vacation | (Un)Diagnosed and still okay

Dear Tourist,

Thank you for visiting our little piece of sand.

You get a lot of flack coming here. You don’t know how to drive in the Rotary. You do not realize you are driving the wrong way up Main Street until you are faced with a Duck Boat ready to crush your Prius. You order your Sundae with sprinkles. We have to teach you how to pronounce Quahog and how properly eat a lobstah. Cape drivers honk at you when you stop to take in the view of the marsh.

You are blamed when we cannot even think of leaving the Cape on a Sunday or try to get back on a Friday. You are the reason we cannot go to Market Basket on our day off. There are some of you think Route 6a and the Service Road are a practice track for the Monte Carlo, barely missing joggers or bikers practicing for the PanMass Challenge.

Continue reading →

Every June I feel guilty for not attending the end of year activities at Bridget’s preschool. The truth has always been that since she wasn’t “graduating” to kindergarten I felt why go through the motions? Why go through the tears, anxiety and feelings of despair as I watched children that were her friends move on without her.

Every year she arrives home with her diploma and I put it with the previous years in my hope chest. Last year was especially difficult for me. It was the first year that Bridget should have been graduating to kindergarten. Per my usual MO I skipped the ceremony. In my mind, it hadn’t happened yet. She wasn’t graduating and I wasn’t going to pretend. I promised myself that next year, this year, I would attend the ceremony. I would take pictures and I would pretend I was like every other mom ecstatic that my child was going to be (finally) moving up to kindergarten.

Instead I skipped the ceremony. But I swear it wasn’t my fault! Continue reading →