4 Generations

This is me with Curtis, my mother, and her dad, my only living grandparent.

I had a chance to go to a family reunion last month in Arizona. After the reunion, on the way home from the airport, I made a comment to my mother. She told me she really wanted me to try to write it down, so I’ll try to remember what I said:

There are some family reunions you can go to where you haven’t seen the people in years, or maybe you only see each other once a year, and you feel a bit like strangers. I have never felt that way going to visit my mother’s family. Everyone is so warm and kind, and they all want to know about what has happened in my life since the last time they saw me. They show genuine interest and care. I see the same warmth in my mother, and I think it has carried down from our Grandma Beth and Grandpa Bruce, the way they raised their daughters and the way those daughters raised their children. Even the spouses that have joined this family (the “recruits,” if you will) have that same feeling of welcome. We interact comfortably as if we don’t live so far apart. And I find that it’s not the place but the people that make it feel like coming home.

Here’s the long story. You don’t have to read it. But stuff like this matters to me, so I’m going to record it.

I actually debated going to the reunion all year. I knew it would be too expensive to fly my whole family down there, but I couldn’t wrap my mind around doing 2 whole days in the car with the kids to get there and then the same amount of time back. I thought about flying down by myself (with Curtis, my little nursing sidekick), but every time I thought about that, I worried that I would spend the whole time wishing my family were there. I hemmed and hawed over the whole thing for months, flip-flopping between determination and frustration.

When I finally decided that I couldn’t stand to miss it and I would go even if I had to go without the whole family, I found that even a ticket just for me to fly down was more than our budget could handle. Discouraged but not giving up, Grant and I made a deal that I would watch ticket prices for a sale, and if I could get a cheaper ticket, I would go to the reunion.

I watched prices and checked airlines for months without the slightest drop in ticket prices. By June, I was steady in my triathlon training and Grant had received his new job offer. The reunion was the weekend before the triathlon, certain to put a major kink in my training just when I would need it most. And Grant’s new job had scheduled him on a trip to Washington D.C. that would put him coming home the Friday of the weekend of the reunion. With all those factors against me, I gave up completely.

The week before the reunion, I got an idea. I remembered that we always do silly skits as a family at the reunion. Usually when I go, my family doesn’t remember that we have to do a skit until the last moment possible, and then we hurry and throw something together. I decided that if my family and I couldn’t be there in person, we could at least make a video of us doing a silly skit so my extended family could see my kids and know how badly we wanted to be there. I told Grant about my idea, and we started working on it.

The more I thought about the skit, the more that old frustration started building. I really felt left out. I didn’t want to send a video; I wanted to send myself! My mother doesn’t have any kids living in Arizona, so we don’t all go every year. We plan certain years to be “super reunions” when all of us out-of-towners make a concerted effort to be there on the same year. Knowing that I was missing a chance to see my grandpa, my wonderful cousins, aunts, and uncles, and my siblings and their kids was killing me! I started debating it all over again and talking to Grant about how we might make it work (poor Grant had to listen to a LOT of that kind of talk this year). There seemed to be so many obstacles. My mind was swimming.

The most obvious problem was who would look after the girls if I was to leave on Thursday while Grant was still out of town. Grant was also scheduled to be out of town the following Tuesday night, and I was worried about how the girls would react to being shuffled around between guardians so much. But when I looked at it and realized that it was actually just one sleep-over at Grandma’s (assuming she was available), which the girls had wanted to do sometime this summer anyway, I didn’t feel quite so bad. I called my mother-in-law trying hard not to get my hopes up, and she said it would be no problem to watch the girls until Grant got home.

Having leapt that hurdle, I really didn’t know what to do with myself. Could I still get through a triathlon if I spent the entire weekend before it playing and travelling? Could I justify spending that much money on myself on a trip when there are bills to pay and kids to clothe and so many other expenses? Would I want to leave town the day before my husband came home and prolong our time apart? What might seem like a no-brainer to many had me completely stumped. I didn’t know what to do.

While I was obsessing over the problem, I remembered a time that my aunt had used her frequent flyer miles to buy me a ticket to Utah so I could visit her and my family there. Oh, how I wished someone would put a ticket in my hand to fly to Arizona. With that wish, I knew I had my answer. I called Grant and told him that I finally realized that the only thing holding me back was the money. I couldn’t stand to spend that much money on myself. All the other factors that seemed to hold me back wouldn’t matter if someone would just hand me a ticket. Grant said, “Joce, I’m handing you a ticket. Just buy a ticket and go to the reunion.”

So I went. By the time I bought my ticket, the price actually had dropped a little bit. And while there were many moments I wished my husband and girls could be there at the reunion with me, there was not one moment I wasn’t so happy that I was there.

I have many more pictures I want to share. And we did end up finishing the video we were working on. I’ll have to see if Grant can change the file size so I can post it here.