Saturday’s reflection
BY JENNY WILSON
It’s a Saturday night and I’m sitting in my apartment watching some documentary on famous crimes in history, writing this blog and munching on dry cereal. I know, my Saturdays are pretty wild. I’m also busy snapchatting one of my childhood friends. She’s up north with my family on a snowmobiling trip. It’s something that we do every year as a trio of families.
I wasn’t even a year old the first time my parents strapped me into a baby Arctic Cat snowsuit, trucked me up north and plopped me on a snowmobile. I haven’t missed a year since. We always go with the same two families, but really they’ve just become an extension of my own family.
It sort of began like an episode of some teen drama television show. Five of our parents were all friends in high school and after many seasons of new characters and mostly failed love interests they ended up coming back to one another. Essentially our parents ended up like the cast of friends. Except that there was no Joey. Anyways so they all got married to one another and had two kids apiece. Three girls and three boys, each representing a year from 1990-1995. They used to line us up on the steps of whatever respective cottage we had rented that year to take a picture. Blair, the oldest at the top, and Drew, the youngest at the bottom. A picture for each year, and every snowmobile trip. From toddler, to little kid, to awkward stage, to teenagers, to where we are now.
Our parents always warned us that the snowmobile trips wouldn’t last forever, that eventually we were going to grow up and not want to go anymore. I don’t think that day will ever come because we’ll all still want to go, but there will come a time when we won’t all be able to go. That happened a few years ago when my best friend, and the oldest daughter Rachel, was living in Australia and couldn’t come. Now it might happen this year because I’ll probably have to work. We always go up on family day weekend, but being a student and living in the city means that I have to work during the weekends. It sucks that I might have to sacrifice tradition in order to make my future as stable as possible. It’s not something I’m ready to stop doing. I just feel so unprepared not to go. It’s like moving away from home all over again.
How many more traditions will I have to give up because I chose to move to Toronto? Peter Pan was right, growing up sucks sometimes, and realizing that I might have to let childhood traditions become a thing of the past is one of the saddest things ever. At moments like this it makes me question whether it’s all worth it. I know it will be in the long run, but the end game seems so far away. Right now I’m bitter over poor timing and accepting that I have to work in order to keep my professional reputation in tact, and to help my career later on. Becoming an adult means independence and that I have to suck it up, and do what I have to do so that I only miss one year of traditions, and that later on in life I can create new ones, but for now I just have to focus on reminiscing, and the future of where this tradition might end up. Who knows, maybe one day our kids will get to experience the same thing that I am missing so badly now.
