How I Spent My Summer Vacation

I really did have to write essays in elementary school answering that question, “How I Spent My Summer Vacation.”

Sometimes, answering the question was easy. “We went to Pensacola, Florida,” or “We went to Gatlinburg, Tennessee” (this was before Gatlinburg was discovered and made over as a tourist mecca).

Those were the times when my parents had the financial resources to take a vacation. When they didn’t, my answer to the question might be “I spent a week with my aunt in the Ninth Ward” or “I spent a week with my grandmother in Shreveport.”

Except for my trips to Shreveport, our vacations were always by automobile. I can remember long trips to Washington, D.C., North Carolina, the Blue Ridge and Smoky Mountains, and Parris Island, South Carolina when my older brother “graduated” from Marine boot camp. I can also remember short trips to Dallas (Six Flags!), Galveston (revisiting the one family vacation my father knew as a child), and Pensacola.

And on those long trips, I can remember asking – many times – for something to drink because I was thirsty. My father’s response was to hand me a cup of “imaginary water.”

Because me and my siblings were rather chronologically spaced out (eight years between me and older brother and ten years between me and my younger brother), there were a lot of vacations as an only child or as the oldest or youngest child by a wide margin. The benefit of that was a lack of sibling rivalry and fighting in the car. What I remember most about those long car rides was spending a lot of time reading or napping.

The memories I have of those vacations are largely good ones. I loved the mountains, and wading in mountain streams, and hiking up a nature trail in the Blue Ridge to suddenly come upon the entire Shenandoah Valley laid out before us. I also remember the massive traffic jams in Houston and Washington, D.C., and the severe sunburn in Florida. But vacations were good times, fun times, things I remember as fun and different, and things I could write about in September for the inevitable essay question.

Vacations have changed. Now they seem to have to be planned with all the strategic and tactical details of a battle plan. Life seems more complicated, or we’ve allowed it to become more complicated, including how we have to keep the kids from getting bored (which, of course, is the major horror of 21^st century culture – boredom).

In The Secrets of Happy Families, Bruce Feiler describes how he talked with the game maker Zynga about what to do to keep children occupied on vacations, particularly for those times when plans might go awry (traffic jams, delayed planes, thunderstorms closing the beach). But tension can happen even when things go well, and Feiler has some good ideas for that as well: “…worry less about eliminating the negatives and focus more on maximizing the positives. One easy way to do that: put away your phone, get down on your kids’ level, and play.”

I like that. Get down on your kids’ level and play.

This month at The High Calling, we’ve been discussing The Secrets of Happy Families. Check the site today to see what Seth Haines has to say about the final chapters in the book, covering vacations, sports, and family reunions.

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

What Grandparents Do

There was a time when I would have thought that being a grandfather was for old people. Either my definition of “old people” changed, or I was really stupid. Or both.

Today I have a t-shirt that proudly proclaims “Grandpa since 2010.” Somewhere along the line I became smart.

I love being a grandfather. I love being with my two grandsons. I love playing toy trains with the three-year-old. I love the expressions on the one-year-old’s face when you walk in the door, the expressions that say, “Who are you? Do I know you? What are you doing here?” I love hearing my wife say “I saw the two grandsons today, and the first words out of the three-year-old’s mouth were ‘Where’s Grandpa?’”

I also know that spending time with them will eventually result in a very good night’s sleep, a nap, or both. Grandchildren require energy – a lot of energy.

My mother was almost exactly my age when she watched our three-year-old while we spent two weeks in Europe. And the three-year-old was a bit more intense than his own three-year-old son is today. I don’t know how she managed it. Two solid weeks.

In The Secrets of Happy Families, Bruce Feiler says that grandparents “are often considered second tier in families, but there’s a striking new body of research that says they’r a primary reason humans were able to live in families.”

Grandparents help raise their grandchildren, he says.

Grandparents reduce stress for parents (especially when they’re not criticizing) and help create more well-adjusted children.

The more involved grandmother sin particular are, the more involved dads are, too.

Grandparents teach social skills like how to cooperate.

While parents lead in disciplining negative behavior, grandparents encourage positive behavior.

And yet I did know. Watching my son and daughter-in-law, I remember my own days as a parent of small children. When you’re a parent, you’re caught up in doing, for yourself and for your children. When you’re a grandparent, it’s all about being.

Feiler cites three things – three jobs – grandparents can become expert at.

Offload siblings: When our one-year-old grandson was born, we packed his older brother off to the zoo, giving Mom and Dad time to get to know the new baby, and his brother the opportunity to know he was still a major presence and wanted.

Be an escape valve: Grandparents can give grandchildren a perspective (and respite) their parents often can’t.

Hover: Hovering parents often lead children, especially older children and teenagers, to rebel. Hovering grandparents, probably because they’re not around 24-7, allow older children to feel cared for and worried over. Older children cut their grandparents some slack that they would never think of giving their parents.

Who knew? I thought it was all plain fun.

Over at The High Calling this month, we’re reading and discussing The Secrets of Happy Families. Since this week’s group of chapters includes the one on “the sex talk,” I suspect you’ll learn a lot from the discussion.

Difficult Conversations

Last week, I mentioned that I came from a “yours, mine, and ours” family. Both of my parents had been married before, and I have a half-sister and a half-brother from those previous marriages. And then there’s me, and my younger brother.

We are spread out chronologically, partially because of those various marriages. My half-sister is 11 years older than I am, my half-brother eight years older, and my younger brother is 10 years younger than I am (my younger brother has a nephew one month older than he is).

We are spread out geographically as well, with only my half-brother still living in the New Orleans metropolitan area. We see each other usually once a year, but in May we three sons were together at my mother’s house. My half-sister has physical problems that don’t allow her to travel.

What we were there for was the beginning of breaking up my mother’s home. Our childhood home. The house where we grew up. My mother had lived there for 58 years, and the time had come for her to move to a retirement home.

My younger brother and I flew in on a Thursday night from different cities, met at the airport, and drove to my mother’s house. My half brother and sister-in-law arrived on Saturday.

In one sense, the difficult conversation had already happened. My mother had agreed that she could no longer live alone. She had had hip surgery the previous year and was maneuvering around the house okay, and had some wonderful neighbors who helped her tremendously. But about a month before, she had fallen and didn’t have the strength to pick herself back up. And she couldn’t reach a telephone. Hours passed before a worried sister called my sister-in-law, who finally reached a neighbor.

The difficult conversation we faced wasn’t to convince her to move. She already had a new apartment lined up. The difficult part was invading every bit of privacy she had left and sort through the contents of the house, decide what she needed and wanted to bring with her, and what to do with everything that remained.

My younger brother and I did most of the sorting that weekend. My sister-in-law has been the real champion, though, taking care of my mother, helping her find a new place, handling arrangements, talking with doctors, and hundreds of other things that can only be done by someone on the scene.

In a real sense, we were sorting lives, and personal histories: photographs, letters, personal effects, books, souvenirs from old vacations, scrapbooks both of my parents had kept when they were much younger, old income tax forms. Deciding who would get what furniture, and how to divide photo albums.

And there was my mother, sitting in the middle of all of it. We found things she had forgotten she had.

I was three years old when we moved into the house. Every time we’ve gone to New Orleans, that’s where we stayed. It’s the house my two sons know as “Grandma’s house.” And it’s the same for all of my nephews (we only have nephews in my family, and one great-niece).

In The Secrets of Happy Families, Bruce Feiler describes his own experiences with aging parents: his father with Parkinson’s disease, his mother hurt after a fall, and he and his siblings living nowhere close. He lists four critical elements of a difficult conversation, based on the idea that such a conversation is part of a larger narrative.

Be curious about the other side’s story.

Tell your own story second.

Create a third story together.

Remember this is not the last story you’ll tell together.

I hadn’t read Feiler’s book until months after that “sorting” weekend. But we actually followed those four steps. We spent a considerable amount of time talking with my mother about the house and various effects. Listening to her tell her stories. And then we told our own. We all went to visit the new apartment and retirement home, and thus started the third story. And there is still some time for making and telling new stories – we were not telling our last story.

Over at The High Calling, we’re discussing The Secrets of Happy Families. This week’s discussion covers three chapters: “Fight Smart,” “The Buck Starts Here,” and “Talk about the Marshmallows” (difficult conversations).

Photograph: My mother’s house, and the house where we grew up in suburban New Orleans.

The Secrets of Happy Families

I was born into one of those “yours mine and ours” kind of families. Both of my parents had been previously married; my father had been married twice before. I had a half-sister from my father’s first marriage, and a half-brother from my mother’s first marriage. Then there was me, followed by my younger brother.

We lived in New Orleans, exotic, yes, but we lived in a fairly typical post-World War II American suburb. The subdivision was long blocks of three-bedroom ranch houses. I was smack in the flood of the famous Baby Boom, and so I knew overcrowded schools and everything else that came for the Boomers.

At the time, most of us didn’t think in terms of happy or unhappy families. Our families just were. Some families were clearly better off financially than others, but I never asked whether my own family was happy. I don’t really think any of us did. Some families were large and others small. Some did a lot of screaming at each other (mine was relatively small and extraordinarily quiet).

But even the screaming wasn’t considered bizarre; it was just something that came along with some families. (The one really loud family in our neighborhood that I remember best had two parents and six children living in a three-bedroom house, and five of the six children were boys.) (I’d probably be a screamer, too.)

Children accept all kinds of situations as normal, because it is normal for them. It’s what they know. It’s the familiar. It may be far from ideal, but there’s a security in the familiar. And I know there can also be insecurity in the familiar.

It wasn’t until I was older that I began to understand many things about my own family that I didn’t see as a child. Every family has tensions; every family has brokenness. Broken people bring brokenness into every family. Both of my parents had been divorced, and I think there was often a determination to make this marriage work. But I know the possibility occurred to both of them.

But brokenness does not preclude happiness; families can be happy in spite of a lot of things stacked against them. But what I’ve learned in my own marriage is that it takes work – lots of work. And it’s helped enormously that both of us share the same faith.

Over at The High Calling, we’re starting a book discussion on The Secrets of Happy Families by Bruce Feiler. Feiler likes lists, and the book promises to have lots of them. What he’s done is to look at the studies, the research, the anecdotes, and his own experience, and identified what happy families seem to have in common. It promises to be a lively discussion – after all, we all have an opinion on families.

Related:

NPR did a story and interview with Bruce Feiler.

Photograph by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.