It's the journey, not the destination....

After a four month hiatus from my fledgling blog, I am back.  Writing, of course, takes a certain amount of mental and emotional energy.  Given the hurdles that I had to clear over the spring, I had to recoil:  board re-certification exam that occurs once every ten years, is expensive, requires brushing up on test-taking skills as well as mastery of all the new scientific and clinical information that has accrued in the decade, and wanting to not fail;  major abdominal surgery to repair some of structural damage done by three pregnancies with 9+lb baby boys;  new and exciting and very time-consuming projects at the company I'm the CEO of (it's not as fancy as it sounds) requiring multiple meetings in our hospital and medical community that I literally can't step back from even though I'd like to;  escalating hours in my "real job" of doctoring at the hospital;  organizational, scheduling and bookkeeping duties related to my husband's small business/corporation as well as our household (The Calendar could be contracted out as a part-time job in itself);  duties related to being member and secretary of my children's school board of directors, and the attendant spring-time issues of major budget and financial decisions;  end of school year celebrations, plays, field trips, parties; planning the three-week camping/road trip that commenced immediately following school and Memorial Day weekend;  usual duties of life, home, wife, mother including (but not limited to) daily breakfast, lunch and dinner preparation, chauffeur duty to and from school and scattered after-school activities, diaper changing, laundry, daily (up to thrice) sweeping of the dusty floor in the dirt house in the dusty high plains desert, bathing and fingernail care and hair brushing and inspection of children to insure weather-appropriate and reasonably matching clothing with location of shoes and any necessary accessories, such as coat of varying weight, hat for either warmth or sun, gloves in winter and sunscreen in summer;  keeping my self from getting over-extended, over-tired, cranky, catty and maintaining my sanity with runs, painted toe-nails, and a clean car (to feel some sense of control, I suppose).  Oh, and trying to be a good friend and good wife (and I mean that in the best possible way) while trying to stay engaged in the social and political world around me.

Sound ridiculous?  Yes.  I don't list it all to sound boastful or complaining at all.  It's just taking stock, which vacations often prompt me to do.  And it's similar to many people's lives.  Yes, David Byrne, how did I get here?  And I purposefully tried not to get here.   I try to avoid getting or feeling over-extended.  I try to be a peter pan kind of mom, after all.  Seriously, I still think of my primary job as parenting, wife-ing, home-making.  Then comes being a doctor, and then the other stuff comes after that.  It's no wonder that it feels, as most would agree, like my life is flying by, my kids are growing up fast.  Every day that I see patients in the hospital (and as an internist I see adults, mostly older ones) at least one tells me how quickly it all goes by, to enjoy my children, even the hard parts, how special it is to parent a young child, how lucky I am, how these are the best years of my life, the years of milk and honey.  I agree with this and bear it in mind constantly.  I've tried to structure my life such that I would be present for and relish all of those fleeting moments in my children's lives, even the most painful and annoying ones (and aren't they unfortunately plentiful?).  I have the same feeling about my family's health--given all of the things that can go wrong and the tragedies that befall wonderful people every day, there but for the grace of God go we.  I've also recognized in my self-analysis and attempted life balancing that I become a less-effective, disaffected, isolated person if I only parent.  I like feeling productive and connected, feeling like I'm contributing to the world, and earning my own paycheck.  And so I let the other things in, one by one, because they are important.

Well, thank God for vacations.  My husband and I bought a camper van in the winter in anticipation of road trips to come.  We did a big one last summer with great success (and a 1, 3 and 7 year old to boot) in my family car and commando style tent camping.  We decided that while the boys are young, road trips plus/minus camping, would be the way for us to go.  We bought a Sportsmobile van.  Inspired by the freedom of the road, the freedom from the airport security process, and the rare opportunity to be spontaneous, we planned on a three week trip north through the Rockies.  I'd like to say it also is economical, and except for the actual purchase of the van, it is!  Our goal for this summer's trip was to hit several National Parks/Monuments, and maybe catch up with some old friends along the way.  We were aiming for some big guns, Yellowstone, Grand Tetons and Glacier, with side trips to Rocky Mountain and Dinosaur.  Mission accomplished, and then some.

The beauty of a road trip, when done as the trip and not for the agonizing purpose of getting across the country in a hurry, is that the vacation and attendant psychological freedom begins as soon as everyone is belted in the car and you pull out of the driveway.  As it always is, both my husband and I had to put in extra time before (and less enjoyably now after) the trip to clear our life's path for the journey.  I felt only capable of taking one day, quite literally, at a time.  But then, hitting the road and driving north, we were again taking things one day at a time.  The difference was that at home I was performing duties proscribed and penned on The Calendar, and had to do each of those duties as a matter of course or in preparation for something else.  I couldn't look ahead, lest I get distracted from the duty at hand.  I had only so much time to do each thing.  I had one day to pack for the trip two weeks ahead, and one day to pack two days ahead.  Every other day in April and May were accounted for. 

On the road, and with only a few reservations (out of necessity, at campsites in the national parks) we took things day by day, and drilling down more microscopically, moment to moment.  We could side trip here.  We could stop there.  We could keep going on the road if all were content or asleep.  We could stay an extra day in Bozeman or Glacier or Ouray because we were having an extra good time.  Much to the delight of my husband's wanderlustful soul, we could be spontaneous.  We could linger.  We could roam.  And, save for our occasional use of smartphones (of which the GPS mapping and direction capabilities were stellar), we could eschew the "real world" and live in the moment with the kids.

All that a child really wants from their parent is attention, love.  Since we had no other distractions, they could have it in spades.  We also went where we, the adults, wanted to go.  It was a win-win, no compromise.  We've never been to the glorious Yellowstone and, thank God and Teddy Roosevelt, we could all go and benefit from and enjoy it's fruits.  We saw geysers and wolves and mud pots and bison and grizzlies and raging waterfalls and the yellow stones of their grand canyon.   We rode bikes as a family.  We ate marshmallow pancakes for breakfast.  The older boys became Junior Rangers.  We lived and slept by the sun and moon and not the clock, apparently staying up late and sleeping in.  We let our oldest have a bit of supervised autonomy.  We also saw dinosaur bones, crossed the path of Lewis, Clark and Sacajawea, saw moose, elk, several bird species, and grizzlies.  In Glacier, we saw the namesake ice, dwindling as it is, set upon jagged peaks and against cobalt blue skies, floored by crystalline lakes.  It was magnificent.

I was moved to tears on multiple occasions, by the sheer beauty of it all.  The creatures flourishing in a wild and natural habitat, the blazing beauty of our surroundings, the wonder at the history of this amazing land.  The grace and beauty and imperfection of our family.  The wide-eyed light in my boys as we visited museums and visitor's centers and saw a wolf.  And I could just be.  And so could the kids.  Of course, they still fought and whined and cried.  And it rained.  But I wasn't hurrying them to get shoes on, to make sure they had lunches, to tick off items on the agenda.  We could transcend the minor annoyances of the day. I watched each of my three boys leap forward in some way.  C (who turned 8 on the trip) knows the natural world in a very deep way, wanted to plen aire paint, and internalized the meaning of an ecosystem, explaining to the park ranger in Glacier the ecology of the mountain goat.  S (age 4) went from drawing fisted scribbles and scratches into careful renditions of identifiable scenes, dramatically and literally overnight, creating a portfolio of pictures of us, animals, trains, busses and other things I will put in the scrapbook of our trip.  F (age 2) learned to love camping, developed a flexibility not easy for toddlers, and began to compose more verbose sentances.  It was just lovely.

And so, in re-entry, I am trying as I always do, to bring part of that vacation into real time.  Isn't that the purpose of vacation?  Mental and physical relaxation and the kind of frame-shift that we can incorporate into our self to bring more joy?  Can I bring the zen of living freely in the moment into balance with a scheduled life?  Well, that may be overly ambitious.  But it has pushed a re-set button in my heart.  It has put priorities into perspective.  It has re-connected me to my ever-evolving children.  It gave me a burning desire to just live in vacation mode.  Thank goodness it's summer and I can hold on to that, at least for a little longer.  It's life: one great big wide open road trip.