The concept of the family vacation has always held a lot of weight for me. Growing up poor with a single mother meant that we didn’t take vacations. The most I could hope for was a weekend trip to visit an aunt in the country or a day at an amusement park. In many ways, my kids have been so much luckier than me or my husband, who also doesn’t have a lot of family vacation memories. They went to Disney and Universal twice. We’ve traveled to Chicago, Arkansas, Virginia, Savannah, Gatlinburg, Gulf Shores, Asheville, Wilmington, Greenville and Charleston, Nashville, and before we moved here, we once did spring break in Chattanooga.
It was never about the destination.
We have seen some beautiful places and had a lot of fun. We still share many family jokes that were born out of those trips. Yet, for some reason, I’ve always envied the families who created tradition by going to the same place every year. The same beach house on 30A for spring break, a family home on a lake, or to the same place in Hilton Head they vacationed as a child. For some reason, that kind of repetition represented safety, tradition, and a kind of stability I never knew as a child but craved to create for my own. It’s only now, in the afterglow of a family trip to Maine – a bucket-list destination I’d dreamed of since I was a little girl – that I realize the thing I wanted to create with those vacations actually had very little to do with where we went. It was something much harder to recognize while we were living it. I wasn’t just trying to make memories or create traditions.
I was trying to create the kind of home my children would always want to come back to, the kind of family they would keep choosing long after they no longer had to.
It occurred to me more than once while we were in Maine on a trip with our 19- and 23-year-old sons that this could be it – the last vacation the four of us would take together. It’s not inconceivable, and boy, did it make this mama’s heart ache. I went to the beach with my mom once when I was 24. It was the first trip we’d gone on together since I was 18 and it was the last trip I’d ever take with her. And my husband never went on a vacation with either of his parents as an adult except the one time we brought my mother-in-law to Gulf Shores to help us with the kids.
But, here we were with our young adult sons exploring a state that calls itself Vacationland.
There was a moment when we were in the coastal town of Camden that really captured what I think we created alongside the memories. My husband had gone on a quest to find a music store. My older son went in search of coffee and books. The younger, who is pursuing his BFA, wandered into an art gallery, and I was just straggling along behind them looking at handmade sweaters, trying to decide if it was the right time for ice cream and absorbing all the Maine magic happening around me. Somehow, we created a family where we are all just welcomed to explore our own interests and be who we are alongside one another.
As parents, we spend so many years trying to shape our children that we sometimes forget the goal isn’t to make them more like us. It’s to know them well enough to delight in who they’re becoming. Somewhere between childhood and adulthood, our vacations stopped being about keeping everyone together every minute of the day. They became about giving each other the freedom to wander – and the certainty that we’d find one another again.
Home is a feeling we build.
So, whether this was our last big family vacation remains to be seen, but it has left me hopeful about whether or not they’ll still want to come home. Not because I expect them to. Their lives are supposed to be growing bigger. They’re supposed to be building careers and relationships and lives of their own, maybe even families of their own with their own traditions that don’t always include thkeir parents. If we’ve succeeded as parents, that’s what it should look like.
But…my hope is that someday when they have some time off, or Christmas rolls around, or someone suggests taking a trip, they will know our door is always open and that coming home feels like an invitation, not an obligation. I want home to always feel like the place where they feel fully known and fully loved. I want it to be a place of deep belly laughs at shared jokes, a drawer of art supplies and a shelf of jigsaw puzzles that can be pulled out, trips to favorite coffee shops and bookstores, hugs, favorite meals, and long talks about what’s in our hearts and on our minds. That kind of openness and acceptance is why adult children come home. I think my husband and I have fostered that. I hope we have.
