What is a proper vacation/holiday? Are they really important to productivity, happiness and long life?
I don’t think I’m going to answer those questions, but why not at least try? I’ll at least brush by them on my way to something else.
A few pieces of housekeeping before I begin.
- I challenged a friend to write a blog post each week and I’m already behind, but here I go. Check out Life In Motion if you want to meet Kyle, my blog colleague who’s living his dream sailing in the Caribbean right now.
- I’ve been meaning to write about becoming a foster dad / real dad but that will have to wait.
- I hate it when people say they’re going to do housekeeping. It’s annoying.
My wife and I became parents about 10 months ago to a 9-year-old, who we’ll call L, mainly because we can’t share L’s name publicly. I’ll even try to obscure L’s gender. L is pretty great, and has been through some serious trauma. L is a foster kid and so we’ve been fostering… I never knew how literal that term would become.
We did one other vacation before this over spring break to visit my family in Minnesota. L did quite well – 15 hours in the car and spending time with all of my family through a premature birth of my brother’s daughter. L was solid and only had a few tantrums as you parents can imagine. And heck, I have tantrums when I visit my parents. Something there about regression and former family unit roles, but that’s for another time. I believe I began writing about the efficacy of vacation…
This time we ended up heading west to Seattle and then onto the Olympic peninsula for some national park sight seeing (or is it site seeing?) Also a bit of camping, mountain biking and hopefully more reading and writing.
I’ve been reading lots of pulp sci-fi (see: The Expanse novels) and even some light fantasy (see: The Stormlight Archive) but not as much of the parenting books which keep piling up on my bedside table (see: one of the things I left behind out on vacation. Well, I did bring one along.)
But for now we’re sat atop a hill in Columbia City, just south of Seattle, recovering from day 1 of the vacation.
(I keep wanting to use headers in this post, as I tell so many content managers in my 9-5 job, but they just don’t seem to fit, so I’ll probably continue to leave them out.)
My partner Jamie found this amazing house apartment above the landlord who’s been very kind to us. It’s peaceful, quiet, minimalist and perfect. The space inside and out invite the sort of introspection that had fallen by the wayside in my life the way things do when you first become a parent. I feel like I used to do this all the time: live, evaluate, change, repeat. Now I seem to barely have time to live. Perhaps if I clear out a few more things in my life and make room!
When Jamie asked me what I wanted to do on this trip, she was expecting me to say things like, “go to the museum of blah,” or, “we must see the thing up behind the place.” I responded differently. “I would like to sleep in, drink good coffee, read, and spend lots of time with both of you.” Before she asked, I don’t think I was aware of my simple desires, but I was proud to have felt this way and to be able to express it.
While vacation didn’t make me feel this way, the unconscious planning my mind had been doing served me well. Now, sitting here overlooking Lake Washington, that mental machinery works away on my mind and spirit to recharge and restore some of the things which I had temporarily let go.
Will this make me a more productive team member? We’ll see. You’ll have to ask my team in a few weeks. Will it be restorative and healing? It already has. Even the mental preparation has healed me in significant ways.
Lastly, and most importantly, and something I’ll talk about more at length in the next entry, this trip continues to help me connect more deeply with my foster child. Dads have it tough in many ways when it comes to connection, and these days away give me more opportunities to stumble upon other ways to draw us closer. They’re a great child, but notoriously tough to get close.
More on that later in the week, the term “foster child” and maybe even a dad joke or two.