Rest-less but Love-filled

After seven hellish hours in an over-packed coupe, Matt and I returned safely from our vacation. The kind of vacation, Matt said, you need a vacation from. I have come to think of trips to the beach as packed with hedonistic levels of sloth-like relaxation, gluttony, and nerdom - hours of sitting, and reading, and eating. My last few trips to the beach have been with Matt’s family and with just six or so adults making up the party all of the above activities have been well represented. We had 10 adults in our beach house alone and the other two houses in our party had adult to children ratios of 4:9 and 4:2, respectively. But we all spent most of our time at the one house on the beach.


Matt’s head nearly exploded on that first night when he met the bulk of my family – to him, at the time, they were an anonymous swarm of hugs and loud. Already just inches away from a panic attack, as we were leaving the main house, my cousin taunted him for his reserved quiet - I thought we were going to have to turn right around and head back for Virginia. He persevered somehow; despite a near absence of the solitary “Matt time” he demands to keep from losing his mind or plunging into lethal depths of mope. And towards the end of the trip he even found some new people to love.

As I have written before, my family is a kind of crazy web of people. Both my uncle and my father went into the order – my father as a priest, my uncle as a monk – and they both left that calling to marry and start families in their last forties – my younger brother was born the Christmas after my dad’s 52nd birthday. But, their younger sister married young and had babies shortly thereafter and those babies are now in their forties and between the three of them they’ve given my aunt (Mary) and uncle (Jim) 11 grandkids. Then there’s how my granddad remarried when he was 66 and fathered four additional kids – who now range in age from 28 to 34. Before my youngest uncle, Dave, was born, he was an uncle of 4. And when Ana married my uncle Dan three years ago, she became a great aunt nine times over. So not only is this a large family, it a very confusing one – I cannot fault my six-year-old cousin Erik for having absolutely no clue who I am.

Matt has no young cousins and an extended family that, by comparison, is fairly small. He has never been around children for an extended period of time and thinks of beach vacations as the quiet bibliophile orgy I described earlier. He ended up kind of babysitting quite often – searching for band-aids, applying sunscreen to kids’ backs, digging holes, loaning out his DS, trying on mood rings, getting his hair done, and being cuddled. It was a chaotic, decidedly un-relaxing, fantastic, love-filled week.

Anyone who knows me knows how incredibly important my family is to me. I have actually denied beach invitations to past boyfriends because I have feared their inability to get along in the group. Matt did better than fine – and his efforts meant more to me because I know they were earnest and challenging, even. By the end of the week Maggie, my amazing six-year-old cousin, had declared him “loveable” and she spent the last night of vacation curled up in his lap. The night we got home he admitted that he missed his “babies”.

More photos on flickr and a video featuring the wall of sound that accompanied us most of the trip is forthcoming.