Living Vicariously and Family First

My family went to Cyprus today. I stayed at home and somehow had a fantastic time.

I have spent almost the entire day at home.

Apart from a trip to the physiotherapist and a walk, or perhaps more accurately a wheel, with the dog and mu full time carer, I haven’t really gone anywhere. Yet somehow, I’ve had a day that has left me smiling from start to finish.

The strange thing is that my wife and daughters have done all the travelling.

As I mentioned in my previous article, a moment of spontaneity got the better of me once again. During Shabbat, we were talking about family. My wife’s sister, her husband and their daughters were in Cyprus, just an hour away by plane. My wife and daughters said how lovely it would be to see them.

That was enough for me.

By Saturday night, I was on my laptop booking three return flights for 36 hours later.

This morning, I watched a video of my sister-in-law’s reaction when she spotted her sister by the pool. For a few seconds, she simply couldn’t process what she was seeing.

The look of complete surprise was priceless.

It was worth every penny of the trip.

Family is everything to me, and I simply couldn’t let the opportunity pass for my wife, her sister, their daughters and the rest of the family to spend some unexpected time together.

Whether I was there or not.

From there, I spent the day following along from afar.

Photos. Videos. Messages. Flight tracking. Even updates about what they were eating.

At one point they took me on a virtual tour of the airport duty-free so I could do a little shopping myself. Technology really is a wonderful thing. I managed to get my duty-free without having to set foot in an airport.

That may actually be the future.

What surprised me most, though, was how I felt.

If I’m honest, I thought today might be difficult.

In one sense, this was my family operating without me. And I am increasingly realising that this is not only inevitable, it is healthy. They need to be able to do things without me.

But that doesn’t mean they are leaving me behind.

There is an important difference.

For most of our lives, we’re in the middle of the action. We’re the parent, organiser, problem solver and taxi service. We make things happen.

That was very much me.

I organised things. I drove everyone everywhere. I took people to airports. Quite often, I then got on the plane myself.

PSP has forced me to hand over much of that role far earlier than I ever expected. For someone who readily admits to being a control freak, that has not always been easy.

The changes have been profound, and they have hit all of us hard.

The last trip my wife and daughter took without me was connected to the joint 50th birthday present my wife and I had planned. That was difficult. There was a very real sense of what I could no longer do.

Today felt completely different.

I thought watching my family head off on an adventure without me might sting.

It didn’t.

Not even slightly.

It was an absolute pleasure.

Perhaps because this time I hadn’t simply been excluded by circumstances. I had helped make it happen.

And perhaps because I am beginning to understand something else.

My family being able to live their lives without me doing everything does not mean that I have stopped having a role in those lives.

The role is simply changing.

The job is no longer always to lead every adventure.

Sometimes the job is to help make the adventure possible.

Sometimes it is to watch.

Sometimes it is to enjoy the photos, track the flight, laugh at the videos and feel genuine happiness because the people you love are happy.

For now, I can still be involved in planning some of those adventures and, of course, blogging about them.

One day even that may change.

I hope I will still be able to enjoy them.

Perhaps that’s what living vicariously really means.

Not missing out.

Not settling for second best.

But finding genuine happiness in someone else’s happiness.

I won’t pretend I’ve mastered that overnight. I’m still learning.

But today felt like a surprisingly successful first step.

As I write this, my family are on their way home. They’re sitting at the airport waiting to board, and I’m so excited about seeing them that I can’t sleep.

It feels a little like adrenaline, which is not something I’ve experienced much of lately.

In a few hours they’ll walk back through the front door.

And yes, despite my daughter’s insistence that it’s slightly weird, I’ll almost certainly be tracking their flight all the way home, just as I tracked them this morning.

That’s just who I am.

There is another upside, of course.

As a former business traveller, I avoided the summer nightmare of the airports.

And while they were having their Cyprus adventure, I got to watch James Bond with my son  who was unable to go.

Not a bad day at all.