They call it a family vacation. Is that an oxymoron? Or are Smartmom and her extended family moronic to even give it a try?
For the eighth year in a row, they have persisted in believing it’s actually fun to spend seven days at the beach with one’s nearest and dearest.
And it is, mostly. Except when it is not, like when the fuse blows in the rental house kitchen because someone plugged in the toaster at the same time as the air-conditioner. And then Manhattan Granny does the same thing 20 minutes later.
But it’s a family tradition and who wants to mess with that?
Actually, Smartmom and Hepcat’s family vacations started as a compromise. For years, the happy couple spent every summer with his family on the family farm in Northern California.
Smartmom loves it there and she wouldn’t knock it (ever). But she was abundantly aware that her cherished summer vacation was always spent in the presence of Hepcat’s relatives, which doesn’t allow for much rest and replenishment.
And zero intimacy between Smartmom and Hepcat. How can Smartmom be expected to get in the mood sleeping in Hepcat’s childhood bedroom (next to the kitchen) with his Porsche posters still hanging on the ceiling?
Smartmom didn’t just crave the sex, she craved the beach.
“Summer is synonymous with the ocean,” she told Hepcat, who doesn’t like lying on the sand getting red as a lobster (truth be told, he doesn’t even like lobster).
But Smartmom has memories of summers spent on Fire Island, Monhegan Island, and Martha’s Vineyard. For her, the fragrance of Ban De Soleil and Calamine is like a Proustean Madeleine.
So this year, after numerous sessions with their couples therapist, they decided to try a week at the beach and a week on the farm. Call it another compromise (isn’t that what marriage is all about?)
Trying to avoid the Hamptons and all it connotes — congestion on Montauk Highway, McMansions in former potato fields, hedge-fund millionaires in pink Lacoste shirts driving red Ferraris — they went to Sag Harbor, the not-Hampton. It’s everything the Hamptons are not: a real place with hilly streets, perfectly scaled architecture, a charming downtown, loads of churches and bay beaches.
The only downside is that it’s too close. With Smartmom only two hours from Brooklyn, her nuclear-family vacation quickly went nuclear when the rest of Smartmom’s family wanted to join in.
An extended family vacation is all about coordination and compromise. Everyone has his likes, dislikes and annoying idiosyncrasies. And there are never enough cars.
Manhattan Granny hates the beach, wearing a bathing suit, and anything having to do with sand. (So why does she want to vacation with Smartmom at the beach? That’s a question for another column.)
The Oh So Feisty One likes the bay beach, which Teen Spirit calls the cheesy beach because it doesn’t have big waves like the ocean.
Teen Spirit is overjoyed with the rental house’s cable connection and unlimited episodes of “Project Runway,” which make it difficult to motivate him to do anything.
Hepcat dislikes sitting in the sun and always forgets to slather the back of his neck and his bald spot with SPF45.
Diaper Diva has to schedule her life according to her utterly adorable 2-year old. That means, she gets about an hour of beach reading (in the living room) while Ducky naps. Bro-in-law doesn’t much like noise and takes long walks into town during mealtimes.
This year, because of the heat wave, it was hard to motivate anyone to do much of anything. The 10 of them spent much of the day in the air-conditioned living room, sticking ice cubes in their clothing and getting irritable. So much for family togetherness.
As for sexual intimacy, it was too hot to even think about that. And since Smartmom and Hepcat had one of the only air-conditioned bedrooms, they never knew who might wander in at an inopportune moment.
As usual, there was more than one mother/daughter blow out.
“You really should lose some weight,” Manhattan Granny told Smartmom just as she’s leaving for the beach in her modest black tank suit. “You don’t mind me telling you that, do you?”
“Not at all,” Smartmom snarled. Grrrrr.
For most of the week, Smartmom felt like an air-traffic controller just trying to get everyone on the same page about breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Thank Buddha for her cellphone. Smartmom had a phone-session with her beloved therapist while lying prone on Atlantic Beach and got to complain about her family for a full 50 minutes (‘We’re going to have to stop now,” he said. “But I didn’t even get to the stuff about…” she wailed).
If it doesn’t sound like a vacation, you’re one smart Milano cookie. The week in Sag was as unrelaxing as every other day of Smartmom’s life — worse still because it kept holding out, then denying, the tantalizing promise of lying on the beach reading Anna Karenina or finally attaining the other unattainable luxuries of family life.