There is no better secret to handling all the curve balls life throws your way.

It’s easier to make sense of it all when you know you’re not alone.  Starting new schools, considering surgery, changing jobs, parenting.  The challenges all seem less personal, like it’s normal or maybe even a rite of passage to have your feelings hurt by your children, or to think your parents don’t understand.  The role of family is to be there when that happens, so you have other people around to remind you that it’s not your fault, that it’s nobody’s fault, and forgiveness is never the wrong thing.

As our babies keep growing up and becoming adult people, our job is to keep figuring out new ways to love them.  Even unconditional love is not static.  Loving someone seems to be this dynamic thing, like everything else in life.  Once you think you have it figured out, it changes again.

Maybe loving something is like art.  The point isn’t how you do it or what it means, or whether you understand it.  The point is just that you do it.  Every day, without worrying whether it’s actually making sense to anyone.  You hope it touches somebody.  You hope that as they go off to college or start fourth grade, they know that even if you’re using the wrong words to say so, you love them more than there are stars in the sky or drops in the ocean.  That we will always be each other’s best friends, even when we can’t hear each other very well anymore.  That nothing could ever change that, even as the world changes and we sometimes don’t keep up.

This trip has been the best.  There I go with my vacation dementia again, but this time it’s totally true!

I would love to say that it wasn’t all fun and games but it was.

That’s all I remember, anyway.

A lot of laughing and hugging, and remembering that this is what makes a family a family.  And we will always love each other no matter what.