Vacation? Yes Please!

I’m going on a vacation!

I haven’t been on a vacation for about 14 years or so, and I’m a little nervous about it.

See, there was a time that things were different. My mom and I used to enjoy vacations. Roaring River State Park and Caplinger Mills in the Ozarks, Mark Twain’s home and Saint Louis, travelling around in Missouri.

I used to have a lot of interest in travelling. My first girlfriend and I went to Houston Texas to see the Johnson Space Center, which was one of my dreams. It was my first vacation by airplane, and it had its own terrors, but it was worth it.

About a decade later, things were all different. Marriage, children, and various other factors had changed my life around as well as my interests and personality. In time, all I wanted was to stay at home, generally in my bedroom. We still travelled some, but in time my wife and kids went on vacation, while I had my vacation at home.

I lost the ability to sleep in hotels, to relax while travelling, and the notion of vacations left a bad taste in my mouth. Going places and seeing the world took a backseat to surviving day after week, month after year.

After 2008 and my divorce, I began trying to simplify my life. Over the years I started rediscovering myself, which included figuring out what I was interested in again. I have trouble sleeping anywhere other than my own bed. I started walking at a park in town which was mostly pleasurable due to being outdoors and around nature.

My young lady in recent years has talked of wanting to really travel. She’s been to Boston, to California, to Florida, but really it’s almost always been for reasons other than simply vacationing. She has been in a holding pattern for years, waiting until the time and finances were right to see the sights beyond a thirty-minute drive from home.

Finances were never going to be accommodating, so she decided it was just time to go. She asked me, the now-timid homebody, about going on a real week-long vacation down to the Ozarks.

As scared as I was of leaving the familiar (again, this was a development in my world, not really the actual me), I said yes. I haven’t had a second thought about it.

Now I’m packing for the trip.

I may not sleep much, but I promise I’m going to relax.

There’s another dimension to the matter of going on vacation however. A very Mindful dimension.

It took many years of deterioration to relieve me of my inner interest in things. My inner self went into hiding like an abused puppy.

So now I’m facing those coping mechanisms and all the conditioning that robbed me of myself.

Mindfulness encourages me to allow my true inner self to come out of hiding. I have fears, and that’s okay, I don’t have to feel ashamed of them, or like I have to deny or “fix” them. I am free to feel the fear, but I’m also free to choose what I want to do about it.

My path is now one of healing. So I’m going to go watch fireworks over the Ozark lakes even if it gets loud. I’m going to have a vacation that isn’t planned out completely, something else I developed a problem with over the years.

I can mindfully allow the vacation to unspool however it will without worrying that it isn’t living up to her expectations or mine. I’m free to just live in each moment of the vacation come what may. Every wave on a lake that laps against the shore will be a wave I’ve never seen before and will never see again.

Whatever else we do might not pan out the way we expect it to, or the way we want it to. But I’m going to enjoy them, because I’ll be experiencing the world a moment at a time with the woman I love.

By leaving my expectations at home I’ll be able to leave my worry about everything at home as well.

What? A vacation that involves getting away from the drama and anxieties of recent life? Where I can just go and enjoy whatever happens, not worrying over who I’m with or what might happen?

A vacation I can enjoy again?

Yes please!

A Mindful Guy Mourns

November 18, 1937 – my mom was born. Today she would have turned 76.

I miss her, more than simply because she was my mom. She helped shape my mind, my core values, my work ethic, my sense of self. When I see myself, I see a lot of her.

She was always proud of me, even when I did things she didn’t approve of. Not during my childhood; I had a pretty down-to-earth childhood. I didn’t get into much trouble, I got good grades, and I wasn’t out partying or hanging with a rough crowd.

No, I mean later in life. She didn’t approve of some of my childish choices, mostly because if a guy made a childish choice it only reminded her of my dad. And when I became one of Jehovah’s Witnesses, she had a real struggle with that. But in time, she saw that I hadn’t really changed a lot. I was still her son.

It’s quite coincidental that the year which marked my last talk with my mom was also the year marking the last time I stepped into a Kingdom Hall. She had watched me grow as a public speaker, and was so proud of me. She got all the attention after any talk she came to hear; people from across the congregation just gushed over her.

Don’t tell anyone: she really got a kick out of that.

You may not see the most amazing aspect of this, but it stands out to me very strongly: she came to a Kingdom Hall to watch me give some of my talks. It was quite against her non-denominational church views to go there, and she would hear things which didn’t ring true to her believing ears, but she went anyway. Just to see and hear her son do something he was good at and enjoyed doing. To see her son, and be proud.

When 2008 was progressing, she had a tough time health-wise. She always had her oxygen tank in tow, she couldn’t sleep much with all the prednisone she had to be on, and her hospital stays were becoming more frequent. She had significant arterial blockage, and even with it cleared out her body was not really recovering. She struggled to spend time with her grandsons whom she adored beyond words, simply because their energy and enthusiasm to see grandma was exhausting. Yet it never stopped her, because she was able to see them, and be proud.

We had some very in-depth talks as 2008 progressed. Somehow all the joking and light-hearted nature of our previous chats about mortality changed. We were serious about the matter. We said all the things we wanted to say, the things we needed to say. When my mom passed away, there was never a moment where I thought, “I wish I had taken the chance to tell her….” We both had the chance, and we both took it.

So I wonder, here on her birthday in 2013, why I feel that I should have done more to mourn the passing of my mother.

I think it may be cultural, as I discussed with a friend of mine recently. It’s like I should have done more. I should have lost control and crumpled in a heap and wailed non-stop for days. Sat in shadows dressed in sackcloth and rubbed ashes on my forehead. Society expects huge displays of grief, and although I cried and struggled, I did not fall apart except in my dreams. (To this day, if my mom appears in my dream, we invariably sit and talk until I crumble into inconsolable wailing and I wake up due to the intensity of it all.)

I cried loudly over my dad’s passing in 2011, falling in a gradual slide over the edge of grief. I had little relationship with my dad except at a distance, simply because his own guilt in life was enveloping and I would soon be overwhelmed by his desire for forgiveness, all from a son who never held his sins against him.

Yet I grieved far less publicly over my mom. Indeed, I mourned far less intensely for her than the man I had little to do with.

Folks will have their theories, and I know the next time I see my therapist I’ll mention all this, but I have a personal realization:

What if I have grieved exactly the right amount for my mom, and I merely think I should have done more? Could I be beating myself up because I didn’t do as much as I thought I was supposed to do?

I think so. I’m often angry for not meeting my own self-held expectations.

My mother did not leave according to my schedule, nor according to hers. But we both saw the departure at hand. We both gained the closure so many never achieve. She certainly wouldn’t want me to be unable to let go. She wouldn’t want the son she loved and was so proud of suffer so.

I believe I have mourned the correct amount, neither too much or too little. Even as I try to finish writing this while crying loudly, I realize it’s time to forgive myself and admit that I have done what I needed to.

I miss you, mom, but I think I’m going to be okay.

And, in a closing that only you and I would get: I hope the Perry Como album sounds good on the bus trip to who-knows-where.