Last month, a woman sitting beside me and my son on a plane began to cry. My son is not yet two, and with no concept of personal space, no ability to understand that the nice man in the business suit with the noise-blocking headphones might not want a half-eaten cookie placed on his head, he always seems to test the limits of the friendly skies. I expected the unlucky person seated beside us to moan and fidget and sound sigh after exasperated sigh, but not to weep, and not so soon after take off.
I asked if she was okay. She nodded, cleared her throat. It seemed as though she had nothing else to say. But then, a few minutes into our flight she apologized and explained how she was returning home from a funeral, her twenty-year-old niece's funeral. She told me about the pain and shock and senselessness of it all. She told me about the memorial service. And then she said something that seemed truly amazing. She said, "On top of everything, I've used up all my vacation days with this trip. I was going to go away with my kids but now I can't. This was my vacation."
I'll admit that at first I was stunned. Was this woman really worrying about vacation days in the face of such tragedy? But as I continued to talk to her, it became increasingly clear that if anyone had ever needed a vacation, it was this woman — a single, full-time working mom with three kids under ten who'd rushed cross-country to her family member's aid in a time of crisis and loss. And the more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that of all the things American culture does well, it simply doesn't get vacation — its importance not just for individual happiness but for families' physical and emotional health.
I have plenty of pleasant vacation memories from my childhood — beach vacations mostly — but the emotional tenor of these memories is not one of long, lazy, relaxing days in the sun, not a pastoral of children playing, dogs barking, family and friends eating and talking outdoors late into the evening, but rather, six nights and seven days of trying to cram as much "fun" as possible into our annual trip. Not that I can complain; even our one-week forays were much more than many of my friends' families experienced.
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