Family!

Jayda, Sammy and Maria – the better 75% of the family.

My son told me yesterday that life isn’t as serious as I am making it in my head – not in those exact words, more like, “life isn’t as serious as you are making it, none of it is that serious.” In many ways he is correct and taking life too serious keeps me from enjoying the moment. My son is seventeen years old and is currently focused on physical fitness and day trading. If he had his way he would spend his days doing those two things with entertainment being the third component which is actually where he spends the majority of his time – viewing or interacting with a screen. We are currently on an extended family vacation and are allowing time each day for our son to trade – a couple hours in the morning – and work out at a gym that he finds and pounds on the door until someone lets him in (he has yet to pay) in the evening for up to three hours. This gives us five or six ours each day to conduct a family activity with the four of us which includes my wife and my fifteen-year-old daughter. Yesterday we made our way to “Lake of the Clouds” in the Porcupine Mountain State Park in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and then found ourselves parked on a beautiful piece of beach just outside the park on Lake Superior. I wanted to enjoy that moment and his comment about not taking life too serious, dropped me into it.

During this extended road trip, someone in the car may critique the day as not being enough or we had missed something that would probably be awesome, but we had done extraordinary things and it was human nature to look past them to what we had missed. We had experienced the time the best we could and yet the desire for more? The children want one more bedroom instead of being happy sharing one, they want the restaurant we passed on the way to the one that is average and they want the life experience that creates the best photo for the internet. I am trying to create memories and connect with my children and wife, but there are many times during each day where I feel like throwing in the towel and driving all eighteen hours directly home. There are also many times during the day that I am elated to be with my family, that I am intimately attracted to my wife, that I am genuinely proud of my children and that I laugh out loud at hilarious comments by any of the three. There is always a searching for self, for connection and for getting outside of myself – for not focusing on my dream of being wealthy or accomplished or six pack fit and when I find myself in the now, peacefully being, I encourage myself to breathe it in.

During this trip I have almost had a fist fight with the afore mentioned teenage boy after finding his sister in the fetal position with him standing over her in what seemed to be a threatening manner. The kids were fighting over beds in an Airbnb, no exactly worth my rage, but the built up anxiety from their constant fighting reached a tipping point and I let my emotion take over my ability to help my children problem solve peacefully vanished. I am a reactionary human – someone that shows his emotion on my outside surfaces. I am not a great listener – if I could improve anything about myself instantly, it would be that, listening intently and genuinely. Instead of listening and trying to problem solve the bed situation, I pushed my son away from his sister and turned red with rage, spewing something off that just enraged him. This ruined the evening and the next morning – I was in that drive home mode, but I new it would be better to work through it.

My wife just wanted to get out of the house after the incident and I joined her which I am not sure that she wanted. On the way out of the house our daughter complained about the house we were staying in and that it was not close enough to water or something for her to do. The house was luxurious, with everything a human could need to be comfortable, much nicer than our own home, so I lost my cool again and said “Fuck You” three times to my fifteen-year-old daughter. No my finest moment (granted this is the same daughter that calls her mother a cunt often, so she is not innocent by any means). I had worked very hard to find great places to stay for us for this extended journey and each day I had worked to have awesome activities for us to do, so when she talked shit about our accommodations I reacted with some good old vitriol. This was right after my son screamed in my face that he was going to kick my ass – another fine moment. Our family had come unraveled over the choice of beds in an awesome sleeping loft – and the beds were both exactly the same. At that point we had been in the car with each other for a week and the closeness began to create a need for space.

We were able to put our family back together the next day through conversation about what had happened. My daughter had a somewhat sincere apology about dogging my vacation planning and my son was sure that he had done nothing wrong and that I should never yell at him. He did end up giving his sister the bed she chose though and somehow my eruption united them against their awful parents. I, as I always do, had to apologize to both children and my wife for losing my temper and I felt small and lacking as a father. I tried to make it up to everyone by renting a boat the next day which didn’t work out because when we arrived we were told that the boat we were supposed to have had been towed in, my bad karma was following us – my wife even expressed that I was pulling dark energy towards us. I believed her and worked to turn the tide. We spent the rest of the day at a beautiful park on the lake and made a plan to go to a near by town for the fireworks show that night. The town was so far north – the Copper Peninsula of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan – that the fireworks didn’t start until 11 p.m. The family came back together on this day before the Fourth of July and we enjoyed our late night fireworks in the most Americana of environments with thousands of other small town Michiganders that were building their own memories.

I could write about the trials of parenthood every day, but what this experience taught me was that tomorrow there will be a new brawl to overcome and that you better enjoy the time between the rounds. We are a spicy group of humans and we will have many more hurdles to overcome, but sometimes we just need to learn that “none of it is that serious”.