< Family vacation wouldn’t be the same without a Cousin Charlotte and an Uncle Pete
Every year I go on a family vacation with different members of my extended family. Every year we shove ourselves into close quarters and plan to spend the next 168 hours in with the ones we love.
This does not sound like a good idea but we do it anyway. A lot of us, all around the world, year after year, summer after summer, succumb to this thing known as the family vacation.
And no matter how many quarrels we have had or minor disagreements over what to have for lunch or what is the perfect beach time or why Uncle Sal always gets you a god-awful cardigan for Christmas; despite all that, it’s still fun.
You know it is.
And while we never know exactly what will transpire year to year, we do know this:
Family is weird. That’s right I said it. Each one of you is weird in your own delightful horrendous way. Put twelve of you in a house together for a week and you will discover just HOW weird and you will love and hate almost every minute of it.
You will have to make concessions. … a lot. With twelve people in a house ranging from age ten to age sixty- seven you will not be able to get your way or live the way you do at home. You will eat food you never would, you will engage in activities that exhaust you and you will wake up at hours you don’t approve of.
This is called fun.
You will get tired of doing dishes or you will just ignore them. With twelve people in a house the sink is never ever empty and the dishwasher is always always full and so is the trash. If you are a drinking family then so is the recycling.
Speaking of drinking, drinking with your family is fun; getting drunk with your family is not.
You will be very aware of how your children act. All of the sudden every fault that your child has will be like a glaring light-bulbed sign for your family to see. You pray for good behavior but know that with late nights, early mornings and sugary vacation treats that you will have at least two meltdowns on your hands and both will not be pretty.
You will do strange things like work on puzzles for hours. You and six others will do a 1000 piece puzzle in five hours flat.
There will be pictures of you washed up on shore after a particularly violent wave. You will be clinging for life to a boogie board and the top of your bathing suit. You are forty-one years old and yet this seems like a good idea.
You will look in all the pictures like you are having the time of your life and you are, it’s just a little hard to recognize amongst all the raucous. But once that 168 hours has passed and you are back to the comfort of your own bed, the quiet of your own family and the routine of your own household; you will miss your large crazy weird family …a lot.
The thought of your yearly family beach trip will get you through many a monotonous work day until you are granted the privilege of another 168 hours with eleven of the most interesting funny kind and caring family members you have ever had the privilege of knowing.
So despite everything we do know about family vacations, we go anyway because where the making of memories are concerned the more the merrier, even if it does mean there is never any room for everyone in the hot tub at one time.
About Rebecca Suder