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[Back to index of July/August articles] FAMILY MATTERS : By Margaret M. Treadwell If you could create your dream vacation, how would it be different from summers past? Where and when would you go? How would you travel? What would be your greatest pleasure? Why don’t you take this vacation now instead of putting it off until next year or the next? Vacation—a scheduled period during which activity or work is suspended for rest and recreation-is from the French vacure—to empty. Re-creation is what Jesus taught us when he separated himself from the crowds to think or pray. Yet if you are planning to fill your luggage with your laptop and at least one serious book, make sure your office knows how you can be reached by fax or phone and be responsible for your family’s fun as well as your own, you won’t be getting much genuine rest. The problem is embedded in our history. Henry James has written, “A large appetite for holidays, the ability not only to take them but to know what to do about them when taken, is the sign of a robust people, and judged by this measure we Americans are sadly inexpert.” His observation is illuminated in Cindy S. Aron’s recently published Working and Playing in the US: The History of American Vacations, where she reviews the tension between labor and leisure. In the early nineteenth century vacations were taken for health by the elite-”taking the waters” for drinking and soaking to cure all sorts of maladies. By the 1850s, vacations became more common with the expansion of the railroads and growth of the working middle class who wanted to get away for fun. But as the happy prospect of rest and relaxation took hold, so too did fears about the dangers of idleness and a cultural anxiety over the concept of taking time off from work that persists today. Despite adult resistance to respite and play, children love vacations. In Endangered Pleasures, Barbara Holland describes her own summer delight in her Chevy Chase childhood: “’Spending the summer’ was what it was called, a fine, open handed, expansive phrase. When I was a child I saw it literally: summer as a fistful of gold coins to be plunked down on the counter. The shopkeeper rang them up and handed you, in return, pretty much everything that made the rest of life worth living through.” Do you remember long, slow, soft summer days with absolutely nothing to do except a few necessary chores? Even if we can’t or won’t replicate simple summers, the least we can do is under-schedule our children to give them the message that simply being rather than relentlessly doing is a fine way to spend at least part of the year. This involves 1) giving them time alone with empty summer spaces for spirituality to blossom and 2) promising not to invade their boundaries in the following five ways: -Thinking about them more than you do yourself or your adult relationships. When I coached young parents planning a vacation with their family in Spain to teach their son and daughter the value of a siesta, she at first lamented, “I can’t leave them alone; they’ll wake all my extended family and the neighbors too!” “Do you want to savor your own vacation?” I asked. “If so, what’s best for you?” Mom: “Are you kidding? I need a siesta every day!” Me: “The children who do best growing up are those whose parents are doing well themselves.” Mom: “Oh, you mean I’m doing this siesta idea for ME?!” (Genuine surprise.) Me: “How much longer do you plan to take on your children’s unacceptable behavior as your own problem without letting the natural consequences do their necessary work?” Mom: “I’ll experiment with it and see you in September.” Every morning I wake torn between a desire to save the world and an inclination to savor it. This makes it hard to plan the day. But if we forget to savor the world, what possible reason do we have for saving it? In a way, the savoring must come first. Margaret M. (“Peggy”) Treadwell is a family psychotherapist. She is the director of The Counseling Center at St. Columba’s, D.C. [Back to index of July/August articles]
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