In March of 1977, I was held in confinement in a wood panelled station wagon. With my eight siblings and a full set of orange leatherette luggage strapped to the roof, our family left the -20c Canadian windchill in search of West Palm Beach Vitamin D.
Back then, snow drifts were the size of sedans and global warming was not even a spark in our collective parent’s eye. Our yearly pilgrimage south of the border was deemed “essential travel”, even back then.
The trip typically took 48 hours which included a one-night stay at Howard Johnson’s and eleven bowls of New England Clam Chowder. But on this particular trip, my Dad recruited my newly licensed brother Kelly to split the driving and plow straight through.
As we barrelled down I-95, my older siblings were scattered in the back and the young ones were in the way way back. My Mother, who never learned to drive, likely by design, sat in the middle up front. The back of her perfectly coiffed bleached blonde hair fully visible to all. Middle seats had no headrests.
This would be my final road trip memory of my Mother.
Our pilgrimage didn''t include seatbelts but it did include Stucky’s pegboard games and fried chicken baskets from Davis Brother’s Cafeteria. After which, the air would fill with a cacophony of bodily sounds and scents. My Mother, who could give a master class in tuning out, buried herself in a well-worn copy of Erma Bombeck’s “The family that plays together gets on each other’s nerves”. The irony was not lost on any of us.
As the youngest of nine, my role was comic relief. My limited repertoire consisted of mimicking teachers, rewriting song lyrics and conjuring up character voices. Her paperback''s title lent itself to the development of an old British butler who repeated the phrase “The family that plaaaaays together gets on each other’s neeeerrrrrves” ad nauseum throughout Ohio, Kentucky and most of Georgia. To my defence ADHD was under diagnosed in girls back then.
Not long after that trip, my Mother developed a “chronic tailbone affliction” which prevented her from ever travelling for long periods in a car with her family again. Her travel was restricted to solo plane rides and meeting us at our destination.
Almost fifty years later, the learnings of that road trip still hold true. Find the humour in utter chaos. When things stink, tune out with a good book and be sure to blow-dry the back of your head.
My Mother knew prioritizing her sanity was not selfish, it was smart. And her choice to commit to a lifelong phoney tailbone affliction, well I’d say that was pure genius. | 
