Vacations

Have you ever taken a vacation with your extended family? Did you all get along? Did you learn anything from the experience?

Yes I have. I spent a week in Hawaii with most of my mom’s side of the family last year.

Until I made this second move to San Diego, I didn’t really talk much with this side of the family just because they were so far away and I hardly ever went to San Diego except when my mom would make plans to go on vacation there. When I moved though, my aunt and uncle very quickly became a second set of parents for me. I can count on them for any help or advice I might need. They are extremely accepting people and are ready to take anyone under their wings.

It’s hard to explain how I feel about living in San Diego as far as my family is concerned. It’s so drastically different from the home life I had with my parents and sisters. It’s a completely different way of life. I have a second set of parents here, and two ‘brothers’ instead of two sisters, plus an even more ‘extended family’ that consists of a woman my age that my uncle befriended while in AA (she’s one of the most beautiful people I know), all of my cousin’s friends, and from time to time an exchange student or two.

Everyone is family, whether related by blood or not. Even my younger cousin’s girlfriend, who I can’t stand, I still consider family.

It’s very easy going. And it was such an enlightening experience. I basically had to retrain myself because my mannerisms were so out of place. At home, I would be yelled at or scolded or any number of things if I took liberties or cracked some joke that my dad didn’t realize was a joke.  Here, my aunt and uncle get offended if I don’t take certain liberties. They even buy extra food and soda and things of that nature in anticipation of people coming over and wanting things to eat or drink. They make fun of me when I ask for things even though I’ve always been taught that’s what you’re supposed to do. It’s like that for all their ‘kids’. We might move out, but to them it’s never really thought of as permanent.

It’s really difficult for me to explain how that makes me feel. It pretty much rewrote how I look at life and how I treat people.  It’s so much better. So much less worrisome.

And going on vacation is a completely diffferent thing all together. I only have one memory of going on vacation with both my mom and my dad that was an actual vacation and not just a trip to San Diego. Oddly enough, it was to Hawaii. Oahu instead of Maui though. My parents fought all the time. They’ve been fighting for as long as I can remember. My dad is far too serious to take anything in stride when things go not according to plan, and my mom is too stubborn to concede that she could ever be wrong. We were kids on that one vacation so we had fun despite the constant tension, but my dad always hated going on vacation because he saw it as a waste of money. He has always been extremely uptight about money. My parents always had a big fight whenever my mom put her foot down and said we were going to San Diego. Dad only went to San Diego with us a handful of times that I can remember. He rarely participated in vacations with us. And I have never been camping in my whole life because my dad always said that pitching a tent on the ranch was good enough. He didn’t believe in camping at all.

When I moved to San Diego and it was demanded of me that I go to Hawaii with everyone, it was a huge family affair. Everyone was involved, and my cousin’s girlfriend Lisa was going, so her whole family was going too, also two of my uncle’s sisters, one of them with a husband, one with her three kids. Huge, big deal. It was so much fun. I have never had so much fun on a vacation in my life. Maui is a beautiful island. We took a day trip to drive around the whole island, we did zip lining, we went snorkeling, we went to a Luau, and we spent hours and hours and hours at the beach. Everyone had a say and everyone had a good time.

It made me very determined to take yearly vacations. To go away from anything familiar and really plan it out and immerse myself in the idea of being away from home. It also made me determined to one day help my own immediate family experience some of that. Especially my mom, and secondly my sisters, nephews, and niece. I don’t want my youngest sister especially to go through her whole childhood without having a decent vacation and I’ve really being trying to figure out if I can save enough money to take her along to London when we go in 2013. She’ll be fifteen, or almost, by then. I have to talk to Aunt Susan about it because it means going sometime in the summer instead of in August-October, but I really hope I can make it work. I wish I could bring my mom along too, but that would be around three thousand dollars just for plane tickets. There’s no way I could afford that.

Families should travel. Families should go on vacations every year if they can. I feel like it’s very important for kids to see as much of the world as they can. The idea that kids have of the world is too narrow if they aren’t able to see lots of it. It still makes me sad and sometimes angry when I think about all the times we didn’t go on vacation because my father thought it was a waste of time. It shouldn’t be like that.

I’m so glad that I was able to take the vacatio to Hawaii with my second family in San Diego. It was just was a vacation should be.