Family Vacations (and why I hate them)

When I was a kid we drove to Florida to visit my step father's sisters. My mother packed us in with a cooler full of cheese and promptly drugged us with Dramamine so she could have a honeymoon. I had spent that school year doing gymnastics. After days of Dramamine my legs cramped. I was in the back of the Ford woody station wagon with the red interior, crying from the pain. My mother screamed at me. How dare you cry, I am driving 90 miles an hour! When we arrived I was fed Metamucil every day. No wonder you hate vacations, my husband said.

When I was six years old I had my appendix out at Rye Hospital during summer vacation. It was a doctor's suggestion because I had too many stomach aches. After a week in the hospital I was brought back to Pengilly Day Camp in Rye NY and was asked if I was ready to take the swim test. My mother said Yes! I had to swim across the pool into the deep end, the same week of surgery. All the kids cheered. I was in agony afterwards. It was too soon after surgery. I was crying and my mother refused to talk to me. She walked away while I was clinging to the 10 foot chain link fence surrounding the pool.

My mother always referred to the doctors by their first name: her doctor Gerry, and her psychiatrist Murray, and my pediatrician Eugene, who she always called Gene.

Murray once said to me We choose our parents. So I guess this is all my fault. Why the hell would I ever chose these people? I thought.

Her doctor Gerry looked like Leonard Cohen in a white jacket. He became my doctor once I entered high school. He once laughed at my feet.

There was a boy to see you, I said to my mother when I was in the hospital over Christmas. I was three and a half. Or maybe that was when I had my tonsils out on New Years Eve. I was five. I was staying in the adult GYN ward in New York City. My doctor looked to me like a boy. 

None of this makes any sense to me now but decades later when my biological father was in a New York hospital I went to see him. He had tried to break a stick, injured his foot, fell, and broke his leg. When I saw the dark green walls of the New York City hospital I had such profound deja vu. I nearly fainted.

After he was released he showed up at our house in a cast and with crutches. He hadn't been to our house in years. My sister said he was faking. He just wants sympathy, she said.