Where I Realize That I Am Turning Into My Mother...

By the time this posts, J and I should be gone on the 3 week odyssey of our road trip to Washington and Charleston, SC. Hopefully, good times will be had by all. J has never done anything like this, and I haven't since I moved out of my parents' house. It's one thing to go to Europe for a month with my parents. It's another thing to spend all this time in the car with them. When I was younger, my father got 5 weeks of vacation in a block. One year, it would be the month of July, the next year, it would be the month of August. Because of the type of work, if we stayed home, our phone would have continued to ring to ask him some type of question, or to do something other than relax. I was sure that it was normal for people to pull up stakes the morning that vacation started and come back to town the night before you returned to work. This meant that my family had wonderful long adventures together: Europe, South America and Africa for 35 days; long camping trips to both coasts. We went away. I'm still somewhat like that, despite a husband who if working could only get a week or perhaps 2. I have time, and we should make the most of it by travelling. Something planned out, but leaving lots of time for experiencing the journey. I travelled in a car that stopped for historic road markers, picnics on the side of the road, and sometimes an ice cream. J remembers only 1 vacation with his family. They went to Yellowstone for 10 days. They got up, and his father started driving from Ohio. They stopped when they got to Yellowstone. Same thing coming home. I asked him if he felt ripped off missing all the interesting things between home and the park. He didn't know what I meant. What I hated most about summer vacations with my parents was the food for the first part of the trip: not what it was as much as what it wasn't. I swore my mother made the biggest batch of cookies she could think of for us to take. She would sped time thinking of snacks and meals that included things brought from home. We would have to finish it all before I was allowed to start choosing store bought cookies for lunch, or get a package of the little boxes of cereal, the one time a year I was allowed to eat presweetened varieties. I thought about this the other day as I made Chex Mix and a big batch of cookies for us to take with us. Not because I was thinking about the kinds we could buy when we run out of home made snacks, but about how much we'll save on the road. I've already heard my mother come out of my face...but this is the first time I've experienced some kind of mind-meld, which I'm sure has probably happened in the past, and I've ignored it. It's starting to happen more frequently, and frankly it scares me a bit. There are worse people I could be melding with: Paris Hilton or Martha Stewart to name a couple.