I am not what you would call a well-traveled person. Heck, I've never even owned a passport.
But let me preface this by saying that I have been outside the United States a few times. Three, to be exact. Three trips across the border into Canada. Niagara Falls, Canada. Once during high school for a soccer tournament in nearby Amherst, New York- which I'm now questioning whether or not we actually ventured into Canada or just remained on the other side of the falls.
Okay, well there were at least two times when I really did get outside the States. Both were short road trips from Pittsburgh with hometown friends to enjoy the lower legalized drinking age of nineteen.
The first was for a few days in the summer of 2003, where I can still remember ordering my very first drink at the hotel bar: An electric blue lemonade concoction, topped with a crazy straw, tiny umbrella, and maybe a cherry or two. And the second, a few months later, when I spontaneously decided to tag along with a few guy friends on New Year's Eve and ended with us sleeping for a few hours in the parking lot before making the trek back to Pennsylvania.
Despite my lack of international adventures over the last forty years, I've lived in three states (Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Illinois) and have made my way through most of those along the eastern coast and Midwestern region. And there was one quick day trip to Colorado for a work event, and a long weekend in California with a friend, where I teared up wishing that we could cancel our return flights and just stay there forever.
When I really think about it, most of my time away has really been back to my hometown or visiting college friends in Ohio, and even those trips have been extremely limited especially in these last few years. I haven’t even made it back to Pittsburgh to celebrate Christmas with my family since 2017, wanting to keep my daughter with her dad for these special holiday memories, never knowing when it could be their last together.
But every year, in the beginning of September, I have taken the chance to get away and spend a week in my favorite little beach town: Stone Harbor, New Jersey.
My parents began enjoying vacations here before I was born, but my very first time was in September 1984, when I celebrated my first birthday. Then my brother joined a few years later. Nearly every year, for a week in late July or early August, we drove the seven hours from Pittsburgh to Stone Harbor, spending our days at the beach and nights at local restaurants and ice cream shops, mini-golf courses, movie theaters, and nearby arcades and boardwalks.
This town saw me grow up. Initially watching my physical growth during those early childhood years as I built sandcastles, jumped and boogey boarded through the waves, and wrote my name and the year in the sand, captured on film by my parents and placed alongside other memories in our family’s album.
Beginning in my adolescence, this town came to learn all the new versions of me. I wasn’t as playful as I used to be. Maybe even fair to say I was a shell of my former self. I walked through these familiar streets filled with self-doubt, age-appropriate fears, and a negative body image, napping on the beach as much as I could to calm my anxious mind and let dreams fill my days. I imagined the life I wished for, and the self-confidence and romcom-influenced love that I always hoped to find.
For a few years, I actually felt like I had that. In 2013, I arrived with an engagement ring on my finger and celebrated my thirtieth birthday over midnight tequila shots with my mom, dad, and brother. (Well, my mom was there but don’t think she joined in the shots.)
And in 2016, I introduced this special place to my husband and our sweet three-month-old baby girl. I think that was the happiest Stone Harbor had ever seen me.
It also marked a new beginning as these trips now became about my daughter and creating vacation memories with her. My happy place was now hers, too, and somehow that has made everything about this town so much more special.
We dig holes and build sandcastles for her, lift her up over the waves, cuddle up in towels for naps on the beach, and write her name and the year on the sand.
But these last few years have also brought so many unexpected changes, more than a young family like ours could have ever imagined.
For one, my husband hasn't joined our family beach trips since 2019, choosing to stay back home with our dog. Honestly, I get it, as silly as there were years where he barely wanted to leave the house let alone travel, but it also just shows how different things are from how I once thought an annual family trip of ours to be.
While many tell me how much a break is good for me, in the months leading up to our scheduled week away, I contemplate coming back as I worry about the financial cost of flights and out-of-our-budget travel funds and leaving him in Chicago- along with all the symptoms that no one else seems to truly understand but me.
Despite my doubts, I go through with the plans, reminding myself that it’s time with my family, who I rarely get to see anymore other than FaceTime calls and the overnight drop-offs in Ohio when my daughter spends a week of school break with her Gigi and Pap. I’ve also come to recognize the importance of having a change of scenery and a much-needed break-from work, from Chicago, from the daily grind of it all- and the benefit of it being alongside the healing powers of the sun, the ocean, and this little beach town.
Each year, I've arrived mentally stressed, physically drained, and emotionally exhausted. But after a few days of beach therapy, family time, and lots of naps and mornings of sleeping in, I am relaxed, refreshed, and rejuvenated in all the ways that I didn’t necessarily know I needed.
Still this year, things feel very different.
There seemed to be an extra strong sense of nostalgia that immediately came over me when we crossed the bridge into town, and i almost felt like a kid again as my daughter’s huge smile reminded me of the ones I used to wear as the windows were rolled down to smell the ocean air and feel the breeze after a long drive.
This year, more than ever before, I kept thinking how I just never know which of these sacred trips may to be our last altogether.
I know I’m very lucky that I still have both of my parents, in fairly decent health, but I’m also extremely well aware that one day it will suddenly change.
It’s been a few days of being here now, and my body is still tense. And my mind, it continues to
to race with endless thoughts, worries, and fears and doubts that I thought I’d finally moved past.
I've tried all my usual pick-me-up tricks: Morning showers, slow deep breaths, workouts, meditation, late afternoon coffee, many glasses of wine. I actually even started reading a non-fiction book, for the first time in way too many years, hoping to get lost in someone else's story. But nothing has really helped. My mind is still spinning, and I just can’t seem to get my beach buzz or any sense of vacation-induced peace.
Instead, I find myself doing much more reflecting (aka overthinking) than usual. I guess this blog post is proof of that.
Being here honestly, it just makes me think so much of my past and all that I’ve gone through in life- my childhood, my adolescence, and these adult years. The memories flood my mind, and I can't help but wonder what exactly I'm supposed to do with them.
What do I keep holding onto, and which ones do I finally let go?
{I swear, just as I finished writing that, the song on my Spotify playlist started singing...
I am not the only traveler
Who has not repaid his debt.
I've been searching for a trail to follow again
Take me back to the night we met.
And then I can tell myself
What the hell I'm supposed to do.}
I guess you can put it that way. What the hell am I supposed to do?
I've spent so much of the last few years riding this wave of change that my husband's health struggles created, and each year I arrive back here with the time and space to process it all.
I always come to be reminded how my love of this place birthed a lifelong dream of living in a beach town like it one day. For so long, it actually felt attainable, but I guess that’s what dreams do. Yet now, it feels foolish to even let myself dream about it when I think about how out of reach it is from my real actual everyday life.
With that dream bubble now popped, and all that life has turned out to be for me, I can’t help but question where it is that I actually belong.
Is there even such a place? Do I actually belong anywhere?
Sadly, Chicago doesn't even feel like home anymore. Honestly, I don't know if it has for a while now, especially not this past year after we moved into the new house. And Pittsburgh really hasn't either, at least not in my adult years. After college, I thought I’d live in Ohio forever, close to some friends and only short roadtrips away from others and our favorite college town.
But I’ve come to learn, the Universe had different plans for me.
Part of me feels like something really is meant to come from all of this. There has to be a purpose for all of my growth and all that I've come to learn from these challenges. But what? What's really next? There are thoughts in my head that feel like my intuition saying, Keep going. Don't give up now. You're almost there. Soon, soon you'll understand.
But every day I wake up and things are still the same, and it leads me to believe otherwise. Maybe dreams are just meant to be dreams, something to believe in with that last bit of hope that better days are to come.
Though God, I swear, I’d be so happy living in a beach town, taking sunset walks down the shore, while watching my daughter do cartwheels in the sand and my dog chasing tennis balls into the waves. She’d love the beach, maybe even more than me.
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