Summer is a time for fun, for vacation, for surfside romps, for visits to the county fair, for baseball games, for seeing friends and drinking wine. This summer was both the same and also very different. While I did all of these things, I did it with family, my big noisy crazy, dysfunctional family including husband, kids, grandkids, sibling and of course in-laws and extended family. But we didn’t go to some exotic island where the summer sun shines 20 hours a day, nor did we jet off to African for a Safari (which is still on my bucket list). This summer was the beautiful California locales, all close by. The summer turned out to be the “summer of love”.
Family vacations evoke all sorts of images, like group cooking in an always beautiful Italianate kitchen, grandparents playing with tiny humans who may look like them, sisters romping on the front lawn doing cartwheels, kids fighting and hitting each other, and many secrets which are best left unshared. But at the bottom of all these images is the reality of spending time with the only people who provide unconditional love, who look like you, who know what you have been through because they have been through it too.
This year was especially memorable for me because my tiny doppelgangers, my grandkids, were old enough to be out of their parents arms, and become their own little people, able to play and love independently.
And because I have rewired my brain, and practiced becoming my best self, I was able to be there and enjoy these precious moments.
It all seems so simple, so natural, so “yeah, of course that’s what happens”, but in fact this is something extremely difficult, requires hard work and is entirely new to me.
So I wrote a whole song about it:
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