Ready for the summer travel to start…

The kids and I leave this morning. My husband leaves later this week. Our neighbor will be taking care of the house and pets while we’re away.

I have to say, I’m ready to get this first trip started. I really struggled to take advantage of the last two weeks, and instead of allowing myself to get the rest I needed I just beat myself up for all the things I wasn’t getting done. I think I was just wound so tightly that I couldn’t figure out how to unwind.

I was also having some weird feelings around my friends, who were largely quiet this past week, as they chatted on other text chains about the day camps their daughters were in, and the overnight camp they left for this Sunday. I know I wasn’t being left out – I couldn’t participate in getting ready if my daughter wasn’t going – but it still felt like I was being left out. They just didn’t have a lot of extra time to chat on the text thread I’m a part of.

Which is totally fine. I’m not upset, just managing my feelings of not being a part of something they are all a part of. I was also managing my daughter’s very real feelings of disappointment and FOMO that she couldn’t go to overnight camp with them. She is obviously thrilled to be seeing her cousins in St. Louis, but it’s still hard to know they will have shared experiences that she won’t be a part of.

I think we both need another set of friends to fall back on in these situations. My daughter actually is doing a lot better than I am in that regards (she makes friends very easily), which makes me happy. I’ve never been good at making friends or cultivating relationships. I should probably prioritize that more as our daughters grow up and away from each other.

And of course once we’re in St. Louis these feelings will be (largely) behind us, as we’ll have cousins to hang out with for the one time we see them this year.

I’m also managing some other stuff though. I realized at the beginning of the summer that while I may thing I have a decent handle on managing stress and anxiety, the more likely reality is that I manage those things in socially acceptable ways (exercise and over work). Once one or either or those slips away (or both as is right now the case – it being summer and my back pain still impeding my movement), I’m actually a massive hot mess. Those crutches being gone was the other reasons I struggled so much these pages two weeks.

So yeah, the start of summer wasn’t that great. I’m not trying to elicit empathy when I had two weeks of daily child care and no immediately pending professional obligations, but learning to live with this new back pain, not knowing how to let myself rest without feeling crushing guilt about not using the time more productively, and feeling left behind by my friends, made it a rough second half of the month. I’m very grateful that I can distract myself with a visit to my extended family for the next two week stretch.

And I think I am ready to go. I’m typing this Monday night on the elliptical machine. I just wrote the “cat care” document and we’re pretty much all packed (just the electronics and cords in the morning). I’ve heard air travel can be a shit show these days so I’m just hoping we make it to the rental car office before it closes tomorrow afternoon (that requires two flights not only not being cancelled, but arriving on time).

Wish us luck!