Descending from the Clouds
Maine for the first time, a daughter returns home, and managing expectations
Issue #25/ Welcome to the Good and Beautiful Things newsletter. I hope by sharing my experiences (or as my friend calls them, my “true stories”) you will find inspiration or encouragement. At the very least, I hope you’ll feel less alone.
For those of you who have been tracking with me, you know that we have been anticipating the arrival of our twenty-year old daughter, who just spent ten months studying abroad in France. When she left, I couldn’t imagine how I would be able to go ten months without seeing her. I assumed I’d eventually figure out a way to visit her or turn to a life of crime to afford the plane fare, if necessary.
My moral compass prevented me from robbing a bank and a lump sum of money didn’t magically appear in my mailbox, so we continued on with What’s App texting and phone calls. Eventually, ten months became just ten more days and then last week, she landed on U.S. soil. As we counted down the final days, friends texted me - “that went by so fast, it seems like she just left”.
No.
It seemed like ten long months. Sometimes twenty.
But I digress.
Our reunion plan involved meeting up in Maine (we live in Nashville) for a week-long family trip to give us some time together and hopefully ease her a little more slowly into her old life. We would fly from Tennessee with our other three children and she would fly solo from Paris. In the months leading up to our trip, my dreamy, idealistic mind painted scenes with the six of us sitting on rosy, cloud-draped mountains with little halos of happiness around our heads. The build-up of being together again had been growing in my mind for almost a year and I’d only been thinking about how perfect it was going to be.
As the day of departure drew nearer, I woke up from the dream and remembered some basic realities.
Traveling with a family of six can be stressful. Six different personalities navigating new places, sometimes with a scarcity of information or with circumstances out of anyone’s control, has proved to be challenging on past trips.
For example, we all carry a little trauma from an episode at the LA airport when the woman directing security shouted at us for not navigating the line like proper military cadets. Once we left security and began the confounding task of trying to locate our gate, my husband stopped talking or interacting with any of us. As an Enneagram 9 (“Everything will be fine” mentality), he takes most situations in stride. But when stress produces a visible reaction from him it unsettles us all. We know the tension has been building for a while in order for it to finally break through to the surface. That hour and half required pure survival instincts for all of us.
In addition to the potential personality conflicts and misfires, we knew our daughter had concerns about her adjustment from France back to America. She was leaving university life next to a castle, with all of Europe just a train ride away, to arrive home to the Land of Walmart. At first, a week in Maine sounded like a buffer to keep her from colliding too quickly with her home, but it hadn’t occurred to me that putting us all in a rental house might be an intense way to enter back into the family after a year of independent living.
As our airplanes headed toward each other last Saturday we received text messages from her — “Everything’s so American I’ve already cried at least once,” and then, “I’m soooooooo excited to see you guys. Even if I cry a lot of the day”. We began to imagine moving from one tourist spot to the next with a weeping daughter/sister beside us.
Thinking beyond the glorious reunion aspect of the trip and moving toward a more grounded expectation turned out to be a good thing. I didn’t switch from one extreme vision to another, I moved the dial somewhere in the middle. That shift allowed margin for mishaps, misunderstandings, and also for beautiful moments as well.
So how did the trip turn out?
Somewhere in the middle.
The Good Parts
The beauty of Maine met and even exceeded most of our expectations.
Our rental house suited our family perfectly. Surrounded by a magic forest, we could walk five minutes down a hill and be right in the middle of Southwest Harbor, which is a quaint, little town nicknamed “the quiet side” (in comparison to the nearby, larger tourist town of Bar Harbor.)
The wild lupines surprised and delighted us each and every time we saw them. We all knew about lupines from a favorite picture book, Miss Rumphius by Barbara Cooney, but somehow none of us realized we were about to see them on this trip.
Kayaking in the ocean was a highlight for me just as I had expected it to be. As I’ve shared in the past, the quirks in my body settle when I get on the water, and it happened the same way this time, as well.
Between our different water adventures, we saw Minke whales, Fin whales, Loons, Puffins, a Bald Eagle’s nest (occupied by a fledgling eagle the group named “Bob”) and seals.
And being with our daughter again? Throughout the week, I marveled that she was with us in the flesh, her familiar laughter ringing through the air.
That isn’t the whole story, though. As expected, we encountered challenges throughout the week.
The Not-As-Good Parts
The kids picked at each other. As they do.
Family members stayed on their phones more than I would have preferred.
My husband and I had a few run-ins with our personality differences. One of them happened on top of a mountain, where I’d originally envisioned our cloud-steeped scene of happiness.
Our boat trip turned out to be too long, too cold, and included me getting doused in beer, which hasn’t happened since the one football game I attended in college over twenty-five years ago.
While our daughter didn’t openly weep about her return home, she did mention daily how much she missed France and had plenty of opportunities to point out the differences (deficits) between America and France. Culture-shock had arrived.
On the fourth day of the trip, I started throwing up and my oldest daughter came down with a miserable cold. We both ended up in bed for the last day of our trip.
Our eight-hour layover in Washington, DC on the way home, which we originally planned as an opportunity to head into the city and go to a Smithsonian Museum, turned into a terrible idea that couldn’t be undone. The two of us who were sick walked miserably in the rain through downtown DC and it turned out we couldn’t get to the museums before they closed. At one point my eldest daughter (age 22), with the head cold, sat down on the wet sidewalk, beside crowds vying for a look at the White House, and drifted off to sleep.
Now that our vacation is over and real life has started up again, I can tell you that I will always treasure this trip. I left a little part of my heart behind in Maine. And I know my capacity to enjoy the trip grew by coming down from the clouds and allowing margin for both the high’s and the lows, the expected and the unexpected.
It was a good practice run for the rest of summer. I’m so glad to have our daughter home with us before she moves back to college at the end of August and our son heads to college as well. But we aren’t living in a medieval painting. No one around here has a golden halo on their head. I’m heading into the second half of summer as grounded as I can be. There will be moments we feel like we’re ascending a mountain and days that we’d rather just stay in bed.
As well as everything in between.
How do you deal with expectations leading up to trips or big transitions in your life? Do you lean toward idealism, worse-case scenario thinking, or somewhere in between? I’d love to hear about it.
From the Sketchbook
In this post, I shared about an art swap that I participated in through a year-long art class that I’m currently enrolled in. While I’ve been flying across the U.S, my art has been traveling as well.
Our courageous teacher received over 120 envelopes of original art and had to sort all of those cards into new envelopes in groups of six. That’s over seven-hundred pieces of miniature, original art. In exchange for the six birds that I sent, I received six cards from six different artists in the class.
Here are the six birds that I sent and the six cards that arrived in my mailbox. The cards I received originated in Texas, Oregon, Holland and Germany! I haven’t been able to track all of my birds but I know that three landed in Texas, Holland, and Germany.
Blessings from the Guest Nest,
-Aimee