We just got home from a great family vacation…well, pretty great until the last day when I got mildly sea sick. (Thank you, Jesus, for Dramamine.) Fortunately, the giant ship rocked us very little on our way to Ocho Rios, Jamaica. We got off the boat for a few hours to go through the trinket shopping gauntlet but more impressively to Dunn’s River Falls where we donned our stylish water shoes and climbed up a gorgeous waterfall! It’s a 600 foot gentle ascent with large rocks and fast-moving water interspersed with calm pools. It’s not an easy climb, but welcomes all comers…children and grandparents, athletes and rookies. So, we, as a family, took to the falls. About half way up, Ben (9) noticed a deck and a set of stairs with a sign that simply read “EXIT”. “Mom, look, we can give up!” I chuckled at his choice of words. Not, “We can quit” or “We can finish early”, but “We can give up”. I jokingly/emphatically advised Ben that we would not be giving up. The view from the top was beautiful but even more exhilarating was simply knowing that we finished what we set out to do. The cool water felt good on a hot day and we all had some good laughs watching each other struggle up the waterfall. It was satisfying to look down and see what we did together…we made it.

Last night, post-call, more tired than I realized or wanted to admit, I had run errands with Jack and then was simultaneously cooling off from a quick P90X workout, packing school lunches, picking up the house, checking texts and emails, and helping Sam finish his Flat Stanley homework, when Jack asked, “Mom, did you ever just feel like, ‘What the heck am I doing? Four kids, med school, job…’ Did you ever just feel like quitting it all?” Uh, yeah. Like every other day in med school. More like every day in residency! (Student loan default is a powerful motivator…) I told him the story of a night when he was about 3 years old. I was a second year med student, Scott was out-of-town for the night, and I was cradling a crying baby Allie who was about 6mo old, holding his bedroom door shut to try to keep him in his room to fall asleep so I could study for a test the next morning. Exasperated, I called my parents who lived about a mile away, and pleaded, “If you ever want to see your grandchildren alive again, you better come over here and deal with them so I can study!!!!” They came. I studied. I passed the test. Scott came home. Though I threatened to, I didn’t give up.

I’ve been thinking about what Ben said. About giving up. That’s just not what we do in our family. We get frustrated, sometimes mad. Sometimes curse. Sometimes cry. We hurt each other and get hurt. But we also forgive and support each other. Scott does all the post-vacation laundry; Jack returns the over due library books and puts gas in my car; Allie babysits her little brothers; Ben takes out the trash and Sam collects the dog poop. But we don’t give up. We don’t give up on the tough days when we are so done with work and school and each other.  On bad days, we eat leftovers and at the end of the day I see the kids for the first time when I kiss them goodnight. And on good days, we stand in the kitchen late into the night and ask Alexa trick questions and get her to play our favorite music, we eat the cookie batter before we can bake it, we laugh til we cry…and we plan our next vacation.

On the last morning of the cruise, Scott and I got up before the kids and took our coffee to the back deck of the ship, instead of mid-ship where we had spent most of our time. The view was amazing! The clouds breaking for the sun, the crystal Caribbean water bubbling in the wake. “Look how far we have come, baby! You can’t see the shore. No land. Just water! So many miles behind us!” Yes, baby, look how far we have come. School and work, moves and kids…more than 20 years. There were some large rocks and fast-moving water along the way…and also some magnificent calm pools. We haven’t given up…and now the view behind us…well, it’s beautiful so far!

 

Disclaimer: My viewpoints are not necessarily reflective of my employer, or any local, regional or national organization that I belong to. As a matter of fact, I pretty much just speak for myself. Please keep that in mind.