Vacation reflections
By: Isabella C
Tags: Vacation, Relationship, Travel, Nostalgia, Family

At the end of 2018, one of my goals for 2019 was to be more deliberate in how I choose to allocate and spend my vacation days. I realized that in 2018 (my first full year of working) I had taken two week-long vacations, but both weeks were spent with family, leaving less time for personal reflection and quality time with Eric. For 2019, I wanted to balance spending time with family and just with Eric or alone. I had a vague vision of going somewhere completely new and faraway for one of my vacations, and for the other, pursuing something familiar and relaxing that would neither require a lot of planning nor incite any FOMO if I wanted to just stay in and do nothing while on vacation.

Given these goals, at the end of March, Eric and I took a week off to spend time with family in Boston and Toronto. Leading up to our vacation, I was especially excited because it had been over a year since I was last in Boston and I couldn’t wait to see all the places that we had frequented when we were in school. (I had deliberately held off on returning to Boston/campus for the past year because I didn’t feel ready, and finally, I found myself missing specific restaurants or feeling nostalgic for specific places and bit the bullet.)

I’m now writing this as we fly back to San Francisco at the end of our week long vacation and trying to figure out if I was able to accomplish my goals for the week off. Taking an entire five days off from work feels monumental given that I only have fifteen vacation days a year, and this vacation is definitely one of my cornerstone “events” of the year. As is the case with the rest of my life, I feel a strong pull to understand and analyze and assess whether I’ve been making good use of the resources at my disposal — and so in this case, understanding whether I took full advantage of my vacation.

We started our nine day vacation in Boston, where we split our time between seeing Eric’s grandma for a few hours each day and going to revisit our favourite places/catching up with friends. We actually stayed in a hotel for our duration in Boston, making it feel like a real holiday! I would say what stood out the most about being back in Boston was revisiting special places that either reminded me of how exciting, new, and liberating being at college felt when I first got there (and thus how far I’ve come in the past few years) or the early days when Eric and I first started dating and shared so many special conversation and moments (and also therefore how far we have come). We took so many trips down memory lane — and for those of you that know me/us, you can only imagine how much we sounded like Old Man Eric and Old Lady Isabella.

I was most struck by the changes in Harvard Square and how the differences compounded to make me feel like the neighbourhood and area weren’t mine anymore. In retrospect, it feels a little silly that I had thought of them as “mine” before, but I like to think this is a sign that I was actually somewhat engaged with and involved in the local community rather than just a transient passerby. As we walked around and remarked on all the new stores and the places where cafes and restaurants had closed down, it felt incredibly strange to see all the people there who were going about their daily lives, comfortable, familiar with the spaces. It was almost like watching a movie and peeking into others’ lives. We were suddenly the audience rather than the protagonists and it made me feel not only old, but also made me realize that maybe all along I’ve been chasing something I can’t quite attain: the feeling of being back in college Isabella’s shoes. I won’t ever experience the exact feeling I used to have when I walked around Harvard Square because I won’t ever be back in the same life situation I was in when I was a student there. Since graduating, I’ve gone through so many more experiences and now my worldview isn’t quite the same as it was back then, and nothing I view now through my current lens will ever be the same as how I saw it before.

As I read what I’m writing, it feels painfully obvious. There doesn’t seem to be any major revelation that I couldn’t have logically deduced, but it does feel like I’ve stumbled upon some new, intuitive wisdom that wasn’t so visceral before. I suppose that’s just maturity and growth!

Somewhat relatedly, my true “vacation” highlights from being in Boston also pointed to just how adult my life has become — I was most excited that: (1) we had a great reason to eat out (a minimal kitchen was all we had at the hotel, and we weren’t realistically able to cook for ourselves), and (2) we got to guiltlessly stay up late because we were indulging in the TV access that we don’t have at home.

What also helped really drive home that I am an adult now was the type of interaction we had with Eric’s grandma. Whereas when we were in school, we would show up and help out here and there, I felt a different sense of responsibility this time when we were in Boston. It felt like we were the adults, and we were the ones who needed to check up on her and make sure she had everything she needed. Instead of merely being helping hands, we were the ones who had to figure everything out from start to finish.

This is a trend I’ve started to feel across the board with respect to elderly relatives, and I see it more and more with my friends and their families as well. Although I feel pride at having more responsibility (and enjoy the relative freedom or authority to decide what I want to do that comes with it), I also find that this leaves me feeling the most burdened in life (and wistful for childhood).

The second half of our vacation was spent in Toronto, where we stayed with my parents. This definitely shifted my focus from feeling like a true adult to treading the line between still being a kid and sort of being a grown up. I felt a lot more aware of my relationship with my parents and my relationship with Eric, and how those come together. I also spent a lot of time pondering what my life would look like if I lived in Toronto instead of San Francisco.

In the many years that Eric and I have been dating, we’ve spent countless hours and days with friends, and often with just one or two mutual friends at once. I have always aimed to be the couple that doesn’t make others feel like a third wheel, and I’d like to think that we generally do a good job of it. That said, it’s fascinating to think about how we appear to outsiders, especially when the outsiders are my parents. I am always curious whether we are too cutesy or silly or, on the flip side, too formal and serious around my parents. I wonder what they expect us to be, and I realize that they probably don’t have an answer either.

Sometimes I wonder whether these are thoughts that cross my mind primarily because Eric and I started dating when we were still students and so the dynamic of our interactions with our families was more clearly as children to our parents. Had we started dating as “proper” adults, would the dynamic be different? Is it possible that I wouldn’t even had thought about any of these things? If this theory stands, are we navigating that transition from children to adults gradually? (There are some signs that maybe this is the case, but it’s still hard to pinpoint.)

Anyway, I think for a long time I’ve lived with a fear of balancing my relationship with my parents and my relationship with Eric. I am lucky to be very, very close with my parents and in some ways it feels zero sum because as Eric and I grow together, we lean on each other in increasingly many ways, and for each of those added ways in which we become co-dependent, we become a little more independent from our respective families and parents. I assume this is generally just how growing up works, but I do find myself wondering how I would feel towards the significant others of my future children, and whether it would make me sad to see my children lean on someone else, or if I’d just be relieved to hand the burden of responsibility off to someone else!

So, given all of these questions and thoughts on my mind, I have to say that this trip to Toronto marked a small but mighty milestone — and be warned, you may laugh out loud. I distinctly recall that when Eric first came to our house, we were all super formal and my parents didn’t really lounge around in their pyjamas in the evenings, and we all slept with the bedroom doors closed and always locked the bathroom door whenever someone was inside. (In contrast, when it’s just my parents and me, we leave the bedroom doors open at nighttime and only close but don’t lock the bathroom doors. I might even push that by leaving the door ajar so I can holler and continue my conversation with my mom…)

This trip, I broke an invisible barrier by peeing with the bathroom door ajar. I assume that this didn’t particularly shock anyone, but somehow it took a huge leap of faith on my part to trust that everyone would be okay with me doing this around all of them at the same time. And I haven’t heard any complaints from any of them just yet. (Admittedly, it’s possible literally none of them realized.)

Other highlights from the Toronto trip included catching up with a few friends that I’ve missed on recent trips back home and also getting sick/recovering/getting a good reminder to not over-schedule and jam pack my trips.

All in all, it was a good ten days and it feels like it was ten days’ worth of stuff. There were a lot of meaningful conversations with new and old friends. There were many, many delicious bites of food. There were familiar encounters and surprising ones. There was down time to read two books, journal, and write. There were a number of flights, and there was even an encounter with four cast members from Kim’s Convenience on our flight from Boston to Toronto. (Also somewhat noteworthy because I’m a nerd, we were on the inaugural day of United flights servicing the Toronto-San Francisco route! There is finally competition for Air Canada on the YYZ-SFO route!) It was a great “staycation” in our favourite familiar cities, and I think it was worth not having photos from some exotic, warmer, more “exciting” destination.