What will our kids remember?
The good, the bad, and whether Mom had fun
Dear Reader,
We’re a Ski Family™️.
If this conjures up aprés ski images of hot toddies, fur coats, and cozying up to an oversized fireplace in a moody hotel lobby, I’m flattered.
We’re not that kind of Ski Family (and neither is almost anyone else).
We may not be part of the fashionable ski set, but we love the sport.
We pack Hawaiian Roll sandwiches to eat on the lift, purchase military season passes for less than the cost of one day’s ticket, and we taught our kids to ski ourselves rather than putting them in lessons. We buy used gear at ski swaps. My husband and I wore the same jackets for over 15 years.
One thing is clear to me now: skiing is rarely something people come to on their own as adults. It’s hard to learn, expensive, and usually inconvenient. We’re skiers today because my husband and I came from Ski Families.
As a parent now, I know what it took for ours to get us on the mountain. The expense, the gear, the cold, the driving, the hike through the parking lot in clunky boots, the traversing over flats before the kids have poles… it’s not for the faint of heart.
But it was always fun.
In fact, my husband and I both remember those ski days with such fondness that when we had our own kids, we wanted to make it a part of their stories, too.
We spent the last week skiing with our kids and our best friends, and it made me think about how our family’s identity shapes us as adults, and what exactly causes something to stick.
It amazes me how often our family of origin dictates how we “do” things.
Like, how my husband cleans all of our recycling before he separates it (so do his parents), or how I’m big on balloons at birthdays (so is my mom).
A lot of my friends have the same number of children as their parents. My sisters and I haven’t lived near each other in decades, but somehow we take similar approaches to how we entertain, how we dress, how we parent.
Those environmental genetics certainly pack a punch. You grow up in a home that values certain things, and that, subconsciously, shapes much of what you value today.
My family was a social, multicultural, outdoorsy bunch: a Camping Family, a Ski Family, eventually an RV Family, a Swimming Family, a Public School Family, and a Roadtrip Family. We were a Christmas-and-Birthdays-are-a-Big-Deal Family. We fished. We played games. We traveled but never by plane.
I liked the predictability and repetition of the things we did. Even as life got more complicated, some of those things stayed the same.
When my parents got a motorhome, we RV’d every month with the same group of people. We had lots of time on the weekends with aunts and uncles, grandparents and cousins. Year after year, we spent a week at church summer camp and weekends at a local lake with friends.
Our Christmases growing up blend together: same decorations, same tinsel meticulously laid on the tree by Dad’s steady hand, same crystal goblets on the dining room table, same people in the chairs around it. The traditions reassured me, providing a cyclical arc to each year. I looked forward to it.
When I got married, I remember feeling a little out of sorts. This was different from how I grew up.
We were now a Military Family, a family without ties to a single home or town, a family without traditions, without extended relatives nearby. I tried to hang onto as many of those identities as I could, but despite my best efforts, most of them dissolved.
For years, I felt badly that I couldn’t recreate some of the magic my mom created in our childhood. In truth, my life didn’t look the same as hers, my children’s lives didn’t look like mine.
I would have to forge new pathways, as many of us do.
To be honest, it’s taken a long time to reconcile the “sameness” of how I grew up with the dynamic nature of life as a military family: the moves, the separations, the living-far-from-grandparents. It’s so different from what I expected life to look like.
But I missed something in the calculus: I thought what formed a family identity were the things we did.
Understandably, then, I felt some level of disappointment at not being able to maintain the same kinds of traditions I had growing up.
Over the years, I’ve come to learn that what we do as a family doesn’t matter nearly as much as the feeling we create while we’re doing it.
I didn’t grow up decorating sugar cookies, but my husband did, and it’s something that, after twenty years of marriage, we’ve carried on to this day. I like sugar cookies just fine, but the act of baking together, rolling out the dough, making a mess, and then - sure - eating the cookies reminds me of easy, uncomplicated holidays with my husband’s family.
When we decorate these cookies, there isn’t anything else to fuss about, nowhere else to be. It forces you to be present, to collaborate, to share, to help each other.
That’s a vibe worth recreating.
Skiing is like that for us.
It’s not about a particular mountain (my kids have never skied where I did), or it looking the same every year (we’ve had years we skied and years we didn’t).
No, it’s about the feeling of being on the mountain together - and to be honest, that’s almost identical to what it felt like growing up.
This year, we stayed in maybe the most convenient accommodations we’ve ever been able to afford. For the first time we didn’t have to drive to the slopes ourselves, park, and hike through the village to the lifts. We could call a shuttle in the morning for a lift-side drop-off and then ski home in the afternoon.
Without question, a luxury.
But the trip didn’t feel so different from the weekends we spent in our parents’ RV, parked in the lot at the base of Snow Summit.
It didn’t feel so different from the year we crammed three families into a friend’s condo in Truckee. We couldn’t open both the oven and the fridge at the same time, and it was a hike to the mountain. But truly, it didn’t matter.
We had as much fun then as we did this year, as much fun this year as we did going skiing with Mom and Dad.
Maybe our families’ legacies aren’t so much about the things we do, but the values those things reveal and the atmosphere they generate.
As different as our life is now from the way we grew up, I see so many similarities to the priorities of our parents.
We take care of our things, love travel, and are faithful stewards of our finances, like my husband’s parents.
We laugh and cackle with friends, host often, and have an open door policy like my parents.
We go big at the holidays, attend church, serve in our communities, and prioritize time together, like both of our families.
We don’t live in the same state, have the same jobs, or spend our days in the same ways. But the good feelings of growing up in our homes, the priorities and values of our parents, really stuck like glue.
Three reminders emerge:
First, what we do as a family only matters to the extent that we enjoy it and spend our time in ways that align with our values.
Second, it doesn’t matter what other families are doing. They have their own priorities, their own sets of values, their own families of origin. Those may or may not align with ours, and that’s okay.
And third, we can’t do it all. We can’t maintain every tradition from our family of origin. We can’t accept every intriguing invitation. And we can’t possibly take every summer trip that comes across our algorithm. We have to pick and choose what works for us. That’s not limiting, it’s liberating.
Surely, our kids will remember that we taught them to ski.
They’ll remember some of these trips, or bits and pieces of them, anyway. They’ll remember particular meals or flights, road trips or games we played.
Mostly, they’ll remember how it felt to step on the snow for the first time in a year. They’ll remember riding the lift next to dad, who always packed a sandwich for them. They’ll remember Mr. Jeff had chocolates in his pockets. And they’ll remember Mom, who skied behind them so she could pick up a stray pole or help up a weary skier who’d taken a tumble.
They’ll remember evenings in the the condo, pajamas at 6:00 pm, cozy dinners and raucous game nights.
They’ll remember how it felt when Mom and Dad were having fun, too. And maybe that’s the biggest legacy we can leave them.
Maybe they’ll teach their own kids to ski, maybe they won’t. But I’d be willing to bet that the warmth and joy they feel on these trips will stick. The closeness and intimacy of sharing a condo with friends, a week-long slumber party, three meals a day together is something they’ll want to recreate.
What exactly that looks like will be up to them.
How it feels will be largely influenced by us.