The perfect family vacation. It looks like still photos in the cooking magazines: aunts, uncles, little boys and matriarchs all sharing the same space, frozen in mid-chuckle, no TV, a half-finished board game set up on the table.
You know the pictures. Page 2 shows the first cousins, the second cousins once removed, the godfathers, the grandmothers arriving, crusty bread in hand.
Turn the page and they are at the beach in the evening. The men have thick preppy sweaters thrown haphazardly over their shoulders. The children, flatfooted and sandy, carry shovels and boards back to the house. Women wave from the deck, dinner ready, white wine chilled. The kids disappear to shower – each guest room has a private bath.
Ah, summer. But not mine.
I have three siblings, and we have various children, spouses and dogs. This year, we are all coming home to a house perched a block away from a cliff that cuts above a stretch of northern California coast. My parents are already there.
A magazine spread we are not.
The 80-plus-year-old little cabin has four small rooms – dark and fragile. The casing around the windows in the front room is so salt worn that, my dad says lovingly, if you lean against it, the wall will fall out.
The house has a single bathroom the exact length, and double the width, of the bathtub. If a little boy sits in there for no other purpose than to read stacks of 1960s Archie comic books one after another uninterrupted, then you end up with a line of grownups, holding their shower paraphernalia, eyeing each other to ensure no one tries to cut in line.
We love this place in ways that are set up solidly in each of us. It happened when we were children.
And so here, we become like children again. My brothers throw balls in the too-small house and tease for sport. My sister becomes peppy like in the Disney scene where the Little Mermaid jumps from the water straight into the air, full of zing. And I become, frankly, emotional and high maintenance. I want everything to be the way it was when I was little – in other words, perfect.
Two years ago, my family of four was at this house alone. We went down to the empty beach early. The boys hit the water and stayed there. My husband and I stuck our noses in books. When I finally looked up, the sand nearby had filled with a large multigenerational family. I watched them until my eyes blurred.
“What’s wrong?” my husband asked. “I always thought that would be us,” I said motioning to the family. “I always thought we’d all live here, our kids would go to school together, and we’d spend every weekend fishing. Look at them. They’re all getting along; no one is annoying. I thought we’d be perfect like that.”
It was one of those moments when you know what you’re saying is ridiculous, but it spills out naked anyway.
He looked at me and clearly resisted the urge to point out he was sitting with the most annoying one of our clan.
“No family is perfect,” he said in the wry way psychologists have of uttering the very obvious with some sort of finality that only they can pull off. “What you thought was perfect probably wasn’t.”
Perfect meant a houseful of people talking with their hands. It meant waking to doughnuts brought by my grandfather from the corner store. It meant meeting up with people whose name I shared. It meant the red fishing pole, rhubarb crunch and Cracker Jack prizes.
It was also surely a muddle and a mess. Surely a high-pitched, overcrowded tribulation. Surely not perfect. But I didn’t notice; it felt effortless.
How dumb, you say? Adults know that nothing worthwhile is effortless. And we know all too well the demands of our day-to-days can send us to our respective corners, too tired to whip-up any more hang-out- and-connect.
But we do. We whip it up and spring back in. We know closing the distance is worth so much. More than that, really, it is everything.
