When Vacation Asks Existential Questions
Belonging, Chipotle, vacation traditions, & uneasy territory.
Last week, my family took our annual trip to the low country in Beaufort, part of the sea islands of South Carolina. This is always a special trip. Having grown up in the Marine Corps, Beaufort is the closest place I have to a hometown. My parents were stationed at the air station there for 7 years (though we did live in 5 different houses in that time). That was the longest I lived anywhere until now.
I brought my little family to Beaufort for the first time in 2014. It was in a season I desperately needed not only an escape (from yet another miscarriage), but a sense of hope and wonder. We go back every year (barring hurricanes).
As we ended our vacation last week, I felt this frustration—nearing rage at times—and sadness that we were shoving in as much as we could in the last two days. Ice cream store. ✅ Bookstores. ✅ Old forts. ✅ Chocolate shop. ✅ Bakery. ✅
The whole trip there felt this haze, as if there was a layer of film over every sight and experience—the marsh wasn’t as vibrant green, why so much construction?, was there always this much traffic?
Where was that magical feeling that held me captive in the low country?
I didn’t feel it. My kids were more interested in books and devices. The pool over the beach. I only managed to convince them to take one walk on the beach. Even the sandbars at low tide only lured one kid out. Gone are the whole beach days and now we only last 2-3 hours.
There’s a part that feels like shoving every memory, every tradition—making sure we don’t miss any—is so rushed I can’t hold them. I can’t be present long enough to savor the changes in my children or accept the changes in the one place that felt like it would never change.
As I began to process all these raging emotions, I came to two realizations:
As much as I feel I belong to Beaufort, it doesn’t claim to me.
What I was really asking was, “Why can’t things just stay the same?”
In Native culture, there is this idea of belonging through who claims you. When I go to Robeson County in North Carolina, back to my dad and grandparent's homeland, if someone asks who I belong to (technically they’ll ask “who’s ya people?”) I’ll say I’m Maggie and Jimmy’s granddaughter (or Aunt Gerald’s great niece or So-and-So’s 2nd cousin). And they’ll respond, “Oh yeah, I know them…that means we’re…” (and they’ll name our common family relation or connection via geography/community.
In Beaufort, there’s no one to claim me. Even though I feel like I belong to this place, that it was formative in my childhood memories, one of the few places that holds a tether on me, it doesn’t claim me. Sure, if there was an emergency I have a few Marine Corps or old church people I could contact, but even if I feel it’s a bit of home…it’s not.
I’m not a resident, not a local, not here for every passing change and new Chipotle (seriously, a town of 13,000 has a Chipotle!), or festival.
Why does change feel like it happens all at once? My kids are growing. Fast. My oldest starts high school in the fall and in four short years will be gone. The exhausted days of saying “Eighteen more years of this???” are coming to a close and I’m grasping.
I am walking the in-between.
And I don’t always know how to do it.
The growth of the town and shoving in of all our traditions mirrored the fact that my children are growing up…there is only so much time left, only so many more years where we can take this trip together all six of us, only so much time to teach them what they need to know, to give them the love and resilience they need before we send them on their way into the big, wide world.
This is a new land, a new place between worlds.
And it is uneasy territory.
Big hugs.❤️ Finding a place we love has changed can be so painful, especially when we realize life itself is changing fast.