Family vacations at midlife: Yea or nay?

My (adult) kids and I are going to Disney! Are we in trouble? Also: How to zap a stye (ouch!) and getaway update.

Hard times in the Medicis’ Boboli Gardens, circa 2018.

I got my hair color fixed this week, which is not an unusual occurrence. For years, I’ve done this every five or six weeks to erase that stubborn strip of silver running along my part, which gets more pronounced by the day after about three weeks. Maybe a decade ago, my colorist had to double down on her camouflage efforts, when all the blondish highlights she had been artfully painting on to conceal the unsightly strands within my naturally brown hair could no longer keep up the charade and needed backup. That’s when she brought in the “base” color that now fully dyes those gray hairs and needs to get fortified every few weeks as my hair grows out.

This would all be a chore if I did not love my colorist so much. I told her as much this week. When I sat down in her chair and she stood behind me and asked me what was new, I told her that I’d started obsessing lately not just about my dog dying, but about her retiring.

“Wait, how old’s your dog?” she asked as she started stirring a brush in a plastic bowl to touch up my base, which was confusing because the gooey mixture was not brown.

I told her he’d just turned seven and she was like, “He’s young! And I’m not retiring any time soon either. And if I do I’ll come to your house. Stop worrying!”

As she started painting my head, I reported that the second stye in about a month was beginning to fester on my eyelid, making it feel like someone was blasting my eyeball with a hairdryer.

“Styes are really making a comeback,” she joked and we started laughing as she explained a bunch of clients had been complaining about them lately.

The look I was going for, circa 1995.

I’ve been visiting this hair salon for around 30 years, which happened to be nowhere near where I lived back then. I found it when I was looking for someone to cut my hair like the girls on the TV show Friends. This was before we called it “The Rachel” and when any New Jersey hair stylist I visited within a 40-mile radius had any idea what I was talking about. Back then there were no iPhones to pull out to show an example of what Jennifer Aniston and Courtney Cox looked like, so I just kept getting bad haircuts based on my descriptions until I found a hairstylist who got me.

I’ve lost track at this point of how long it’s been since I started fooling around with my hair color, but I know it was before my colorist and I were both pregnant at the same time with our kids, who are now juniors in college. That was way back in my mid-30s when I’d look forward to disappearing for an entire day to get my hair done. When I’d run away from the life I’d thought I wanted and had started feeling like it was closing in on me, like a snug turtleneck that sometimes feels like it’s gripping your throat a little too tight. You know? Nice house. Nice car. Lots of kids. Who had it better than me?

“Got any trips planned?” she asked and I told her the kids and I had just booked flights to Orlando in May to do Disney and Universal for a few days. She looked up from painting my head and caught my eye in the mirror. “Oh, oh,” she said, and we started laughing and I said — no! they all wanted to go.

“Seriously!” I said. “I told them that this wasn’t just my trip! That they all had agency to do whatever they wanted!”

I explained that I’d offer to pay for the townhouse we could all stay in and she asked who’d be staying in the main bedroom. “Me, I guess?” I said, and then she really started laughing again.

“Okay, kids! Really, it’s your trip, too!” she laughed. “But really it’s MY condo, MY bedroom, MY trip!”

I laughed along with her and told her that she should have seen my therapist’s face over Zoom when I told her we were all going away together (me + 4 adult kids + 1 fiancée).

Italy 2018: Before the Fall

“It’s probably going to be really great or really horrible,” I said, telling her how things had fallen apart when we were all in Italy together a few years ago. How we crammed into this little spot in Florence to grab lunch and I was just taking a bite out of the most delicious piece of pizza you’d ever seen, hot and drizzled with pesto, when my son and daughter started yelling at each other across the little wooden table we were packed around.

We were all standing and eating our pizza as they began throwing daggers at each other over the beautiful pizza until my son abruptly left and everyone else stood quietly eating and I took big gulps of red wine and pretended everything was fine. Tensions ran kinda high after that, everyone agitated walking around Boboli Gardens, strolling along wide gravel pathways and peering inside centuries-old grottos, and later back in Rome, drinking Aperol Spritzes in silence on the Spanish Steps.

“It’ll probably be a little of both,” she said, describing her recent vacation family argument and making me feel better about my own family squabbles.

The pandemic is a great example of how things can quickly go south with us. When the world started to shut down, I urged my kids three kids who had moved out after college to come home and gather under my roof to ride things out. I pictured them alone and infected in their apartments with the terrifying virus. Wasting away in their beds and me unable to save them. “Mama needs you home to make Mama feel better,” I should have said.

I’d say that things were fun for about three days as we did our first puzzles and drank all the wine I kept risking my life to run out and hoard from Wegman’s. And the rest of the six months with my grown children living under my roof were tinged with — Anger? Resentment? Gaping childhood wounds? Hard to say. I did quit drinking during that period, so that says something. Revisiting the past helped me move forward with my own life.

About a month into the pandemic, my first-ever stye erupted and let me tell you, it was a doozy. The pustule hung from my upper lid, dipping down in front of my iris, and had about five eyes of its own. Tensions were running high at that point and we were all kind of ignoring each other but one morning, when my older son actually paid attention to my face for a minute, he backed away and said, “Mom, what the fuck?”

Eventually, everything began to drain out of it. I gave the stye a little squeeze one night as I examined it in my high-octane magnifying mirror, and blood came out. I took a picture and sent it to the kids with the message, “BLOODY EYE!” because the kids used to drag down their lower lids when they were little to show whatever that red part is in their under your eye and yell it at each other: “BLOODY EYE!”

It was funny but that night upon reflection, I didn’t think an actual bloody eye was a good thing and the internet, when consulted, backed up that assertion. So I kept my hands off the stye after that and eventually, it went away.

Anyway, all of this is to say that despite rifts that have occurred over the years, the kids and I are fucking optimists. Apparently, we really want to share these experiences with each other. It seems that despite things not always going perfectly, we yearn for each other’s love and keep trying to get it right. Not one of them hesitated when I suggested that we all go be Disney geeks together when my work conference was going to be in Orlando. And then after that work thing was canceled, we still decided to go.

We’ll spend a few days riding rollercoasters. There are a bunch of new attractions we’re hot to try and of course, revisit the classics, like Space Mountain, which we’d all done many times together on past trips. We’ll pile in the minivan I rented and check out Harry Potter Land and Star Wars Land or whatever they’re calling the parks nowadays. And this time, I won’t be hauling them around on a sit-n-stand stroller loaded down with their sweaty bodies and 20 pounds of fruit snacks. On this trip, they can wear their own fanny packs to carry their own snacks and no one will beg me for one of those handheld fans that also mist you with water that costs $40.

Now, we’ll just be a bunch of grown-ups traveling together because we want to and not because we’re stuck with each other. Because everything — even each one of us — is a little bit good and a little bit bad. We’ll stand in lines and surrender to the rides, letting them take us on a journey. Maybe we’ll scream and grab each other’s arms. Or feel the wind flying through our hair. Our stomachs dropping. Our legs pressing together as we bank sharp turns. Laughing when it’s over. Looking at each other. All of us. Together.

A pandemic rendering of daughter’s semester in Firenze.

sunday shares: read + watch + cook + buy

Stye Care 101: Well, I don’t want to become the face of stye-care, but I do have a good tip. Instead of relying on hot water to create a compress and help accelerate the stye’s progression, turn to your pantry instead. Pour about a cup of rice into a sock (preferably clean), knot/rubberband the end, and microwave for about 30 seconds. Carefully hold to affected eye as the rice stays warm for a while to get maximum impact. Just say this came from an anonymous source.

Oscar shorts: This weekend, my local artsy film house is showing all the short films nominated for Academy Awards this year. On Friday night, I went to see the documentary selection, and out of the five selections, I only really liked two of them. One was a profile of the craftspeople who work in an LA-based shop that repairs the musical instruments that are used by the students in the city’s school system. Very sweet. The other was on book banning, told from students’ point of view, and if you want to get really mad about school systems’ overreach, watch it. Also, if we’re living in little bubbles, which we all do, how do we learn about other cultures and ways of being if not through reading and art? How do we develop empathy for people who are different than we are but still human beings? And if we feel different, how do we know that it’s okay?

Last night I saw the live-action selections with another friend and we both agreed that we liked these two the most.

Girls’ getaway. I have to be completely honest — I did not think anyone would be interested in doing a retreat together. Seriously, I joked with the Midlifer who is so generously offering to host a few of us that it could just be the two of us sharing a nice weekend. But much like my children all being gung-ho to go to Disney, you guys really seem to want to go away and connect with fellow Midlifers. I told my daughter, who is an event planner, that I put it out to all of you and she was like: clearly, you are not an event planner.

For this first beach getaway in April, I am getting in touch with those who reached out to work out arrangements since there are only a few spots for the full weekend available. We are also considering a day pass to accommodate a few more if there’s interest. HOWEVER, this has motivated me to look into something that could accommodate more of us in September. We can find different things to talk about, like friendship, romance after a certain age, our always-changing bodies. It’s endless all the stuff we can talk about.

In the meantime, maybe we can come together in a different way? Like a Zoom call where we can talk about something we’ve all read/watched/listened to and start connecting that way and getting the conversations going? I’m into it and excited to get to know you all better (in my quest to be a better friend). Thoughts?

See you guys next week. xoAmy