Left Behind

On Friday my parents, along with my younger brother and his girlfriend, left for a 10 day vacation to Rapid City, South Dakota. Our family has traveled there each summer for the last 6-7 summers or so. My memory doesn’t always store the stuff it should, so I could be underestimating here. Needless to say we’ve been traveling there as a family for a good chunk of years.

Of all the vacations that my family has taken, I’ve only missed one and that was three years ago when I had my first internship. My family would usually take our annual vacation in August and three years ago that was no different. Most of the summer my internship had been pretty boring and I didn’t feel like I learned a ton, but as the last month of it approached I finally had some things to work on. Because of that I wanted to stay home instead of going on vacation. That and I needed to make some more money to pay for college. Private school sure isn’t cheap.

Barring that one instance three years ago my family, all five of us, would always make an annual trip out to South Dakota. For the first time ever neither I nor my brother Randy will be going. I have to stay here for work since we just secured a new client that we are working with and Randy is staying home because of his summer classes and internship.

When I wasn’t able to go a couple of years back it felt weird that my family was going without me. This time it also feels weird. Maybe it’s because it’s signaling the slow departure away from dependence upon, and unity with, my family and the start of my own full independence. Maybe it’s because I really could have used a vacation. Maybe it’s because I hate change. Maybe it’s because I know we’re all getting older and with it will soon come families of our own (me and my brothers, I mean). It’s probably all of them, but any way you slice it, I’m missing my family and being on vacation right now.

I could have really used the vacation too. I haven’t had a vacation since last year. I had planned on taking a trip to Chicago earlier this summer, but that had fallen through. I had also planned on taking a road trip at the end of August this year, but now it looks like I'll be knee deep in training sessions (teaching them) at work that week so I had to let that trip fall by the wayside as well.

What might make things even harder now is working with our new client at work since I know I probably won’t be able to take a very long vacation if I even get to take one period. We’ll have to see how it goes, but it’s looking like I’m going to be going vacationless for a little while yet, which makes me a little bit more irritable that usual.