Great Expectations

When we bought our house in OB, the oldest of our six boys was 18, and the youngest was seven.  We dreamed of lots of quality family time, with the younger boys growing up spending a lot of time on island, and the older boys spending their summers here, working in between all their college semesters.

We were deluded.

There were two very important factors we had not considered.  The boys wanted to be with their friends and not us, and the effect on our schedule of the ever present sports teams.  The sports teams completely eliminated many weekends from our potential island time, or at best left us with a day trip to the island. 

I should explain at this point that I am the world’s worst sports mom.  Baseball bores me literally to tears.  When my boys were playing, I would watch only when they were actually doing something, since as much as I hate sports, I do love my boys.  But if they weren’t playing at that moment, I was watching the clouds, plucking dandelions, walking laps around the field, or even trying to work, dodging the sunlight glare on the laptop.  Basketball was slightly better, as the game at least progressed with a little bit of speed, and my youngest is talented enough at it that he was in the game most of the time.  I just was not born to be one of those moms who could analyze the game and scream at the top of their lungs.  My son has tried to explain to me that his fouling a player on purpose was strategy, but I just don’t get it.  If sports are supposed to give a life lesson, that’s not one I can stand behind!

So when sports season was over, we were more than ready for a full weekend on the island with the boys in tow.  But that enthusiasm was not shared by our boys.  It wasn’t very long before we heard the protests of “the Vineyard, AGAIN?”  At this point, the competition with their friends filled the void left by the sports season.  And with that came the difficult decisions about how old a child had to be before they could stay on their own (I still don’t have the answer to that).

The boys would find any way they could to avoid a trip here – some of the more ironic reasons being “can I go with my friend to the Cape/Maine instead?”  They would occasionally bring friends here, but the Vineyard to them became a place they needed to take a stand against going to, and they usually refused our repeated offers to bring their friends along.  Our island house was fairly lonely for quite a few years.

Now that the youngest is a college sophomore, there are glimmers of hope that at least parts of our innocent dream will come true some day.  A couple of the boys have worked here for the summer, though only one of them actually spent the summer here, while the other shuttled back here only for weekend hours, ensuring he could see his friends during the week.  While we worry about leaving a college sophomore home alone, he really is old enough to actually keep an eye on the house for us, and our island house usually has its lights on.  Two of the older boys have asked if they could come down this summer.  It is becoming a family destination at long last.

I’ll never know if we took the plunge too soon or too late.  Maybe we should have waited until now to plant our part-time roots here.  Maybe if we had bought the house when the boys were younger, they would have been more open to the island (ignoring the reality that it would not have been possible then).  I’ll never know the answer, but as I write this on the deck with a Vineyard sky above me, I’m glad we did.  But if anyone out there is thinking about whether their family would use a vacation house, I would definitely advise them to consult their kids’ sports schedules first!