Our kids were born 21 months apart and nearly everything about those first four years of young family life seemed like a natural deterrent to long trips. An overwhelming amount of equipment--portable cribs, booster chairs, kid snacks, bottles, sippy cups, days-worth of diapers—was required to make travel possible, and even then there was no guarantee our children would allow us to enjoy a single second. But this year, we decided it was time for our first family vacation.
We’d done the occasional long weekend to the beach or the grandparents’, but this would be a full-fledged week-long adventure to Disney World, two states away. My husband spent months planning it while I secretly tamped down my anxiety over the nightmare it could quite possibly turn out to be. Our kids could barely tolerate a single hour in the car, so it seemed like unbelievably wishful thinking to suppose that driving for more than one quarter of a day with them would be any less excruciating than the suffering incurred through enhanced interrogation techniques. The boys were now 4 and 2, and their moods on a typical day (not spent confined to their car seats) ricocheted like a pinball from euphoria to misery, exhaustion to excitement, contentment to confrontation, as though someone had slipped LSD into their sippy cups when Mommy wasn’t looking. Based on all previous experience, I was more than a little nervous about taking this show on the road for what was going to be the most expensive week of travel since our honeymoon. We might have a cute picture or two to show when it was all over—but it could very well come at the cost of Fed Ex’ing one or both boys home to the grandparents mid-week.
Regardless, we were excited. The boys counted the days down by removing strips of construction paper from a chain we’d taped together as a representation of the time left until our departure. Meanwhile, I rejoiced in the prospect of a week without dishes and my husband waited with the anticipation of a kid on Christmas to see all his meticulous planning come to fruition. When the time finally came to leave, the kids piled in the car with smiles tattooed to their faces--and we crossed our fingers that we’d make it to the first state line before the wheels came off (literally or figuratively).
We stopped for the night with just a few hours left to go, opting not to press our luck by pressing on toward our final destination. It was a safe, nondescript exit off the interstate, with a cluster of fast food places and mid-level hotel chains—but you would have thought we’d already arrived at Disney. The boys clambered into the hotel elevator, eagerly fighting over pushing the buttons, and burst into the hotel room like a pair of triathletes through the finish line tape, scrambling into the double bed they would share and burrowing under the covers. They relished their nuggets and French fries at the Chick-fil-a across the street like farm-to-table fare from a four-star restaurant and acted like they’d won the lottery upon being excused so they could explore the adjoining play area. Back at the hotel, they huddled happily in their double bed and watched a movie on the IPad, while my husband and I enjoyed a beer or two and waited for the kids to pass out—which they did. Without complaint.
Downstairs the next morning, the “continental breakfast” was nothing stellar to the adults, but was considered a triumph in powder donuts and dry cereal by the kids, who visually devoured the milk dispenser with wide eyes, no doubt imagining the sour-smelling havoc they could wreak if only they had dairy on tap at home. Having been unexpectedly blessed with our kids’ pleasantly surprising behavior to this point, my husband and I quietly acknowledged the fact that all hell was likely to break loose from this moment on. And eventually, it did. With about 30 minutes left in the drive, the 4-year-old got impatient and hungry and the 2-year-old grew frustrated with the IPad, unable to resist tapping his way into dead-end rabbit holes trying to purchase app upgrades that were parentally-blocked. We stopped at a nearby Wendy’s for a snack and “Come-To-Jesus” meeting, punctuated with the time-honored “turn this car around” tenor generations of parents have used since the advent of auto travel. We got back in the car and arrived at the resort not 30 minutes later to a scene more wondrous than our kids could ever have imagined.
They’d been reluctant to leave our over-night hotel that morning, my oldest son refusing to believe our next set of accommodations could ever compare to the standard appointments of the basic contemporary travel lodge we were leaving behind. If there was a pool, they hadn’t seen it. All they knew was the parking lot with the Chick-fil-a, the elevator, the strange new bed, and the long ubiquitous hallway that was somewhat creepy to any adult who’d seen The Shining--but to the kids, it was an over-sized tunnel in an indoor playground through which they could squeal and chase each other continuously for a full 15 seconds before having to stop and turn around. My kids believed they had been to the mountain top and had not wanted to leave.
Nevertheless, as we turned into Disney’s Art of Animation Resort, the kids couldn’t even process what they were seeing as a hotel, because it wasn’t. It was a sprawling expanse of pools, playgrounds, pathways, and places to eat, sleep, relax, and shop--all dedicated to the celebration of sketches, scenery, and 3-dimensional character replicas from some of Disney’s--and newly-acquired Pixar’s--most treasured animated films in modern history: The Little Mermaid, The Lion King, Finding Nemo, and most importantly for our boys, Cars.
Cars was released in 2006, the year my husband and I were married. The film’s debut was met with little fanfare by two childless adults, utterly unaware of the ripple in the space-time continuum it caused for families, of young boys especially, forever thereafter. Fast-forward to 10 years later, and our lives had been saturated in our sons’ obsession with entire franchise. The fog was beginning to lift for our older son, now four, but our 2-year-old was still deep in the throes of a passionate enchantment. The movie was a weekly, if not daily, feature in our home, and our two sons’ collective acquisition of die-cast vehicles from the film had expanded to the extensive proportions of borderline hoarders. So naturally, when my husband’s research happened upon the option to reside in a Cars-themed suite, he knew his boys would be no happier in nirvana itself.
Having arrived too early for check-in, we spent the first hour exploring the property—through the luminescent lobby papered with towering versions of the early sketches on which iconic characters from the movies were rendered; past the azure expanse of the Nemo-themed pool with its jellyfish fountains; and down the sidewalk painted with solid and dotted lines like a highway to a real-life staging of Radiator Springs, the infamous town from Cars, nestled in the courtyard between the three buildings of the Cars-themed wing. Life-size replicas of the main character cars lined the walkway, with the pool as its centerpiece, designed after the film’s Cozy Cone Motel, with enormous orange traffic cones as comfy cabanas over-looking the water. As soon as the first Cars character was in view, both boys took off running like they’d been shot out of a cannon, embracing then caressing each one—Sheriff, Ramone, Flo, Mater, Luigi, Guido, Sarge, Fillmore, Sally, Lightning--like long-lost loved ones, before erupting into shared celebration and joy. Pure joy. As they reveled in the real-ness of this imaginary town come-to-life.
By the time the dinner-hour had descended upon us, we’d had enough time to check in, swim in two of the resort’s three pools, and endure the late-afternoon tantrum or two that punctuates the daily life of young children with an obstinately emphatic exclamation point. The next day would be our first foray into the labyrinth of amusement parks just a convenient shuttle bus ride away, but after a few celebratory drinks for the adults and the sugar rush of a giant Mickey Mouse cupcake from the hotel food court for the kids, we weren’t ready to turn in just yet.
An outdoor showing of the movie Inside Out was scheduled to play in patch of grass between two buildings adjacent to the Nemo pool, so the kids kicked back in the double-stroller while mom and dad reclined beside them on the grass beneath the clear night sky. It was a movie we’d never seen that lived up to its critical acclaim, ultimately winning the Oscar for Best Animated Feature later that same month. The boys were mesmerized by its humor and silliness, but I was totally taken in by the staggeringly accurate depiction of what happens inside the mind of an eleven-year-old girl as she progresses from a sweet, carefree kid to a brooding and complicated preteen.
The essence of the main character Riley was composed by her “Islands of Personality”--Family, Friendship, Honesty, Goofball, and Hockey—which connected to the personified emotions of Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, and Anger in the “Headquarters” of her consciousness. As the plot unfolded, Riley’s “Islands” gradually broke away in response to unfamiliar adversity and crumbled into the cavernous nothingness of her subconscious, threatening to leave behind a young girl who was no longer the happy, silly, honest, friendly, hockey-playing daughter she used to be. I remembered that feeling, like everything I knew and took pride in about myself was withering away in the struggle to determine what parts I could carry over into adolescence. For a good while, I basically forgot how to openly like or enjoy things out of fear that I’d be seen as childish, boring, or not cool.
Seeing it play out in such familiar fashion on screen literally brought me to tears—hot, wet tears that reflected the full array of emotions represented in the movie… Sadness for the parts of myself I gave up in growing older… Fear, knowing I will ultimately be forced to watch my sweet, silly, infuriating little boys give up parts of themselves as they battle through all their subsequent phases of being… Disgust that my lack in strength of character ever prompted me to hide myself in the first place… Anger at the whole process for the sake of my kids, whose inevitable struggle I am incapable of postponing or alleviating…and then… as tears cascaded down my cheeks and the movie crowd sat deathly silent… during the most sentimentally serious part of the movie…
…my 4-year-old farted.
So loudly that the families in front of us turned to look accusingly at each other.
“Daddy!” my son scolded out loud, not missing a beat and throwing my husband completely under the bus for something we all knew Daddy hadn’t done.
And then, there was Joy. In the laughter shared with my family. In the knowing smiles of surrounding parents and kids who had lived their own versions of this scenario in their own households. In the satisfied embrace I shared with my husband having emerged victorious from the initial 36 hours of our first family vacation. In the bittersweet, aching understanding that, for now—if not forever--these kids were content, cared for, and consumed with gratitude and excitement. And in the heartfelt acknowledgement that, for all the conflict and chaos it can generate, this little family is the catalyst for incomparable joy in my life.
At the movie’s end, the personified emotions of Joy and Sadness work together to resolve Riley’s conflict with her parents through the complex relationship between those two opposing feelings and their capacity to intensify and inform the one another. Fortunately for us, Joy proved to be the dominant emotion of that night, as well as that trip—a time together that was so surprisingly and overwhelmingly positive, that I can already foresee how we might plumb the depths of the joy we recall from this one vacation to sustain us during more stressed and sorrowful times to come.
The family dynamic does and always will compel the full range of human emotion—anger, disgust, sadness, fear, and of course, joy. But joy is fickle and fleeting, the elusive one-fifth of an otherwise unfortunate balance in life’s flavor palate. Nevertheless, it’s there. On even the worst days, the scattered seconds and minutes of the joy I witness and partake in could be collected and layered together into something deliciously substantial. My hope in congealing and preserving the memory of this and other tiny joyful moments as a wife and mother is that the slightest fraction of the pie can somehow be the most filling, so that long after the lingering taste of the more unsavory emotions disintegrates, we are still satiated in the lasting fullness of the cumulative joy we experienced together.
We’d done the occasional long weekend to the beach or the grandparents’, but this would be a full-fledged week-long adventure to Disney World, two states away. My husband spent months planning it while I secretly tamped down my anxiety over the nightmare it could quite possibly turn out to be. Our kids could barely tolerate a single hour in the car, so it seemed like unbelievably wishful thinking to suppose that driving for more than one quarter of a day with them would be any less excruciating than the suffering incurred through enhanced interrogation techniques. The boys were now 4 and 2, and their moods on a typical day (not spent confined to their car seats) ricocheted like a pinball from euphoria to misery, exhaustion to excitement, contentment to confrontation, as though someone had slipped LSD into their sippy cups when Mommy wasn’t looking. Based on all previous experience, I was more than a little nervous about taking this show on the road for what was going to be the most expensive week of travel since our honeymoon. We might have a cute picture or two to show when it was all over—but it could very well come at the cost of Fed Ex’ing one or both boys home to the grandparents mid-week.
Regardless, we were excited. The boys counted the days down by removing strips of construction paper from a chain we’d taped together as a representation of the time left until our departure. Meanwhile, I rejoiced in the prospect of a week without dishes and my husband waited with the anticipation of a kid on Christmas to see all his meticulous planning come to fruition. When the time finally came to leave, the kids piled in the car with smiles tattooed to their faces--and we crossed our fingers that we’d make it to the first state line before the wheels came off (literally or figuratively).
We stopped for the night with just a few hours left to go, opting not to press our luck by pressing on toward our final destination. It was a safe, nondescript exit off the interstate, with a cluster of fast food places and mid-level hotel chains—but you would have thought we’d already arrived at Disney. The boys clambered into the hotel elevator, eagerly fighting over pushing the buttons, and burst into the hotel room like a pair of triathletes through the finish line tape, scrambling into the double bed they would share and burrowing under the covers. They relished their nuggets and French fries at the Chick-fil-a across the street like farm-to-table fare from a four-star restaurant and acted like they’d won the lottery upon being excused so they could explore the adjoining play area. Back at the hotel, they huddled happily in their double bed and watched a movie on the IPad, while my husband and I enjoyed a beer or two and waited for the kids to pass out—which they did. Without complaint.
Downstairs the next morning, the “continental breakfast” was nothing stellar to the adults, but was considered a triumph in powder donuts and dry cereal by the kids, who visually devoured the milk dispenser with wide eyes, no doubt imagining the sour-smelling havoc they could wreak if only they had dairy on tap at home. Having been unexpectedly blessed with our kids’ pleasantly surprising behavior to this point, my husband and I quietly acknowledged the fact that all hell was likely to break loose from this moment on. And eventually, it did. With about 30 minutes left in the drive, the 4-year-old got impatient and hungry and the 2-year-old grew frustrated with the IPad, unable to resist tapping his way into dead-end rabbit holes trying to purchase app upgrades that were parentally-blocked. We stopped at a nearby Wendy’s for a snack and “Come-To-Jesus” meeting, punctuated with the time-honored “turn this car around” tenor generations of parents have used since the advent of auto travel. We got back in the car and arrived at the resort not 30 minutes later to a scene more wondrous than our kids could ever have imagined.
They’d been reluctant to leave our over-night hotel that morning, my oldest son refusing to believe our next set of accommodations could ever compare to the standard appointments of the basic contemporary travel lodge we were leaving behind. If there was a pool, they hadn’t seen it. All they knew was the parking lot with the Chick-fil-a, the elevator, the strange new bed, and the long ubiquitous hallway that was somewhat creepy to any adult who’d seen The Shining--but to the kids, it was an over-sized tunnel in an indoor playground through which they could squeal and chase each other continuously for a full 15 seconds before having to stop and turn around. My kids believed they had been to the mountain top and had not wanted to leave.
Nevertheless, as we turned into Disney’s Art of Animation Resort, the kids couldn’t even process what they were seeing as a hotel, because it wasn’t. It was a sprawling expanse of pools, playgrounds, pathways, and places to eat, sleep, relax, and shop--all dedicated to the celebration of sketches, scenery, and 3-dimensional character replicas from some of Disney’s--and newly-acquired Pixar’s--most treasured animated films in modern history: The Little Mermaid, The Lion King, Finding Nemo, and most importantly for our boys, Cars.
Cars was released in 2006, the year my husband and I were married. The film’s debut was met with little fanfare by two childless adults, utterly unaware of the ripple in the space-time continuum it caused for families, of young boys especially, forever thereafter. Fast-forward to 10 years later, and our lives had been saturated in our sons’ obsession with entire franchise. The fog was beginning to lift for our older son, now four, but our 2-year-old was still deep in the throes of a passionate enchantment. The movie was a weekly, if not daily, feature in our home, and our two sons’ collective acquisition of die-cast vehicles from the film had expanded to the extensive proportions of borderline hoarders. So naturally, when my husband’s research happened upon the option to reside in a Cars-themed suite, he knew his boys would be no happier in nirvana itself.
Having arrived too early for check-in, we spent the first hour exploring the property—through the luminescent lobby papered with towering versions of the early sketches on which iconic characters from the movies were rendered; past the azure expanse of the Nemo-themed pool with its jellyfish fountains; and down the sidewalk painted with solid and dotted lines like a highway to a real-life staging of Radiator Springs, the infamous town from Cars, nestled in the courtyard between the three buildings of the Cars-themed wing. Life-size replicas of the main character cars lined the walkway, with the pool as its centerpiece, designed after the film’s Cozy Cone Motel, with enormous orange traffic cones as comfy cabanas over-looking the water. As soon as the first Cars character was in view, both boys took off running like they’d been shot out of a cannon, embracing then caressing each one—Sheriff, Ramone, Flo, Mater, Luigi, Guido, Sarge, Fillmore, Sally, Lightning--like long-lost loved ones, before erupting into shared celebration and joy. Pure joy. As they reveled in the real-ness of this imaginary town come-to-life.
By the time the dinner-hour had descended upon us, we’d had enough time to check in, swim in two of the resort’s three pools, and endure the late-afternoon tantrum or two that punctuates the daily life of young children with an obstinately emphatic exclamation point. The next day would be our first foray into the labyrinth of amusement parks just a convenient shuttle bus ride away, but after a few celebratory drinks for the adults and the sugar rush of a giant Mickey Mouse cupcake from the hotel food court for the kids, we weren’t ready to turn in just yet.
An outdoor showing of the movie Inside Out was scheduled to play in patch of grass between two buildings adjacent to the Nemo pool, so the kids kicked back in the double-stroller while mom and dad reclined beside them on the grass beneath the clear night sky. It was a movie we’d never seen that lived up to its critical acclaim, ultimately winning the Oscar for Best Animated Feature later that same month. The boys were mesmerized by its humor and silliness, but I was totally taken in by the staggeringly accurate depiction of what happens inside the mind of an eleven-year-old girl as she progresses from a sweet, carefree kid to a brooding and complicated preteen.
The essence of the main character Riley was composed by her “Islands of Personality”--Family, Friendship, Honesty, Goofball, and Hockey—which connected to the personified emotions of Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, and Anger in the “Headquarters” of her consciousness. As the plot unfolded, Riley’s “Islands” gradually broke away in response to unfamiliar adversity and crumbled into the cavernous nothingness of her subconscious, threatening to leave behind a young girl who was no longer the happy, silly, honest, friendly, hockey-playing daughter she used to be. I remembered that feeling, like everything I knew and took pride in about myself was withering away in the struggle to determine what parts I could carry over into adolescence. For a good while, I basically forgot how to openly like or enjoy things out of fear that I’d be seen as childish, boring, or not cool.
Seeing it play out in such familiar fashion on screen literally brought me to tears—hot, wet tears that reflected the full array of emotions represented in the movie… Sadness for the parts of myself I gave up in growing older… Fear, knowing I will ultimately be forced to watch my sweet, silly, infuriating little boys give up parts of themselves as they battle through all their subsequent phases of being… Disgust that my lack in strength of character ever prompted me to hide myself in the first place… Anger at the whole process for the sake of my kids, whose inevitable struggle I am incapable of postponing or alleviating…and then… as tears cascaded down my cheeks and the movie crowd sat deathly silent… during the most sentimentally serious part of the movie…
…my 4-year-old farted.
So loudly that the families in front of us turned to look accusingly at each other.
“Daddy!” my son scolded out loud, not missing a beat and throwing my husband completely under the bus for something we all knew Daddy hadn’t done.
And then, there was Joy. In the laughter shared with my family. In the knowing smiles of surrounding parents and kids who had lived their own versions of this scenario in their own households. In the satisfied embrace I shared with my husband having emerged victorious from the initial 36 hours of our first family vacation. In the bittersweet, aching understanding that, for now—if not forever--these kids were content, cared for, and consumed with gratitude and excitement. And in the heartfelt acknowledgement that, for all the conflict and chaos it can generate, this little family is the catalyst for incomparable joy in my life.
At the movie’s end, the personified emotions of Joy and Sadness work together to resolve Riley’s conflict with her parents through the complex relationship between those two opposing feelings and their capacity to intensify and inform the one another. Fortunately for us, Joy proved to be the dominant emotion of that night, as well as that trip—a time together that was so surprisingly and overwhelmingly positive, that I can already foresee how we might plumb the depths of the joy we recall from this one vacation to sustain us during more stressed and sorrowful times to come.
The family dynamic does and always will compel the full range of human emotion—anger, disgust, sadness, fear, and of course, joy. But joy is fickle and fleeting, the elusive one-fifth of an otherwise unfortunate balance in life’s flavor palate. Nevertheless, it’s there. On even the worst days, the scattered seconds and minutes of the joy I witness and partake in could be collected and layered together into something deliciously substantial. My hope in congealing and preserving the memory of this and other tiny joyful moments as a wife and mother is that the slightest fraction of the pie can somehow be the most filling, so that long after the lingering taste of the more unsavory emotions disintegrates, we are still satiated in the lasting fullness of the cumulative joy we experienced together.
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| My boys, holding hands on The People-Mover, their favorite ride. |
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