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The Big Disappointment
Our Family Just Can’t Seem to Get It Together
This is my son’s 26th birthday weekend. We, along with my two other kids, 23 and 19, had planned to go camping at Assateague island on the coast of Maryland for two nights to mark the occasion. Assateague is the cool place where wild ponies roam, you can build a fire right on the beach, watch the sun rise, and just chill.
I thought it would be nice to get all of us together for a couple of days because the birthday guy just got sober at the beginning of the pandemic. There’s a lot to be grateful for.
We haven’t managed a weekend together as a family in roughly a decade.
Someone always disappoints.
In fact, daily, someone drops the ball. I ask that the kitchen be left tidy every night because we live in an urban townhouse (we are in Baltimore City), and yet with three adult kids in the house, that never manages to be the case.
When we try to plan a holiday dinner, someone declares at the last minute that they were able to pull a work shift and, hey, “the money’s good and who could pass it up?” So I shrug and reluctantly agree.
I think back to their childhoods when summer Sundays were reserved for family time, and we nearly always spent our time lazing about poolside, but then I am jarred into remembering…
