I've spent three separate weeks with various family members in the past five months, and I'm about familied out. I was with my mom in January when she was having a lumpectomy (all is well on that front); then D. and I visited her mom in what was quite a good visit; and I just got back last night from a trip to the Land of My Youth, in which I divided my time evenly between my mom and dad.
That split-time visit is unusual for me; usually I stay with my mom and just have lunch with my dad and his wife, in part because my dad spends most of his time at their river house, about four hours away from my mom's house. (The river house is actually their primary residence; his wife is just reluctant to sell the townhouse he moved into when I was in 9th grade, and the mortgage is long ago paid off.) But I'm on sabbatical this spring, which meant I had no excuse not to go when he urged me to pay a visit to the river house. I'd been on that property only once before, when they hadn't even started building the house (which took, seriously, like 20 years to build, although it's a modest two-story house).
I was anxious about the visit because I haven't spent that much time in one stretch with my dad in years ... but it turned out that it was a delightful visit! At my suggestion, he also invited my brother and his family down, so we did it over Memorial Day weekend so that we could all have time to hang out even though my brother works on Saturdays. On Sunday night, my dad and his wife and my brother stayed up talking until 2 a.m. The next night, after my brother and his family left, I stayed up with them until 1:30 a.m. talking! I feel bad saying this, but I had kind of forgotten what an interesting and fun guy my dad is.
So that was all lovely, but every time I go away, it takes me a few days to settle back into work. In fact, I never did really settle back into work after we visited D's mom, because I'd been back only a few days when I got the worst stomach virus I've had in years.
Uh oh -- it occurs to me only now that I also got terribly sick, with the flu, when I came back from the January visit with my mom. Ugh -- no sickness allowed after this latest family visit!
I had some miscellaneous things to do today, so didn't really recover from the hours of driving I did this week, so that's on tap for tomorrow. And then I'm giving myself the weekend to do some for-work-but-fun reading, and then, on Monday, the drafting begins! I have pages and pages of notes and a barely started draft of an article that I'm committed to finishing in June.