You poor suffering thing!

And other classic family travel games

In my five-year-old daughter’s very Berkeley karate class, children earn “stripes,” which are essentially a piece of high-quality colored masking tape affixed to your gi, on the way to the harder-to-wait for rewards of new belts. I think it’s a little dumb, but, in the age of instant gratification, this may be a thing in karate classes across this beautiful country of ours that somehow both coddles children and also encourages them to work in industrial laundries.

But, my friends, someone give me a motherfucking stripe, because I just survived, and, dare I say, ENJOYED, 11 days on the road with my husband and two young children!

travel is tiring

Many of my reflections on the good, bad, and the pooping-in-a-bag-on-the-side-of-the-road of it all were covered in this piece I wrote about our first family road trip, two years ago. I just reread it, and still relate to the general theme that we are all human, even on vacation, and to expect anything else is to be slightly deranged and greatly disappointed. This rant/iconic speech from the piece elaborates:

I’ve been studying how to be a good parent since before I was a parent. Opinions abound, but very little seems to consider that both children and parents are human, that parents were raised by other parents who were also human, and that I can both want desperately for my children to grow up to be healthy, happy adults, and also consider that if I leave while they’re young they will perhaps forget about me and not be that traumatized.

I think, perhaps, the answer is that I already am a good parent. I believe, with great confidence, that if you too are a parent, you are also a good one. Western parents spend more time with their children than they ever have before. We give thought and care to raising children who think about gender, race, and ability in more nuanced ways than what we were taught. We are teaching them to both be sex positive and set boundaries with their own bodies. Unlike previous generations, we are explaining to our kids that Bill Clinton is actually a big ol’ dirt bag. This last year, the vast majority of us did not act on our impulses to murder or abandon our children, though it was clear that everyone was writing about us but no one was coming for us. We are overwhelmed with a culture of unreasonable expectations for parents and almost zero actual support, and then we are told that all we have to do to make that whole situation totally fine is parent like the French or the Maya or let our kids range-free or find our own village.

What I wanted for myself when I wrote this, and also when, as soon as school was out, I again loaded bags and snacks and coloring books and two scooters and helmets that were not used even once into our Subaru Outback for a week and a half of “quality time,” was the comfort of expecting lows as well as highs, and the casting off of some “right” way to do family vacation.

And since it is summer once again, even though the gray bay areas skies and chilly temperatures that I find deeply disturbing every June might lead you to think otherwise, I want this for all of us.

What can I give you from my time on the road that could aide you in your own family adventures this summer? Well, I think trying, with a healthy dose of failure, to accept the above rant/iconic speech is really how I earned my stripe.

But if I have one “tip,” it’s to let yourself get a little weird, maybe even go slightly crazy, as you are totally justified in doing when traveling all day (and attempting to sleep all night) with your dependents. Our finest moments were playing the same song over and over and over again (Major Lazer’s “Lean On,” for which no amount of listening will help you decipher the lyrics), eating nothing but Cheetos and lollipops and the individual elements of unused s’mores kits, trying to make friends with strangers, going through Victoria B.C.’s completely bananas “Miniature World” twice because, I mean, it was SO bananas.

i mean c’mon weirdo tourism does not get better than this

At my lowest point on the trip, when my husband was on his second day in bed with a terrible cold and we were all sharing one cabin with a large family of carpenter ants on my aunt and uncle’s farm on a tiny island that had endless flowers and clam digging and bonkers views and swallowtail butterflies but none of my go-to solo-parenting escapes (the houses of friends and the arcade), things got so bad they got good again.

My son made some comment related to a perceived deprivation involving root beer floats, to which I responded cheekily “Oh! You poor suffering thing!” My daughter then complained that I never said that to her, and though I had a monologue about their shared ungratefulness fully locked-and-loaded, I was so exhausted that I just repeated “You poor suffering thing!” I asked her how else I had wronged her. She had plenty. It started out very sibling-rivalry-ish, but got into how she doesn’t have her ears pierced, how it’s too long until the next Halloween, and how she was afraid I would also get sick. To each grievance, I simply replied, in a spinoff of a therapeutic activity I’ve heard called “Spring Cleaning" that a friend taught me, “You poor suffering thing! What else?” You don’t try to fix or minimize. All complaints are equally weighty.

My son had a turn. No one wanted to play blackjack with him and he missed his dad. Then they let me go. At first I wanted to protect them from my gripes, but then I realized I needed this. Instead of pushing down my discomforts and disappointments to be a travel trooper, I complained full force. I realized I’d been pretty cold and ungenerous towards my poor suffering husband, who sure as hell did not want to be lying in a loft with his head exploding at that moment, but who I somehow, in that odd co-parenting math we do, blamed for abandoning me during what was supposed to be my “hot farm mom” era.

is this too much to ask for, people?

Letting myself actually feel sorry for myself, instead of also feeling ashamed about all that but trying to be cool about it, helped. The kids yelled in unison, “you poor suffering thing!” My cousin came over and said “so, it’s group therapy?” My aunt got into it, and I felt her pain at getting her ice cream in a cup that day, but then realizing a cone would have been nice, as if it was my own.

We had a better night after that. Somehow I felt a little looser. Throughout the rest of the trip, “you poor suffering thing” made the occasional appearance. Did we stop feeling sorry for ourselves? Not entirely. Did we take responsibility for our own behaviors instead of blaming others for them? Certainly I didn’t, not completely. Did I lose my absolute mind over my children fighting and threaten to deploy punishments I had no plan on carrying through and probably didn’t really have power over anyway? Absolutely.

The only thing we can count on it that we’ll suck, some of the time. But isn’t it nice to have company in that? Enjoy* your times this summer, and taking your family show on the road, and don’t forget to embrace the suffering. Sometimes it’s the only way to get to the fun.

For more family travel support, and help with the acceptance of the parenting unknown, I recommend:

• This mighty fun family travel package that ScaryMommy just released, including this piece I wrote on the most ethically-cloudy parenting topic I have yet to encounter, leaving your child in a hotel room.

• This piece by Miranda Rake in Romper about letting yourself be “surprised” by parenting can easily be extended to family adventures.

• The kid’s debate podcast, SmashBoomBest, which a friend just told us about. We listened to approximately 1000 episodes. From an adult perspective, they can be quite uneven in quality, but they’re mostly not annoying and some, like this one, featuring rapper Matt “Nur-D” Allen,” or the one where Vulture’s Sam Sanders defends aliens, are top notch!

• If you reeeallly wanna get weird, this 1999-era website tracks all of the alleged souvenir pressed penny machines in the U.S. (and Canada!) and it turns out that some kids are pretty happy to be in a car for 12 hours as long as they can get like, two pressed pennies for their troubles! (My son got obsessed with this right before we left and collected his pennies in a “Pressed Penny Passport” which is somehow the best $5 we’ve even spent).

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Also, this:

I’ve been obsessed with the British singer Jessie Ware since my friend Ben played her banger slow jam “Wildest Moments” for me in 2012, and her new neo-disco album, That! Feels! Good! is legit. It makes me want to smile, dance, and get, like scary good at roller-skating. She’s an absolute goddess. Here’s one new track: