Back in our brooding days of youth, my friend Kate and I used to lay around in our sweats, eating knock-off Tostitos, drinking Beringer White Zin and dream aloud about what our future lives would look like. We’d try to picture our husbands, foretell how many kids we’d have and what they’d look like. As we delved deeper and deeper into these imagined futures, we’d talk with growing excitement about how great it would be to get our families together each summer and vacation at the beach. ‘Can you just picture it,’ we’d say, ‘our little kids running around on the beach?’ In these imagined scenarios, the two of us would be lazily reclining on beach chairs while our kids calmly and quietly played in the sand, our handsome husbands by our sides. (How adorably naïve we were, to think we’d be able to sit on the beach and gossip over books and magazines, while our kids magically minded themselves.)
It was all a little surreal when that long ago dream came somewhat true over this past Labor Day weekend. Nearly a decade out from the Era of Nachos and Bad Wine, Kate and I found ourselves taking up residence at a beautiful house on the Jersey Shore, along with our respective husbands and sons. In some ways, our vision had come true, and of course in many ways it was far different than our younger selves would have ever believed.
When we first dreamed up our futures, we didn’t even know our now-husbands existed. We pictured adorable children, but we couldn’t have imagined just how adorable they would turn out to be, or how our hearts would have the capacity to love them as fiercely as we do. With no real-world experience to go on, we didn’t realize that our sons, at such tender ages, would be far more interested in muddy sand than in playing with each other. That we wouldn’t have the time to sit on beach chairs, catching up for hours. How were we to know that instead we’d be running around the sand with our kids, stopping for brief intervals to marvel or complain over what each was doing, giving each other a silent look that could only mean, ‘You know there’s nothing I’d love more right now than to sit and talk with you, except, that is, to sit at the edge of the tide, getting sand in my ass because my baby loves the sand and it’s his first experience with it and I don’t want to miss it for the world, sandy crotch or no!’
No, back in the daydream era we didn’t realize that we might not get to sit on the beach at the same time because our kids would be on different nap schedules and you Do Not Mess With The Nap. We wouldn’t have believed that we’d go to bed at 10PM (on vacation!) because we were just So. Damn. Shot. from the day.
I still like to think that one day our dream will come true. Our kids will be old enough to play by themselves. Our beach chairs will actually get some use. We’ll park our asses in them and talk and talk. Occasionally we’ll get up to yell at someone to come closer, or to stop flinging sand. And maybe, for old time’s sake, we’ll toast with a glass of White Zin.
