I didn’t know if I had the money or whether it was the best decision but I started the summer with an escape to the beach and I took my mother with me.
I still had things to do like the homework for a class I was taking and paid really good money for. The classes I was scheduled to teach were around the corner and had not been designed outside of some ideas on paper.
I had no business running away to Galveston, Texas. I had no business pressing book on the AirBnB place. There was rain in the forecast and when it rains in Houston in any kind of hard way, its an automatic Bibilical flood.
And yet, I escaped, even if it was for a few days, away from it all. I said hello to ocean air, sand between my toes, overcast walks on the seawall and being okay in staying as detached from email as possible.
This is vacation during pandemic life, during professor life, during life life. Vacation is escaping and I needed one.
I didn’t remember the last time I went somewhere that wasn’t work related or writing related. Those for me were vacations. Vacations had purpose but not necessarily vacating life. Vacations were glorified errands.
This one though was just time to sit. Yes, I still had to design my class that was beginning the following week and finish up a class I was taking. But I did it from a porch, with my feet up, and a cup of coffee on the table next to me. I took naps. I walked the seawall. I took a dip in the ocean.
Just because I could.
Why don’t we take vacations? Why do we accumulate time off like dust on an old television in the garage?
This is the part of the essay where we talk about value, as in what do we value, as in overworking is valued, a flex, a badge, a trophy. This is the part of the essay where I usually bring in different perspective, maybe some research, or even talk about how we got here.
But we all know this. We got here because at one time we were taught hard work is part of the American Dream. For the privilege of living, most of your waking hours have to be dedicated to making money, making dreams, laying down foundations to something.
This feeling is amplified when you are the child/ children of immigrants. The parents, they hustled just for the basics — food, shelter, lights, water. They struggled to build. So how can we do anything less? It’s an insult.
Looking at my own parents’ lives, the immigrant hustle is stone-strong. Late nights. Abusive bosses. Jobs that torture the body. For them, vacation is a strange, UFO-like thing. Vacations were for visiting family in the old country, the one you would have been born in if things were different.
Vacations for vacation’s sake are for people with more money than sense.
“How much did you spend,” my mom would ask as we rolled up to the AirBnB on Galveston Island.
This question was the constant one. A nice meal with appetizers and a seafood soup that blew our minds was too much money. Even though she worked all her life for moments like this, it’s too much. Too much money, too much time not working, too much nice, too much attention to the fact that we don’t do this more often, that this feels foreign and we are aliens in yet another way.
Eventually, during our mini-getaway, Mom stopped asking that question and embraced afternoon naps, sitting by the coastline, enjoying a cup of coffee on the porch. These smaller moments were just enough to remind herself that she had earned, at the very least, a series of moments. And maybe, if we string enough moments together, it could be bigger. An entire vacation. To rest the bones, the soul, the body.
If we string enough moments together, it can be a life, a dream fulfilled, a house filled with joy, a car to get to work, a legacy to leave your children.
If we string enough moments we can gather what we need to keep going.
This is what my mom thinks when she thinks vacation — moments of rest. It’s in this way that we think different. Where I escape to a mini vacation to escape life as sprinter to the end of a race, my mom sees life as a marathon — steady with occasional breaks.
It was only at this summer that both of our moments of rest aligned.
