Returning Home: Filling the Void

One of the main reasons for taking this trip was, of course, for this family of four to spend an extended amount of time together instead of living our daily, mostly separate lives. At home, like most of you and outside of vacations which usually are not longer than a week, we don’t spend much time each day all together as a family.  Even if one parent stays at home, you get maybe an hour in the morning and a couple at night when everyone is together?  Three hours a day?  And sometimes those three hours feel like too many!  In the morning, you want to leave for work or the kids to go to school so that you can have some peace.  At night, you want the kids to go to sleep so that you can have a little bit of time to be with your husband or wife or partner.

So, despite the fact that the very point of the trip was to spend time together, there was a moment in the desert of northern Chile, back on day 3 or 4 of the 89 with a volcano looming over me, when I had a bit of a panic about whether we actually could do it. Whether we had the ability to spend that much time together without everything falling apart.  Whether I had that ability.  It wasn’t severe panic – it was mostly a fleeting feeling – but I still felt ashamed.  It wasn’t a proud moment.

I think I had that moment at that time and I think we sometimes feel like three hours a day is too many because we fill ourselves up with so many other things – work, fitness/health, politics, social media, kids’ activities, consumption, volunteering, friends, gossip – that those three hours is about as much space as you have left. And that’s what you grow accustomed to. It’s not that you wouldn’t rather spend more time together as a family, it’s just that you’re terribly out of practice at it.  And being out of practice – because you never really do it – you wonder whether you can do it and whether you’ll actually like spending all day, every day with these people. And so, I panicked.

But it turns out – miraculously! – that when you do what we did, you empty yourself of the unimportant things that used to fill you up (some things – friends, fitness/health, volunteering – are undoubtedly important and good) and you fill yourself up with your family.

And then.  And then you remember more clearly why you fell in love 22 years ago.  And then you discover that your first baby boy now has a sense of humor you can relate to. And then you hold your youngest’s hand so tight every time he reaches out because you can almost feel it growing inside yours.  And then you are more full of precious things than you could have imagined.

And then you come home and you go back to work and your kids go back to school and what filled you up feels like it’s rushing out.  The void it leaves is hard to live with.  The first few days after we came back were the hardest and darkest of my life.  It’s still hard and will be for a long time.  

But I’m trying to be more discriminating in what I let fill in that void and to make sure the important things fill more of it.  Some things will be irreplaceable.  Cam and Wes have to go to school.  Wisconsin is not quite Patagonia or the Southern Alps of New Zealand.  We’ll make some changes, most will be small…some might be big.  

Most of all, I’m trying as much as possible to make those three hours a day feel like an 89-day adventure to the other side of the world.