The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

On Sunday morning while in Michigan I went to church with my brother. My sister, Kristy, used to attend the church he attends and a lot of our relatives attend there as well. I’ve visited several times also and still have never heard their pastor give a message due to guest speakers and child care issues. Regardless, after church I spoke with some aunts and cousins briefly and my aunt Sandy told me to plan on an informal Schwartz (my mom’s family) get together on Tuesday night.

I was really grateful for that effort as I really wanted to see some aunts uncles and cousins but can’t get around to seeing everyone on a short trip.

I took the boys to the park Tuesday morning and we all went to lunch and out for ice cream in the afternoon. When Tuesday evening rolled around Kris and I had made arrangements to pick up my sister Kathy and her girls, and dad carried Owen and Ivan in his car. We arrived just in time to see a couple cousins who had to leave, but soon the rest of the gang came pouring in. I saw several I haven’t seen in a while and of course even in a gathering like that you still can only really talk to a few but in all of it I felt tremendously blessed.

After eating wonderful homemade dishes made from home grown veggies (my mouth waters as I type) my aunts Sandra, Ony and Esther, cousins: Carma, Laura, Gina, Rasika and Danae and my niece Jessica and several little tiny baby boys: Charlie, Aaron, Ryan and Preston were gathered in Sandra’s living room talking, feeding and rocking babies and laughing a lot. That group was a tiny sampling of the women in our family. We talked about babies, about gardens and husbands who work hard. We talked about pregnancy and housekeeping, windows, antiques and adding on to farmhouses. A lot of ground was covered but it wasn’t so much the material that made it special. I just loved the company. There is something so comfortable about being with family. Something so refreshing about conversation with women of a common history and like minded desires.

After enduring our long traffic issues on Monday, the unrelenting humidity all day and sleepiness that plagued us, it was so refreshing (did I say that before?) to end the active part of our trip in this way. I would have stayed longer but we had to get my sister back home to start a new job that night.

The “ugly” part happened on Wednesday morning. We were packed and ready to go in very good time and had decided to stop at the coffee shop in Sturgis for breakfast on our way out. We were almost done there but I wanted Aron to make one last effort on the potty before hitting the toll road. As I lifted him onto the toilet my back had a muscle spasm. OUCH! It was a bad one…and right before sitting in the van for 8 hours. Not good! I hobbled back out to the van where Kris and the boys were waiting for us and managed to survive the trip. To top it off we had a lot of nasty storms to drive through and I am not a good storm traveler. After hydroplaning in a car one time I get extremely tense traveling in heavy rain. It was just miserable and I had no alternatives, no back up, nothing to relieve me.

I ran through some of my thought processes and stresses over the whole trip and realized a lot of mistakes that I made. Mainly, I let my own desire for things to be perfect dictate my stress level. I wanted Kris to have a good time and the humidity made him miserable. I wanted dad to enjoy my kids and he got stuck with a poopy diaper and an inability to go anywhere for dinner because of a traffic tie up on Monday. I wanted to keep everyone happy and that’s not possible. No one expected to be happy all the time, and no one blamed me for any of those things, but I somehow took the responsibility anyway. Because my mom isn’t there I feel a little like I’m hosting and visiting at the same time when I take my family up there. I missed her too and didn’t let myself dwell on that much, further stuffing the stress of the trip into my lower back. I guess I still don’t know how to relax.

It’s Monday and my back still hurts. I’ve been very busy since getting back and I don’t know when I’ll get some professional attention for this, but I can at least say it’s much better than it was.

For now, I’m at the car dealership for our 70,000 mile service…grateful for the free wi-fi for me and tub of giant Legos for Ivan and Aron.