Rome if You Want To

I don’t have fond memories of early travels with our children. I recall long, stressful car trips from Chicago to Detroit, one of which included a detour to the emergency room, and a particularly grueling weeklong “getaway” to South Haven, Michigan. During the latter trip, which was peppered with temper tantrums — both ours and the kids’ — I learned that when babies and toddlers are involved, vacations can be more work than the regular life you intend to escape. No matter how long the trip, we returned exhausted rather than rejuvenated, and the piles of mail and laundry that awaited us quickly erased any small moments of pleasure we had enjoyed while we were away.

Back then, if someone had told me things would get easier, I would have given him or her an earful that included a string of profanities.

Based on the trauma of those early trips, my husband and I decided to wait to take a major (i.e., extensive and expensive) vacation that involved plane travel until the kids were 4 and 6. We figured these were reasonable ages because they would both be out of diapers and nap-free, and, we hoped, old enough to remember something of the vacation.

Do they recall anything from our first family trip to Disney World? Our daughter, then 4, remembers the teacup ride, which terrified her. The kind operator of the ride stopped it after the first go-round so my hysterical, non-spin-friendly child could escape. Our son, the 6-year-old, recalls the luau and fire dancers at the Polynesian Resort, the teacups (for obvious reasons) and the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. Oh, and he liked the pizza at Pizza Planet.

I guess it’s a good thing we took lots of pictures.

Epcot, which the kids and my husband hated. Good thing there was wine and ice cream.

Did my husband and I enjoy the trip? I, for one, could have done without pushing that rented double stroller, with a combined 80 pounds of kids, for five days and through four amusement parks, while listening to endless whining, fighting, and begging for overpriced snacks and souvenirs. But watching their sweet faces light up with first-time Disney joy at least partially compensated for their sometimes not-so-cute behavior.

Despite our early bumps in the road, our family became fairly well-seasoned travelers in the years that followed. We flew to visit family in Florida and Los Angeles — with a stop in Disneyland, of course — and we even ventured to my favorite U.S. city, San Francisco. We took a marathon road trip several spring breaks ago to Philadelphia; Washington, D.C.; and New York City. And one summer we caravanned with a family we barely knew on a two-week trip across the country to Yellowstone National Park. After surviving a week together in a shoebox-size cabin, we were travel buddies for life.

Yellowstone National Park: Our best road trip ever.

This summer our son turned 13, and we decided it was time for another family travel first: Europe. My ecstatic husband became obsessed with planning his dream trip to Italy. He learned Italian with Rosetta Stone — the kids halfheartedly joined him for the first couple of weeks — and labored over every detail of the vacation. We had 12 days, and he wanted to cram in as much as possible.

The beauty of this family trip, however, was its relaxed tone and spontaneity.

We each had a passport, a plane ticket and a piece of carry-on luggage. We arrived in Rome, traveled all over Tuscany and flew out of Venice. The kids trekked through airports, from hotel to hotel, and in and out of taxicabs, trains, water buses and gondolas. Together we learned to order food in Italian, to navigate the country’s maze of a highway system in a clown-size car, to respect cultural traditions, to appreciate ancient art and ruins, and to enjoy long, leisurely meals and relaxing afternoon siestas.

Tuscany, especially the tiny village of Semproniano, was the hardest to leave.

On our family trip to Italy, we guided and our kids followed. But in some cases the opposite was true, and they taught us something. In one situation, my son, who can read a map better than anyone in our family, got us back on track when a wrong turn took us three hours in the opposite direction of our destination.

Were there other snafus? Many. Every family vacation has them, and it was our first trip abroad together. But despite the things that went wrong in Italy, we discovered just how easy and enjoyable traveling with our kids had become.

My husband’s trip of a lifetime turned out to be the family’s as well — at least so far.

The Long Way Home

I drove the 260-mile trip home to Michigan countless times over 20 years. In the early nineties, just a few months after I moved to Chicago, I brought a nervous new boyfriend home to meet my family. Two years later, we ventured back as an engaged couple, clinking blue-stemmed champagne flutes with my father and stepmother. In another several years, we took our infant son there for Thanksgiving, two overwhelmed first-time parents, cringing as our baby wailed for what seemed like the entire four-and-a-half-hour car ride.

Sometimes, pre-kids, I made the trip home alone and stayed with friends. Post-kids, we went as a family and stayed with my aunt, who had been a mother to me when I was young, or with my dad. We planned our visits around holidays, so they were equal parts stressful and joy-filled. I wanted my husband to help me wrangle our two children, but even more than that I needed the cushion of his emotional support.

I needed it more than ever as we made our latest trek to Michigan, to my cousin’s house in Brighton. Our previous trip there had been to visit my bed-ridden aunt, whose frail, 92-year-old body was unable to bounce back after a bitter bout with pneumonia. She died shortly afterward.

Now, eight months later, we were on our way to her memorial.

On that early Saturday morning in our atypically quiet car, my husband focused on the road, the kids on their iPod games, and me on the prospect of keeping it together in front of my relatives and their friends. This wasn’t a funeral; it was a celebration. It was no place for tears, mine or anyone else’s.

As we passed the exit signs on our journey east on I-94, landmarks we usually pointed out went unnoticed. Not even the Climax, Michigan, sign, which normally elicited a dirty-minded snicker from my husband or me, seemed to register. When we finally reached Brighton, we missed my cousin’s street. I noticed my marker for it — a strangely constructed, half-underground house — but forgot to tell my husband to make the turn. Nothing felt familiar. Everything had changed.

It’s sad and strange to go home when the people you loved the most are no longer there.

I reminded myself that everyone at the memorial had lost my aunt, not just me. When we arrived at my cousin’s house, I forced a smile on my face, hid my sad eyes behind Ray-Bans and headed into the party. My aunt had taught me as a little girl to always say hello to everyone who visited us. So there, at what used to be her home, that’s what I did.

After an hour or so of small talk with relatives and friends, a few of my cousins and I gathered in my aunt’s living room to watch some old videotapes of family parties. My aunt, the matriarch, had dominated our family get-togethers. I felt her presence as we watched the videos, even when she wasn’t on the TV screen.

My beautiful aunt, our family’s matriarch

When dinnertime came, we all felt her presence — in the menu. We dined on the foods she had served at family gatherings: beef brisket, ham, potato salad, cole slaw, cucumber salad and butter tarts. We shared a toast after the meal, each of us raising a shot glass of watered-down scotch with an ice cube in her honor. My aunt had loved her scotch and water — every day at four o’clock and even in her nineties.

The guests departed gradually after the toast, but my husband, children and I stayed well into the evening. We sat in my aunt’s living room with her children, my older cousins, trading stories and catching up on one another’s lives. Their company was familiar, soothing. I didn’t want to go because leaving would mark a conclusion. How could I place a period at the end of the last sentence of such an important chapter of my life?

We did leave eventually, as parents of tired children must. We said our goodbyes and drove up the gravel driveway. That’s the point where I would normally burst into tears after visiting my aunt, sobbing and shaking until at least the end of my cousin’s street. I hated leaving her. I hated being left.

This time I hadn’t cried, which I didn’t realize until we reached our hotel. The memorial had been a good thing, I told my husband. It gave us all closure.

When I woke the next morning, I felt an overwhelming desire to run, fast and far away. I had my closure, and I needed to leave Michigan, my ghost town of memories, and return to my present.

I rose quickly, showered and packed before waking my husband. “I need to leave,” I told him. “Now.” He understood.

We made a quick stop for Coney Island hotdogs — a Detroit-area tradition — on our way out of town. At our table in the diner, I watched my children scarf down pancakes and bacon while my husband and I noshed on our Coneys. My tension ebbed.

The past was painful, but I didn’t have to run from it. I had punctuated the end of my Michigan sentence long ago.

We finished our food and began our 260-mile journey home to Illinois.

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P.S. My cousin, the talented blogger behind The Three Under, shares her thoughts on the memorial party and growing up in Brighton here