we could ship the entire store home to New Jersey.

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Jun
12
2017

Letting It Go

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Two of my kids embarked on very different adventures recently and all I could do was hope that one of them posted a photo or two on social media so that I knew he was still alive. But, this being 2017, if the kids did post anything on social media, it would be on Snapchat – where I’ve been blocked from seeing either’s Snap story – or on their Insta story, where I have also been banned. So basically, I was just hoping for the best for a few days.

While it’s just a weird coincidence that the trips overlapped, I’m beginning to understand that I compensated for not having any control over one of the trips by crazily micromanaging the other. I don’t think my youngest child – a boy who taught himself to tie his own shoes and ride a bike when he determined at a young age that everyone around him was too distracted to step in and help – had received that much attention since the time he fell as a toddler and knocked his tooth back up into his gums. You can always count on blood to get me to sit up and take notice.

My oldest left for an overnight flight to Barcelona for a week’s vacation with a friend, and I didn’t even know what airline they were flying on. I mean, I know he mentioned it at some point, but I was busy trying to memorize other details, like arrival and departure dates and where they were staying. So I guess that fairly major one slipped through my mental cracks. I tried Googling it but didn’t have much luck finding a flight that left Newark bound for Spain at 11 p.m. the night he left.

After about 10 minutes of searching, I realized I was running behind schedule if I was going to prepare the special breakfast I’d promised – a porkroll and egg sandwich – for my 14yo who was leaving early for the iconic 8th grade trip to Washinton, DC for three days.

I’d gone on that same trip with his two older sisters years earlier and had hoped to continue the tradition this year with my baby, my one-last-middle-school-hurrah. Alas, the administration did not feel equally nostalgic about inviting me to come along. In an uncharacteristically organized and prompt manner, I’d sent an email to the principal on the first day of school announcing my desire to chaperone the trip and enumerating my many qualifications. I hit SEND and then sat back and waited for my anointment.

Instead, I got a note from the school secretary about a month later thanking me for my interest but informing me that there just wasn’t enough room to accommodate all of the requests they received.

“Don’t they know who you are?” my 20yo daughter asked in horror when I reported my rejection over glasses of rose.

“Apparently not,” I told her, taking a long sip. “It seems I’ve been running on fumes these last few years and I got passed over.”

Note to younger parents interested in nabbing a future spot as a school trip chaperone: you’re only as good as the last fundraiser you ran. Or race you organized. Or three-years spent on your school board (that was my golden ticket for a number of years).

I’d run into other moms of other 8th grade boys at our local Bilabong store where we all flocked after learning our sons needed to wear collared shirts for touring, and we agreed that boys were so easy to dress. I ended up buying my guy three pairs of shorts and two shirts and honestly, I won’t have to buy him any more clothes until he transitions to longer pants in, like, December.

I brought his bag of new clothes into my room for safekeeping, so the crisp new shorts and shirts with tags wouldn’t get swept up into the detritus littering his floor or, one of his favorite tricks, stuffed into his dirty laundry hamper. Later that night, I laid them all out on my bed and added underwear and socks to create an outfit for each day, which I then showed my son before packing into his suitcase.

“Should I get post it notes?” he asked, obviously getting into having a mom who does things like, pack his suitcase and create outfits for him.

Earlier, we’d gone to pick up some snacks and beauty items for him to take and we unwrapped the zit cream from its package and popped it into his dopp kit along with his deodorant and sunscreen. I could tell he was taking it all a little more seriously than his usual slapdash packing jobs – you should see the crumbled mass of clothing he brought with us for a recent long weekend in Boston – because he was even packing a toothbrush. He didn’t bother to bring one to Boston.

In the meantime, I kept an eye on the clock and considered the best time to text my oldest to give him a speech about safety overseas without coming off as crazy or, worse, that I didn’t have faith in his decision making abilities.

I’d messaged him on Facebook an article I’d seen earlier in the week about what to do in the event you find yourself in a terror attack. Tips like “Don’t use the elevator, take the stairs instead,” and “Don’t play dead.” Useful things like that. But just six months ago, the kids and I had spent a lovely afternoon walking over the London Bridge and poking around nearby Borough Market – eating Scottish quail eggs over greens and crisp Asian dumplings – before we headed to a nearby pub for a pint. The same path terrorists recently took to attack innocent people. Tourists like us.

So of course, I worry.

This isn’t the first time one of my children has traveled to another country solo. Both my girls – who are bookended by their brothers – flew to Europe over spring break with their high school during their respective junior years. This spring break, my younger girl visited Italy as part of a class she was taking in college to study European hospitality. She initially balked at my request that she text from time to time to just let me know she was alive but in the end, we were in constant communication.

I saw her on Instagram sitting with the hills of Tuscany in the distance and she texted photos of amazing meals she was enjoying . Thanks to SnapChat, I also saw her holding one of those giant drinks – you know, the kind that comes with a bunch of straws – late at night surrounded by a bunch of other kids. Apparently, hospitality was alive and well in Tuscany.

I was happy she was having fun but also couldn’t stop thinking about that Amanda Knox documentary I watched on Netflix and tried to slide in texts to her like, “Fun! Don’t leave the bar with a stranger!” and “TTYL! Oh, and pay attention if you wake up and there’s blood all over your bathroom!” I tried to be cool, I threw in some emojis for good measure, but it’s hard as a mom not to worry about your kids getting, like, implicated for murder in a foreign country and shit.

When my older daughter went to Italy during high school, things were pretty chaotic at our house. By then I was divorced and working full time at a relentless job and had four kids in four different schools and – as an added bonus – three teenagers living under my roof. This was probably around the time that the baby took matters into his own hands and learned to do things for himself.

After my daughter left, I realized I had no idea when she was expected to return. I mean, I knew the day – thank God – but not the time the buses would pull back into the high school parking lot. School was closed for the break and I didn’t really know any of the other parents well enough to call up and make a joke about the whole thing. No one who would laugh and be all like, “Been there.”

No, instead I had to call the parents of a boy with whom my daughter had gone to grammar school. The kind of parents that really seems to have their act together. The kind of family that sends all three of its children to Ivy League schools. The dad, who I knew even less well than the mom, answered the phone and had a hard time hiding his dismay when I confessed my sin. “It’s in all the paperwork,” he told me.

“LOL. Paperwork,” I thought, wondering how I could still have in my possession Bed, Bath & Beyond coupons that expired three years earlier and not papers containing vital information for this Italy trip.

The dad gave me the arrival time and then assured me it was accurate as he’d confirmed when his son called the day before. Then it was my turn to hide my surprise that he’d actually heard from his child on the trip. All I got was radio silence and then some some slightly stale biscotti upon my daughter’s return.

I mentioned all this to my friend Dan, how I worried about my oldest navigating a foreign city and whether I’d taught him everything he needed to know to stay safe.

“That’s how we learn,” Dan reminded me, and I thought about my own maiden voyage overseas. How, following a terrible breakup, I enlisted a pal to travel super-low-budget to Europe for 10 days and, having only been on a few jaunts to Florida during high school, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. And that was 100 years before the Internet and cell phones.

We were so clueless, we even got on line as soon as we entered the International Terminal at JFK to have our baggage searched, not realizing it was for people flying to, like, the Gaza Strip or some shit. And I packed an actual suitcase for the multi-city journey, which was sans wheels, and ended up lugging that thing through train stations in Milan and Paris and up and down the cobbled streets of Trastevere and Nice looking for cheap hostels.

My friend and I learned the hard way that beer in Europe was much stronger than the Busch beer we were used to drinking at fraternity parties, and that Italian men were good kissers but terribly persistent (we had to dodge a pair for a few days who’d come back to take us to the beach that we’d drunkenly agreed to visit the night before).

Upon our return to New York, tired and pretty broke, we discovered that the subway back into Manhattan from JFK could get a little dicey, circa 1990, making stops in Bushwick and Bed Stuy. But we survived with nary a scratch (but maybe a few hickies that we tried to cover up with our new Parisian scarves) and learned going forward to always go easy on the Italian beer and – for the love of God – pony up the extra 20 bucks for a cab out of JFK.

I ended up texting my oldest guy after work the night of his departure and reminded him to call so I could wish him a bon voyage. When he called a little while later, he quickly got annoyed and told me he felt like I was judging him, which I probably was. He was leaving for the airport way later than I would ever leave to catch an international flight. (Interestingly, the only time I am never, ever, late is when flying.) But my son sensed my vibe, the one I tend to put out when people aren’t doing things the way I think they should be doing them. I get a tone. For those who love me, it makes them nuts.

But I apologized and asked a bunch of questions and we got back on track. After a few minutes, he told me he was going to finish up eating dinner and get ready to go.

I wanted to say, “Watch out for terrorists,” or “Keep your wits about you” or at the very least, “Can you send me your travel itinerary?” but in the end, just told him to have a great time. And then, because I just couldn’t help myself, asked if he’d just text me when he got to his gate. And maybe again when he landed.

“Mom,” he said, “I’ll text you when I can.”

So I woke up early the next morning and remembered my child was somewhere in the air over the ocean and that’s when I tried to figure out what flight he was on before making breakfast for my other guy. While I was flipping his egg, my phone dinged and I looked down to see a text from my oldest son. “Just landed. Here safe.”

And that was that. I’ve seen daily photos on Instagram and a whole album on Facebook, but haven’t really heard from him again.

In the meantime, I received an all-points bulletin when the 8th graders’ buses departed and my girlfriend got a text from her kid reporting that they’d made it to Maryland.

Ten years ago, when that same boy who is in Barcelona traveled with his 8th grade class to D.C., there was no communication until the buses pulled back into the school’s driveway three days later. There were no CODE RED texts and emails and he certainly didn’t call or text. I don’t even think they were allowed to bring cell phones with them back then.

So maybe I’ve just become conditioned to be able to contact my children at any time of day or night over the last decade. And, thanks to location sharing technology, I can even stalk three out of the four kids to see where they are at any given moment. But the person I really want to keep track of – my wily 14yo – is the hardest to pin down as he’s usually blown through his allotted amount of data about four days into our Verizon billing cycle, rendering him unable to text or be tracked until the 20th of the following month.

And maybe I should be glad for that. Maybe in the end it helps me let go of trying to control and monitor his every move. Give him some latitude to figure things out on his own. Kind of like he’s always done.

I’m thankful I didn’t have the technology available today around when my oldest child was still in the grip of my highly-involved parenting style. Back then, I would have put a chip in him if that was an option. And I think I was so up his butt when he was younger that by the time high school rolled around he spent a good deal of time trying to shake me loose. It wasn’t pretty.

Ten years and three kids through high school and two kids through college later, and I’ve managed to reign in my desire to micromanage my kids’ every move. (Almost.) I’ve learned to have faith in their decision making and, more importantly, to learn from their mistakes. (Pretty much.) I’ve decided it’s much healthier to adopt a “let it go” attitude. (Well, not so much.)

But I have my limits. I still want to know when their plane lands after a long flight or they’ve arrived at their destination following a lengthy drive. I’m not a worrier in general but do fret when they’re in transit. I need to know when they’ve dodged the travel bullet.

I guess everything else is gravy.

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Feb
13
2017

This Is Your Brain

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cf4b27e118fb68f80db165ebc7d7dad3I don’t know about you, but I never really think about my brain. Honestly, I tend to take that organ for granted, much the same way I do all of those other essential body parts I can’t really see. It’s like I accept that in theory they are there, doing whatever it is they’re supposed to be doing. But I can’t really imagine myself with, like, a liver of my own.

It’s kind of like when I was having my third baby and a helpful delivery nurse pushed a full-length mirror over to the foot of the bed where the whole pushing drama was playing out. Imagine my dismay when I saw what my pelvic floor looked like during the ordeal. Like, this wasn’t some stranger’s perineum I was watching on some “How to Have a Baby” video. It was my poor bottom pulsing like The Little Rascals mweep mwomp cake as the baby kept taking three steps forward and one step back down the birth canal. Needless to say, my horror threw off any big efforts I had been making up to that point to get the baby’s big damn head out of me. When the fourth baby came a few years later, I banned all mirrors from the delivery room and kept the birth process the mystery it really needed to be.

I’ve always thought about my brain more as my noggin or my noodle. I make grand pronouncements, like that I’m going to “blow my brains out” if something horrendous occurs – like, say, a certain candidate is elected president – or that I’m officially “brain dead” after folding yoga pants for six hours. I recently yelled at my son to please use his brain when he thought playing lacrosse in the kitchen was a good idea.

But I’ve never really wrapped my alleged brain around the fact that nestled in the warmth of my skull sits one of those things you can find if you search for images of “brain” on the internet. One of those weird, bulbous, spongy-looking things that might be more interesting as a tabletop curio than something actually living inside you. It might make a nice paperweight.

It turns out though that I actually do have one of those things because I hurt it a couple of weeks ago and ever since it has been making its presence known. I’m almost at the point where I’d like to tell my brain, “Enough already. I get it. You’re mad and I’ll try to make better decisions in the future.” That thing can be so bossy.

It’s kind of funny, actually, because the cause of the injury could be in a way pinned to my lack of brains, or that maybe I should have really utilized said brain before I decided to ski down that wooded trail.

But we’d been having such a great day – me and my friend Susan and our three sons – that it just seemed right to say, “Sure” when the boys suggested we detour off the nice wide trails we’d been skiing down all day and do a run through the woods.

Actually, that’s a lie. What the boys really said was, “We’re gonna go through the woods,” and I said, “Susan, let’s do it.”

And Susan tried to be the voice of reason. She tried to say, “Why don’t we just meet them at the bottom?”

Sigh.

But I was feeling cocky. I haven’t fallen skiing in years and even though I am totally not the greatest skier, I’ve gotten much better than I used to be. If the trail isn’t too steep I can ski kinda straight down, with minimal turning. I don’t need to go back and forth across the whole width of the trail to make my way down any more. But some turning is still required. This here is the rub.

So, in theory, I could handle skiing through the woods. But the reality of skiing through the woods, or at least the trail that we descended onto, was much different. My son and his friend set off, one after the other, and I followed behind and quickly learned two things after about ten feet of skiing: #1 there was absolutely no wiggle room and #2 there was also no escape hatch. I was committed.

Where there was about a three-foot path to maneuver down through the trees I needed, like, five. I needed to do a little back-and-forth. I didn’t even have enough room to bring my ski tips together and try to snow plow, which I quickly tried to do to slow things down.

And then I saw the tree. Well, it was really two trees ahead in the distance that needed to be circumvented to continue along the trail. In retrospect, what I really should have been using my brain for at that moment was to quickly develop a strategy for the upcoming maneuver. I should have been thinking how I needed to kinda veer to the right a little and then quickly cut to the left to get around the trees. But honestly, as I watched the white bark of the birch tree come closer and closer, the only thing my brain could do as I bared down on the obstacle was scream, “YOU’RE GOING TO DIE LIKE SONNY BONO!”

The next few seconds are kind of blurry. I think in an effort to make friends with the tree and show it I meant it no harm, I tried to sort of hug it as I went past. But then either the tree got pissed and shoved me or the effort threw whatever semblance of balance I’d maintained down the trail completely off, I don’t really know. What I do know is that time suddenly went all Matrix on me as I started to fall backwards. I had about a hundred thoughts all at once:

“Oh my God, I’m falling.”

“I always loved Sonny and Cher.”

“This is going to hurt.”

“What is the name of that other famous person who died skiing?”

“I haven’t fallen skiing in years.”

“Where should we go for dinner?”

“Was it Natalie?”

“I hope people can’t see me from the ski lift.”

“You know, Liam Neeson’s wife?” 

“Thank God I’m wearing a helmet.”

“You really can get anything at Costco.”

“Ow.”

That last second, when the back of my ski helmet connected with the pretty hard trail, is really what I remember the most. The feeling of my helmet smashing onto the ground and how my whole head and neck seemed to reverberate was incredibly vivid, as was my final and competing thoughts: “Wow, that really hurt,” and “I can’t believe anyone would ski without a helmet.”

Everything else is kind of a blur.

I guess I must have just laid there in a jumbled mass on the ground for a few beats before trying to sit up and assess the situation and honestly at that point, I was much more concerned about my 50yo lady knees than my head. When I pushed myself up on my elbows to see what had happened to the lower half of my body, I found that somehow my legs were wrapped around my old friend the birch tree with my knees bent inwards and my skis jutting out from either side of my body.

I was trying to use the tip of my ski pole to pop the ski off my boot when Susan and her oldest son came upon my situation and tried to help out, which was a challenge since they are snowboarders and had no idea how ski bindings work. So it was kind of comical, them trying to push and press different parts of my boots to try to get skis off me and me becoming increasingly panicked as my knees really started to hurt.

“Why don’t we just do this?” Susan asked while lifting my whole leg up in an effort to reposition the skis around the tree when suddenly, miraculously, the ski just popped off.

From there, I’m not too sure how I ended up back on my feet and skiing the final 10 or so yards out of the woods and back onto the regular old ski trail. As I emerged, wobbly and a little more humble than when I’d entered, the other two boys stood waiting and started to cheer.

“What happened to you?” they asked and I had to tell them the whole grim story while we waited for Susan and her son to clip back into their boards and make their way out of the woods.

And then I decided to pretty much forget about the whole ordeal. We continued to ski for the rest of the afternoon and when all three boys decided they’d had enough and were ready to call it a day, Susan and I took the gondola up to the top of the mountain for a final long run before calling it quits. We pulled out our phones at the top to take pictures of how beautiful the trees looked, drooping under the weight of so much snow and framed by the late afternoon Vermont sky. I congratulated myself for making the effort to take that final run and as we flew down the (nice and easy) trail, I could see other snowy mountains off in the distance and patches of darkly colored lakes scattered far below and thought, “Oh, this is why people like to ski.”

Buoyed by the brush with nature’s greatness and my newfound love for skiing, Susan and I decided to keep the momentum going once we got to the bottom and headed to the bar at the lodge to get a beer and rub elbows with all our fellow helmet-headed skiers.

The music was loud and the tap beer cold and hoppy and we chatted with the people around us at the bar and even though I could feel my head hurting a little, I did what I do best which is to ignore red flags and just hope they go away and stop trying to interrupt all the fun.

We took the last shuttle back down to the condo and made dinner while the boys went for a swim in the pool and later we all played cards around the big wooden table. I went to bed that night thinking more about how great the weekend had been – how the boys spent way more time with us than I’d ever hoped to imagine and how that was all about to change – than my head. We’d Googled “concussion symptoms” earlier in the night and I had Susan examine my pupils for any dire signs but as I had not lost consciousness nor was I vomiting, figured I’d feel better in the morning.

Which, alas, I did not. In fact, my head felt that much worse and I also woke to discover that the front and back of my neck was stiff with whiplash.

“Susan,” I said as we sat on the couch waiting for CBS Sunday Morning to come on while the boys squeezed in a little more skiing, “I don’t think I can ignore my head any more.”

We decided I should call the urgent care place at the base of the mountain and explain the situation and see if they could just diagnose me over the phone. A very nice nurse named Wilma took the call and listened to my tale of woe and then very kindly explained that it was indeed difficult to make these kinds of diagnoses based on here say.

“You really should come in,” she said.

So, not for the first time, Susan found herself driving me to an emergency room in search of professional care. I got to meet Wilma, who gave me a look-see, and then later I was examined by a resident and finally a doctor, both of whom were wearing ski boots which I found interesting. It’s like they’d made a quick stop to perform some medical exams between runs.

At any rate, all concurred that – based on what I told them and their observations – that I’d sustained a mild concussion after my brush with the tree and we all agreed the helmet – while not a magic shield against all injury – did indeed prevent anything worse from occurring (unlike poor Natasha Richardson).

I was told to kind of chill out for a couple of days and especially avoid staring at my phone or computer or watching any TV, which I mostly did (I did, however, read two books but honestly that didn’t really seem to hurt my head as much as when I tried to sneak in a few minutes of Facebook).

Listen, this story could go on and on. I could tell you about the bad cold/sinus thing that then manifested itself and caused even greater pressure on my already sore brain. I could tell you about how I was so good, lying in my dark bedroom for a few days, and then how I decided I was really over the whole thing and tried to go back to my old life, Facebook and all. And how, after 10 days of headaches, I took myself to my local emergency room the other day to get myself a CAT scan and finally diagnose either the internal bleeding or spinal meningitis I was pretty sure was festering within my skull.

Instead, the friendly nurse practitioner who assessed my images assured me that my brain looked good and showed no signs of bleeding and that meningitis is not some cunning villain, laying quietly in wait to be diagnosed. It really makes its presence knows to its victim, she told me. It doesn’t just wait for you to go to an emergency room to say hello.

So, that’s kind of where I am right now. I don’t really have a tidy ending to this whole, long story except to say, “Brains are important, kids. Don’t take yours for granted.” When your brain tells you that maybe something you’re considering doing is dangerous, you should really pay attention. And for the love of Pete, don’t even think about not wearing a helmet when you’re doing something risky.

Your brain will thank you.

Use your brain! Sign up to get all of my latest posts sent right to your inbox by typing your email into the box below and new posts will arrive without you having to remember to look for them. Everything should be this easy. You can also follow me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and (what the hell) Pinterest. [wysija_form id=”1″]

 

 

Jan
27
2017

What to Wear on Your Flight to London

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London Tourist

Following a recent trip to London I took with my four kids between Christmas and New Year’s, I’ve decided that I totally spend as much – if not more – time obsessing over what to wear on the plane than when I’m on the actual vacation.

Unlike most other outfits I’d need to pack for our vacation – clothes for touring the Tower of London or enjoying an elegant tea with my daughters – my travel ensemble needed to serve a number of functions.

First and foremost, it needed to be cozy enough for a seven-hour overnight flight in coach that would allow sleep. Critical. The outfit also had to take me through a day of sightseeing once we landed. And finally – and most importantly – I obviously also wanted to look cute and not like I was a crazy person walking around in my pajamas.

No problem.

The other critical piece to the travel puzzle – because it is a puzzle, n’est-ce pas? – was figuring out what accessories would help facilitate my goals. I needed a bag and shoes that would encourage comfort whilst preventing me from looking like the Ugly American (and I was already planning on walking around with my camera around my neck for most of the trip).

In the end, I think the weird amount of time I spent thinking about these things paid off. I slept a good amount of the flight (thank you, Valium), spent a day hopping on and off the Big Red Bus and a spin around the London Eye at dusk, and – because we were so exhausted by the end of that first day – stayed in my travel outfit for dinner at a gastropub around the corner from our hotel. At the end of our meal, the owner sent us over glasses of champagne to celebrate our first night in London and I can’t decide if it’s because he was delighted with how chic we all looked or felt sorry for our sad state of affairs.

Needless to say, I peeled that 24-hour outfit off that night and thanked it for its service. It had done its job.

Travel Essentials London

ONE: Cardigan/Garnet Hill; TWO: Blanket Scarf/Mark & Graham; THREE: Travel Blanket/Sac; FOUR: Leggings/Athleta; FIVE: Passport Holder/Cuyana; SIX: Boots/Clarks; SEVEN: Sports Bra/Athleta

  1. Cashmere Cardigan: As a 50-year-old lady who is prone to feeling like her hair is on fire at any given moment, I am an advocate of layering – with cashmere, where appropriate. Honestly, it’s like wearing a very cozy blanket. Throw over this cute tank and you’re ready for your nap.
  2. Blanket Scarf: I bought these big, soft scarves for my daughters for Christmas that doubled as cozy throws for the flight. I am also now completely devoted to the site because I not only nabbed them at Black Friday prices but the free gift wrapping they arrived at my door in seemed almost more expensive than the scarves themselves. Well-played, Mark & Graham.
  3. Travel Blanket/Pillow: I’ve had this cozy set for years and it’s come with me on all sorts of adventures like Greece and Hong Kong. Even though they hand out blankets in sanitized plastic wrap for longer flights, I’d still rather know where my pillow has been.
  4. Leggings: Okay, I currently work at the store but even if I didn’t, I’d still rave about these tights. They have just the right bit of compression, cute zippers at the ankle and the waist is nice and high and doesn’t cut into your midsection while you’re cramped in your seat mid-flight. Plus, it kinda just smoothes out the whole middle situation, if you know what I mean (see 50-year-old lady bit above).
  5. Passport Holder: I honestly didn’t know I needed a passport holder until my BF gave me this chic little number for Christmas. The soft leather has this wonderful pebbly grain and my initials embossed in gold on the bottom corner. It ended up being the perfect wallet for a trip abroad, where you’re really only carrying around your license, credit card and some currency. You can leave your Costco card at home.
  6. Black Suede Boots: At one point in early December, it looked as if my bedroom was doubling as a Zappos warehouse. I just kept ordering boots that I thought might fit the bill of being comfortable to walk all over London and yet not make me look like too much of a granny. I mean, I do have a reputation to uphold. In the end, these babies from Clarks made love to my feet all day long. There’s really no other way to say it. And their looks kinda grew on me throughout the trip, even after my younger daughter observed during our Harry Potter Warner Bros. Studio Tour that they somewhat resembled the Sorting Hat. Maybe that just makes me a wizard.
  7. Sports Bra: This should really have made it to the top of my list because I spent so much time thinking about finding the right undergarment for sleeping and sightseeing. I only wish I’d discovered this bra before my 16-hour flight to Hong Kong a couple of years ago because it’s so comfortable. In fact, now that I’m home, I still find myself throwing it on most days instead of a regular bra with wires and hooks. Imagine me like Oprah right now freaking out over bread: You MUST have this bra! GO GET this bra!
  8. Cross-Body Bag (Not Pictured): Need a great bag for sightseeing that’s also super-stylish? Go buy this bag from Madewell right now. Yes, I’m still talking like Oprah.
  9. Book a Trip!!: You say you have nowhere to go! It’s not too late to book a spring break getaway! You can still snag a fabulous rental someplace warm through Tripping.com, which is kinda like the Kayak  (my flight/hotel fave) of vacation rentals. It’s one-stop-shopping for rentals listed on all the top sites like TripAdvisor, VRBO and Homeaway. Don’t know where to go? We hear Florida is the hot destination du jour (in more ways than one). Get booking!

Stop being so greedy already! Share your own travel must-haves in the comments below. You’re the best. Sign up to get all of my latest posts sent right to your inbox by typing your email into the box below and new posts will arrive without you having to remember to look for them. Everything should be this easy. You can also follow me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and (what the hell) Pinterest. [wysija_form id=”1″]

Jan
09
2017

Making Memories in London With My Kids

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In the weeks leading up to a recent trip I took to London with my four (mostly) grown children, the most common response I got from folks when I told them about our upcoming adventure was, “You’re taking all of them?”

“Yes,” I’d tell the nice people, “every bles-sed one of them.”

But I was never really sure what any of them meant by that question.

Maybe the trip seemed like a big financial undertaking for a single mom. Or maybe there are age limits for family vacations. Maybe it’s weird to want to take your kids – 24, 22, 19 and 14 (two of whom have graduated from college) – away on a trip. Like, to pay good money to spend time with them when you’d just spent so much on tuitions in an effort to get rid of them.

But it had been about seven years since we’d all gone away on vacation together. Right after the divorce I took the four kids to the Bahamas for a few days and honestly, the trip was a bit of a disaster. A snowstorm botched initial plans to leave and once we finally got there, the weather wasn’t much better than New Jersey. We were running around in bathing suits one day hopping on and off the resort’s lazy river, our teeth chattering and extremities covered in goosebumps, when I made a quick pit stop in the ladies room and found a cluster of little Bahamian girls standing there wearing puffy winter jackets.

Aside from a couple of jaunts to a friend’s house in Vermont for skiing and hiking, the five of us hadn’t traveled anywhere together in a long time. I’d taken various combinations of the kids places over the years but it had been on my bucket list to try to squeeze it in one more vacation en famille before it was too late. Before the older ones went off and started their own families or moved far away or joined the priesthood. Or the circus. Something like that. So when I downsized last year, I set aside a little nest egg for all of us to go away together somewhere special.

And it was the best money I ever spent.

I knew the kids would have been happy planting their butts on the beach of some all-inclusive resort in Mexico for a week, but I dreamed of going zip lining through the jungles of Costa Rica or channeling my inner Marcia Brady and riding a donkey down into the Grand Canyon or looking out over the City of Lights from the Eiffel Tower alongside those eight little eyes I made. I wanted to share with them the joy I got from traveling. From experiencing new cultures and meeting new people. I really wanted to give them an adventure and not just a vacation.

But either airfare was nuts or the season was wrong or the language barrier seemed way too daunting to go forward with any of those initial ideas. I already knew I’d play the role of tour guide for this vacation and didn’t need a foreign language to add to any stressful moments while getting us around. I don’t know about your family, but things can get tense for us when we all need to come together to make a decision. And if someone (read: me) needed to then find someone to parlez-vous anglais to help us make that decision, our family anxiety level would have ratcheted up to about a Level 12 out of a possible 10.

And, since I was thinking really big, the idea of going to London just came to me one morning while sitting on my couch at one with my laptop. I’d been across the proverbial pond a couple of times with the kids’ dad for really fast and fun weekends for his job and loved the city. But we’d never really done any hard-core touristy stuff. We’d seen some of the bigger sites but at that point in my life, I was just thrilled to get away from our four kids for a few days and have some fun. I never bought any guidebooks or read up on the history of the city. We just kind of walked around without an itinerary and did what we pleased. Since none of the kids had ever been to London, I thought it might make the perfect destination for our big adventure. Something we could discover together.

And it was.

We spent about five full days canvassing London between Christmas and New Year’s and it was exhausting and fun and probably the best vacation I’ve ever taken. Sure, it would have been way easier (and cheaper) to just take two or three of the kids still living at home. But it wouldn’t have been the same. I wanted something the whole family could experience. To create all those shared memories and maybe, just maybe, help bring us together after a bad divorce and that dark era I refer to as “The Teenaged Years” that fell upon our home for a good decade. I mean, I still have two teenagers but things seem to have lightened up a bit, which tells me either I’m getting really good at managing those surly beasts or I’ve developed an immunity to their poisonous ways.

Either way, our little family really needed some team building. We needed to feel a little less fractured.

So when I tentatively floated the idea in a text to the kids in September of going to London as a family Christmas present, they jumped all over it – especially the bigger kids. Bosses were consulted, time off was taken and in no time we were making plans about where to go and what to wear.

Okay, that’s not totally true. In reality, I literally stalked the Internet for weeks looking for cheap flights, a place to stay and researching all of the things there are to do with a family of big kids in London. I would send the children links (emails, please, texts from me can get so annoying) from time to time – attractions I thought might be fun or BuzzFeed lists of top places to eat – but no one really looked at them. In fact at one point I was told to “stop with all the links.” And really, that was fine because as much as I pretend to give the people in my life options, I really just do what I want to do anyway. So their indifference totally worked for me.

Unlike vacations of long ago, jaunts to Vermont or Disney World with sometimes cranky – often indifferent – children, traveling with big kids is an infinitely more satisfying experience. My kids were so into London and approached and executed each item on our pretty packed itinerary with enthusiasm and curiosity. No one complained about riding the tube, the hour-long wait to get into the Churchill War Rooms or the two-hour walking tour we took of Westminster Abbey (in fact, that information-packed trip turned out to be the highlight for my two daughters).

And I would be remiss right now if I didn’t extend a special thanks to my friends at Netflix whose perfectly-timed release of “The Crown,” which all of us (aside from the 14yo boy) gobbled up before the trip, helped bring so much insight to the history of the city and the royal monarchy as we toured all week. It was pretty thrilling to stand in the spot in Westminster Abbey where Queen Elizabeth was anointed during her coronation and later, over at the Tower of London, getting to see the jewel-laden crown she wore during that historic ceremony. Even better than my own fascination was seeing that same look of curiosity on my children’s faces. People, who wouldn’t pay to see that?

We departed the day after Christmas and returned New Year’s Day and I couldn’t think of any people I’d rather be with in London to celebrate the end of one year and beginning of another other than my four children (obviously, since Ryan Gosling is now married with two children of his own).

But seriously, all joking aside, it was probably the most glorious week of my life. I will forever treasure the memories I have tucked in the coziest spot of my brain of the kids seeing Big Ben for the first time as we rounded the corner atop our double-decker bus or watching all of them hustle to keep up with our Beefeater Yeoman Bob on our fun Tower of London tour. Best was sitting in our ride waiting to head back to Heathrow to fly home and my oldest jumping in the seat next to me, slamming the door closed behind him and turning to all of us to ask, “Okay guys, favorites?” and then he quickly answered himself, “Alright, I’ll start.”

This from a guy who sometimes seems to work overtime to appear annoyed by most things that involve me.

But my very favorite moment of the trip happened quite organically and was not one of the many carefully researched activities on our itinerary. On our final full day we were looking for a morning activity before things we had planned later in the day and my oldest suggested we try to get tickets to see an exhibit at the Victoria and Albert Museum – about a 15-minute’s walk from our hotel – that we got shut out of a few days earlier. Called “You Say You Want a Revolution? Records and Rebels 1966-1970,” the exhibition documents that counterculture era and ticket holders don headsets that magically know where you are standing as you wander through rooms packed with all sorts of fashion/psychedelic/rock-and-roll memorabilia.

We all put on our headsets and wandered off to explore and it wasn’t long before I lost sight of the kids while becoming engrossed with reading the handwritten lyrics of “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” and examining Mick Jagger’s grommet-studded jumpsuit. The exhibit was so jam-packed with stuff documenting the confluence of the music, fashion, political activism and drugs during that era that I was a little annoyed the kids had seemingly raced through it.Wasn’t sex-drugs-and rock ‘n roll the stuff of young people?

But then I rounded a corner and found myself in a big, darkened room dominated by a movie screen wrapped along three walls and on it were Sly and the Family Stone jamming to “Higher and Higher” at Woodstock and there, sitting together on the floor, were my four children. I slipped off my headset and squeezed in between them on the faux grass that I guess was supposed to make us feel like we were there, sitting in that New York field in the Summer of 1969, and let the music surround me. I know my oldest guy loves horns, he’s a sucker for early Stevie Wonder, so I nudged his leg and imitated playing one and he nodded and I settled in to watch.

The Who came on next to perform “My Generation” and I remembered how much I used to love that famous line about dying before I got old. How I’d sing that part with a little more gusto than the rest of the song when I was a surly teen during the Jurassic era. And now, there I was, old and surrounded by my four children in a darkened room in London with the song blaring from all sides and realizing I was happy to be kinda old. Or at least old enough to really know when I was in the midst of one of life’s truly juicy moments, instead of looking off towards the horizon, waiting for them to come like some pirate searching for a treasure chest and not seeing all the jewels strewn across the sand. I can be guilty of blindly walking over gems — quiet moments and little victories – in search of that elusive big perfect life of mine.

And there I was smack in the middle of a sweet memory bubble, nestled between my four kids – surrounded by the artistry and the passion and the irreverence of Woodstock and all that it represented – and knowing right where I was. I could tuck it away and pull the memory out during all those less-than-perfect moments we all have and be reminded of that time when the moon and the stars aligned to give me that one beautiful ruby of a moment with my children.

And then Jimi Hendrix walked out on stage to play the national anthem and really, I could have packed it up then and happily flown right home. We sat and watched him riff on that most familiar and powerful of tunes and none of us moved. We sat transfixed and even though I’m always talking about wishing my kids were still babies, there’s something pretty great about hanging out with your grown up kids. Who no longer get antsy and bore easily. Who are interested in the history of other countries and trying new foods and are as riveted as their mom when a guy wearing fringe and a pretty spectacular afro walks out on stage with a guitar and starts to play. It was beautiful and passionate and moving and I loved that they thought so too.

I savored every moment of our trip and instead of feeling anxious about sticking to a schedule and getting to the next place, I enjoyed all our many moments together. Going for the second spin on the Crown Jewels conveyor belt when one of the kids suggested getting a better look at some massive diamond or learning how to navigate our way around the city via the tube and Uber. And even though it was absolutely freezing sitting atop that double-decker bus at night and I had the distinct pleasure of walking to not one but two hospitals on our second day, convinced my youngest had strep throat and needed antibiotics (which he did not), the sun will always shine brightly on the trip in my mind, making all the real gems sparkle there in the sand.

We came home tired but happy late on New year’s Day and my oldest left for work in Manhattan the following morning and the others took to their rooms and got lost in all the unlimited Internet they’d been deprived of for the week abroad and enjoyed some quality time alone. And I did too.

Until our next adventure.

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Photo courtesy of Max Walsack. Top photo courtesy of Annie Walsack.

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Jul
22
2016

It Would Be Wrong Not To

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IMG_0121Here’s something you should know about me: I can be pretty spur-of-the-moment. It’s an attribute that helped get me invited recently on an amazing Caribbean getaway, but also may or may not be the reason why I ended up with so many kids.

It seems I prefer to let things happen organically.

Now, this type of life-strategy can be fraught with uncertainty. It can leave you wondering what you have in the pantry to feed your four children for dinner at 6 p.m. or whether you’ll be spending your golden years living in you daughter’s basement eating cat food.

But when it comes to vacationing, the what-the-hell approach really seems to be working out for me.

Don’t get me wrong: I’d love to be one of those people who can tell you where she’s spending her holidays through 2019. I have a girlfriend who’s already booked her all-inclusive stay in Mexico for spring break next year and Disney World the following summer.

I’d also love to be one of those people who has traditional annual getaways marked on her calendar. The Presidents Weekend ski trip you’ve been doing with a bunch of families since the kids were small or the end-of-summer beach house your extended family has been renting for years.

Sadly, I am none of those things. It’s expensive taking four kids on vacation. Throw in all their different schedules and the ten-year disparity in the children’s ages, and we haven’t all gone away together in years. I would also like to add that coming off a decade of having at least one teenager in the house might also be a contributing factor. Sometimes it’s hard enough sitting down to eat dinner together, much less paying to share a hotel room.

And since my divorce six years ago, the few traditional trips we did enjoy as a family have become a thing of the past (well, for me anyway). I loved our annual ski weekend at the Scooby Doo House – so named because the place was so dated it looked as if the Mystery Machine could pull up at any moment –with friends and cousins. While the house was pretty creepy, like I’d arrive bearing my own sheets and blankets, it was ski-on/ski-off and slept a ton of people and the mountain was manageable enough that the kids could go off on their own and feel like they owned the place.

For a few years towards the end of my marriage, I would accompany my husband to London for a long weekend in February. Say what you will about the man, but my ex can be super fun and for some reason, we were always able to push aside whatever strife was disrupting our stateside life and just enjoy those U.K. trips.

Nowadays when I travel it’s generally on the coattails of somebody else’s planning and often, arrives last minute. Which is where the benefits of a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants-life come in.

I just returned from one of those trips.

A few weeks ago, a friend texted and asked if I wanted to jump on her 50th birthday jaunt to St. Barth’s. Her husband had rented a villa so pretty much I just needed to get myself there. I knew that the trip had been planned for couples and tried to weigh the potential fabulousness of an island getaway with, once again, playing the part of the fifth wheel.

“We are so NOT couply,” my pal texted and when we spoke later, she explained that two of the couples had dropped out and she was trying to fill the open spots with girlfriends instead.

“Why wouldn’t I go?” I asked her, reasoning that I was also turning 50 this summer and didn’t really have anything planned to mark the occasion.

“Exactly,” she said. “It would be wrong not to.”

And just like that, a catchphrase was born.

Throughout the five-day trip, whether the question was whether to have a rum punch at 9 a.m., eat one of the little sugar-crusted donuts filled with Nutella that were delivered in a basket each morning, or take off our swim tops (See: starting the drinking day at 9 a.m.), the answer for all eight of us was invariably, “It would be wrong not to.”

In fact, had I not applied that way of thinking to a last-minute invitation I received a few years ago, I would not have met the birthday girl in the first place. Two friends from town were flying to one of their places in Florida for the weekend and they asked me to join them. We were going down on a Thursday night and would be joined the following day by the homeowner’s college roommate. But I was more than satisfied with the company of my hometown girls and didn’t really give much thought to the college roommate’s arrival.

Early the next morning, in walks the college roommate. We eyed either up and down. “I love your shorts,” she told me. “I love your shoes,” I gushed. And the rest, as they say, was history. It was love at first sight and we’ve stayed in touch well after that fateful trip.

Maybe another way of framing “It would be wrong not to,” would be: “When opportunity knocks, open the damn door.”

For my daughter, a recent college graduate, that meant saying “yes” to her first job offer following her very first interview. She came down from her bedroom to share the good news she had just received in an email while I was sitting outside on our deck drinking a bottle of rose with a pal. My daughter’s initial reaction was to reject the offer. It was so soon after graduation and she didn’t know if this is what she wanted to do with her life. And then my friend gently suggested, as only someone who is not the mother in that situation might do, that my girl had nothing to lose and so much to gain. A salary. Life experience. The opportunity to start figuring out what she really does want to do with her sweet, wild life. And before I knew it, I had a child with a Big Girl Job.

For my younger daughter, saying “Hi” to opportunity means juggling all-manner of odd jobs this summer, and it seems one gig has led to the next. She’s got a group of families for whom she babysits, taking kids to the beach or hanging out with them after a day at camp. She’s been helping a local caterer do some food prep as well as deliver dinners she prepares for customers. And someone in town hired her a few weeks ago to put together IKEA bedroom furniture. For someone who started the summer with not many job prospects, the girl is always working.

Last fall, my mom asked if my 13yo son and me wanted to join her for a November trip to Disney World. One of my sisters had dropped out and the villa she’d rented had enough room for us to tag along. Now, at the time, I was undergoing a financial downturn as I waited for the sale of my house to go through. I knew the villa was paid for and that my mom would probably treat us to most of our meals, but I still had to fly us there and pay for the park tickets.

But my youngest had never really been to Disney and none of us was getting any younger and, I reasoned, when would I ever have another opportunity to go with my own mother to Disney World? Or anywhere else with her, for that matter?

So I booked it. And guess what? It would have been wrong not to.

IMG_0378If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have gotten to watch my 13yo son happily push my 4-month-old nephew’s stroller through the throngs of people at the Magic Kingdom one morning, pausing to stick his head under the stroller’s canopy to make the baby laugh. Or I’d have missed seeing my child walk hand-in-hand with his 4yo nephew. I wouldn’t have walked with that Tiny Husband down one of the side streets of Hollywood Studios, fresh off a spin on the Rockin’ Rollercoaster, and have him grab my own hand and hold it as we strolled towards the exit, happily chatting about what to do next. And, had I not said “yes,” I would not witnessed my mother – who is the opposite of me, a planner and always in control – deliriously out-of-control one night in Epcot.

We’d gone to the park after an early dinner to walk around and see if we could jump on any of the rides. We walked past spraying fountains timed to music and watched my 4yo nephew jump up and down when Nemo swam onto the screen in a darkened theater. Later, we strolled past the thrill ride Test Track and saw that there weren’t the usual long longs waiting to get in.

And maybe because she had just dipped and swooped over the majestic state of California on a ride called Soarin’, or maybe it was just being out of New Jersey and in Florida on a balmy November night, but my usually reticent mother seemed to be feeling a little more adventurous and before we knew it, six of us were on the line and moving towards the ride.

The last time I’d been on Test Track was when it first opened years ago and my only recollection was that it kept breaking down throughout so I guess we never really got the ride’s full effect. It’s pretty much like you’re pretending to test a race car – its brakes and steering, stuff like that – and in the end you kind of open it up and test its speed capabilities, but I didn’t remember it being particularly thrilling.

So we all climbed into our vehicle – my brother, 4yo nephew and his dad in the front and me, my mom and the 13yo in the back – and set off on our journey. The car jerked around the track as it went through its various tests and we were all laughing and pretending the 4yo was driving the car and yelling at him to stop being a crazy driver.

We twisted and turned through the course, dipping down sudden hills that gave our stomachs little jolts that made us whoop with delight, and about 3.5 minutes in were alerted that we’d arrived at the Barrier Test Area. The vehicle began flying down the track towards a wall that pulled apart at the last second and we sped outside into the warm Florida night. A light rain was falling as we whipped around the track and I turned to see my mom sitting next to me laughing harder than I’d ever seen her laugh – like, from deep within her belly – and her usually perfectly arranged hair flying in every direction. I’d never seen her so raw. So free. I sat next to her and tried to take it all in, imprint all the details of that moment – the rain, the force of the six of us hurtling down the track, my mom’s laughter – in my mental hard drive. I savored the sweetness of that moment like I do when I bite into that one perfect peach each summer. I know from experience that there will be plenty more peaches to come, but few –if any – will measure up to that one exceptionally juicy bite.

When I returned home I wrote about it in my journal, placing that moment at the top of my highlights from the trip. Seeing my mother from a new angle. Watching her let go.

Man, it so would have been wrong not to.

Planning a vacation and have room for one more? Obviously, it would be wrong not to ask me. In the meantime, you can sign up to get all of my latest posts sent right to your inbox by typing your email into the box below. You can also follow me on Facebook and Twitter.

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