I have no idea why I try to blog about anything other than how ridiculous my family is. This blog should really just be a chronicle of the random things we/they do. I love when my friends meet my family. At my Rocky Horror cast party last Halloween, my little brother showed up around 1 or 2 and multiple people came up to be and said, “EVERYTHING MAKES SENSE NOW.” We are all different varieties of ridiculous, but when you get us together, the madness makes perfect sense.
Last week my mom was on the phone with my little brother. He didn’t get to leave with his running club for Nationals in Indiana because he had a test. Not only did he personally want to be there, but he was an asset to the team, and his not being there would hurt their overall position.
So my mom decides to book him a flight to Indianapolis. But the race is in Bloomington. Of course the answer to this is that she would pick him up and drive him down to Bloomington. This is the kind of thing my family regularly decides to do on the fly.
Twenty minutes before my evening shift at the gallery started, I had to get someone to cover for me, because I was now also going to Indiana. Typical Friday night, no?
People don’t understand how I can go on cross-country road trips alone. First of all, you don’t know me very well at all if you doubt that I can entertain myself for 24 straight hours. Second, this is just what my family does.
The first time I personally made the drive back to LA was a matter of weeks after I got my license. I had been bugging my mother about the fact that we were a month into summer vacation and we still had not made a trip back “home.” She responded by reminding me that I had a car and a card she gave me for gas money. What did I need her for?
I then had to wait for my older cousin who needed to get to San Diego to join his newly-relocated family. I did over half of the driving, and certainly could have (and would have) made the trip alone had he not needed to get to California as well. This is just how my family is. My mom knew that I knew the route. She knew that I wasn’t a stupid kid and could make smart decisions.
Of course, I was a fatuous little teenager who feared nothing and trusted everyone. I would be lying if I did not admit that I have grown to find more reason to be afraid in these trips. But then, I did know what the safer places to stop were. I knew what kinds of things to look out for. I just trusted this knowledge (and myself) more absolutely than I do now.
After the innumerable times we made the 24ish hour drive from Jefferson City to LA, it was pretty much a non-issue for my mom to make the 16 hour drive to DC to move me in and out of college every single year. Or most years. I think I moved myself out once.
Of course, to all of my friends, this was ridiculous. Most of their parents wouldn’t make the five hour drive from Jersey more than twice — freshman move-in and graduation.
I am so insanely grateful for the fact that I spent so much time on the road. In spite of the fact that I have become more cautious, it gives me an insane amount of faith in myself and my own problem-solving abilities. Travel, in general, tends to have this effect. When you are constantly finding yourself in unfamiliar places which you have to navigate, you must become a more self-reliant person.
This does not always mean doing things by yourself. Sometimes it means knowing who to call and what questions to ask. My mother has wired me money everywhere from Kingman, Arizona to Copenhagen. I never did this without a safety net. Whether you think its right or wrong, I know that I don’t have to venture out into reality without one either.
When you move across the country, your family members quickly become your only friends. As a child of the internet age and the wonders of cell phones, this is perhaps somewhat less true than it would have been in the past. We have been through a lot of things as a unit, between moving and a house fire, and all of the travel that we have done as a family. All of these things have made us ridiculously close.
This is part of why it boggles my mind that more people are not intimately acquainted with this concept of the big family road trip. You see this a lot on older television shows, but it seems to be a dying concept. Obviously, television shows about families are the great arbiters of social truth. If it’s not there, than I refuse to believe it’s a phenomenon.
I think that you have all seriously missed out on some serious family tormenting time. I mean bonding time. My older brother used to hover over his window and talk about how great the view was. When I would try to see what was so spectacular, he would yell at me and tell me that it was his window. At 5, I was too stupid to realize that he was looking at the same damned endless abyss of corn fields. Or maybe I knew, but wanted to believe in the possibility that something cool had appeared there. After all, we had been in these corn fields for what felt like days and he was my older brother so he WOULD get to see the random cool thing. Figures.
Your family can’t make your life a living hell anywhere quite as successfully as they can when trapped in a confined space for an extended period of time. My obsession with this phenomenon probably proves what a masochist I secretly must be.
As good as we, the kids, were at tormenting each other, my mom had her own special way of contributing. She prides herself on her ability to pack obscene amounts of shit into a vehicle. Of course, sitting comfortably in the front seat, she never felt the consequences of this policy. In the years since my mom opened her own gallery, my little sister has hardly sat through the six hour drive home from Chicago in an upright position because there is almost always a canvas hanging precariously over her head. Or a stack of canvases. I’m sure there is some Tuscan scene that seemed particularly poised to hit her in the face that she still has nightmares about.
This, by the way, is largely indicative of my mother’s basic parenting philosophy. When something happened, we usually all got in trouble for it. She was not a particularly harsh disciplinarian, but we were all subjected to equal dragging hours that were probably actually minutes but felt like hours sitting on the stairs in time-out. (Of course, on the rare occasion that someone was spared, it was a toss-up whether or not they would sneak you contraband candy and hand-held games, or taunt you, by choosing to sit five feet away from you with said contraband. That fate was generally decided by whether or not the prisoner had inflicted some sort of harm on the free child.) My mom’s theory was always that it was best to have us all angry with her than each other. She never doubted that we would forgive her. We were much better at carrying grudges against each other. As annoying as my little brother’s foot on my arm rest might be, the tower of suitcases that fell on me each time we turned was substantially more obnoxious.
But when when we weren’t arguing over the specific boundaries of our seats, or yelling at my sister for buying smelly chips at the gas station, we were also playing games and talking about things and doing all of the things that make families close. If you emerge from regular family trips without killing each other, you kind of have to accept the possibility that you might actually like each other.
You also learn a thousand new ways to keep yourself occupied. I have never considered myself an exceptionally patient person, but I can’t even imagine how annoying waiting rooms must be for those of you that weren’t subjected to these road trips as children.
Traveling not only teaches you that self-reliance in unfamiliar situations, but it teaches you about the fact that you have people willing to help you when you can’t quite help yourself. And you know that you have a tiny army of similarly resourceful people who are probably just a phone call away. As awesome as most of my friends are, there are few problems that I will ever encounter that could not be best addressed by some member of my family.
Of course, this help may come at the cost of some small fraction of your pride. And possibly seat space during future torture treks. You have to weight those costs on a case-by-case basis.