About sixteen years ago, I met him for the first time. My trainwreck sibling brought home this adorable puppy he had no business adopting because he had not one thing in his life that wasn’t a mess. I was furious at my sibling – he didn’t even take care of himself, how could he drag
I suppose this is a fitting enough post for Mother’s Day. Happy Mother’s Day!
In the aftermath of my venting posts about my brother, The high costs of Parenting Fails, or a Bad Seed Part 1 and Part 2, I feel I did my parents a disservice. In focusing on the mistakes that we made specific to my brother, I seem to have implied that my parents were a) ungrateful, and b) hadn’t done anything right.
Those two bits couldn’t be more wrong.
To compound the wrongness, some, especially after the Consumerist picked up the latter post, said I was asking the wrong question, that I ought to have asked how much I ought to be supporting my parents instead of how much parents should support their children.
To be clear, I wasn’t asking any question in the first place, I was just mad at my brother for being a clown.
But if I were, my simple answer would be this: parents are to love their children completely and equip them with the skills they need to become fully functional, independent adults. Many times, that will mean not just giving them things or money but rather imparting the knowledge of how to obtain those things. And the material support does have an end. The complicated answer is complicated.
Before I can answer the question of how much help this adult child should give her parents, I have to put in context this adult child and her parents as there were a number of assumptions drawn from the limited and rather irrelevant posts above.
Without getting into the details of their lives before us, some of which you can read here about my mom and a brief synopsis here, there was plenty that they did right and much they did to have inspired my desire to support them in return.
This isn’t a blind, enculturated sense of filial duty. Certainly it’s filial but it starts from the knowledge that they chose to sacrifice their established lives to come to a foreign country, learn a new language, and start over to give us a better shot at good lives. They could have stayed but instead chose to trade in their quality of life for an automatic “one up” for us. It was a roll of the dice whether their lives would improve or not since “Land of Opportunity” or not, life in America was equal parts luck (ill or good) and much hard work for the first wave of immigrants; we had relatives already in the States who could testify to the amount of work necessary to make it here. There was no such thing as an easy ride and they still chose to make the leap for us.
Making life even more challenging for themselves, they moved into a tiny predominantly Caucausian suburb instead of the established community enclaves, guaranteeing our better education and assimilation; the freeways creating concrete barriers between us and the vortices of gang violence developing in the LA/Orange County areas where much of our family had already settled.
Upon their arrival, my parents worked every single day, 14 -16 hour days. They never took a day off, never took a holiday and only alternated three vacations between the two of them in thirty years in order to do their duty in taking us home to meet our grandparents. We couldn’t afford those trips, of course but it was incredibly important for us to know them. We occasionally drove into the city on the weekend for a morning to run an errand as a family, but otherwise, my parents worked constantly to make the bills and send us to the best school possible. I never heard a single complaint, so I never knew this wasn’t “normal.”
During my teenage years, the hours actually got longer because they put my brother in private high school having seen one male cousin fall in with the wrong crowd at the public school and come to a tragically early end, planned to pay for our college education and ran two businesses to afford it all. They paid for music lessons and three sports of my choosing before my senior year of high school.
By the time everything started to unravel at the start of my college years, my parents had worn themselves to a thread giving us as much as they could. That didn’t mean they’d given up, though.
Despite Grandma’s illness, living with us, bedridden, and in the past…
Despite Mom and Dad having to tend to her every day even though Mom herself was quite ill requiring surgeries and rounds of medications that weren’t working…
Despite the businesses going south between the embezzlement and the health problems…
Despite the remaining credit card debts from the business and taking us back to the old country to meet our grandparents…
Despite Dad’s inability to get a job due to a combination of ageism and a limited resume that only had “business owner” on it…
Despite Dad’s losing money on his attempts to make money which caused him to spiral into further depression…
Despite Dad’s particularly tough realizations that he’d spent our entire childhoods working only to have his legacy for his family disappear and fear that he might well have lost his family into the bargain…
They still fought for their pride, for my sake, for our survival. Dad kept searching and digging, working odd jobs for old friends who would find something they needed his skills for. Mom was willing to put up with the worst of environments as long as she was helping me with a bit of cash at month’s end. They were driving themselves crazy (and me, into the bargain) for nearly nothing in return but to spare me an hour of work and I couldn’t stand it, so I took everything over. But as long as they could, they tried. We were at emotional cross purposes, all fighting, pulling each other away from our positions to protect one another from pain.
Of course they made mistakes. Desperate people make mistakes. Desperate people care.
Mom’s health deterioration was jagged. Reduced to menial jobs, places where supervisors and coworkers were abusive, she was shorted on wages because her mental and physical health was diminishing in loops and fades; she couldn’t truly function or keep a job. Until I made her stop, she was taking every job she could secure. Even then she tried strongarming my dad into taking her to job interviews when I was away even though she wasn’t capable of working because she was so pained about my working such long hours. She didn’t peacefully accept the loss of her functioning.
My parents are both very grateful to me for my help and communicate that. I’ve no doubt of that just as they know I love them and will always care about them. It may be a frustrating cognitive dissonance to know that and reconcile it with their actions toward my brother that ripple back to me. But at the same time, I understand because just as much as they love me, they love him. He is their child every bit as much as I am.
(More their child, ahem. Nope, not bitter, grumble grumble.)
In all seriousness, I love and respect my parents because for better or worse, they did the best they could with what they had. They always strove to be strong and good people. The choices and mistakes they made out of love for their other child that I disagree with doesn’t change the fact that they also raised and cared for me deeply and deserve to be well-cared for as best I can manage. If the circumstances were different, if they were a bit less unlucky in their health and business manager (the thrice-cursed embezzler!), perhaps things would be different but that doesn’t necessarily follow that different is better.
Perhaps some people might say that having supported them for the past ten years as I have was too much and “enabling” but there’s a hugely important factor: You can’t compare my brother to my parents because they are completely different people.
He might have worked all of three years in his total of 30+ years of life. They’ve worked two lifetimes. He’s done little but been an influence in my life. My parents both gave me life and nurtured me, succored me when I was ill, and would still do anything they could to ease my way now if they were able.
Supporting my brother would be enabling because he could, if he chose, find a way to earn a living and support himself. My mother is no longer medically able to care for herself or be independent and my dad has to care for her around the clock. Supporting them is a matter of their survival as the clock on their finding and holding jobs has long run out.
These past years have been challenging and I know it will take quite a lot more planning and resources to provide for them in their later years. But it’s not really a question for me whether or not I’ll do it.
How I’ll manage it has been a question posed a time or two (thousand).
Getting them safely into a protected home environment where idio-sib can’t moosh in with them is only the first in many steps we’ll have to take to get there since living together’s not really an option.
Getting back to the question: how much should I (we) support them? Well, no amount of money in the bank is worth the loss of my parents from my life, forgotten and uncared for. And PiC, bless his heart and soul, is on board even though I’ve only newly introduced him to Ship Support the Parents as it’s been such a private journey for so long.
Their basic needs will always be provided. They won’t be living in luxury. I can’t afford that unless y’all decide I’m a genius blogger, share this with millions of your friends and I become the next dooce.com. Hardy-har. But they will live in safety. They will always have enough to eat. They should always have some form of safe transport and access to medical care. The cost, even now, is stiff. Each time a situation or a crisis arises, I have to evaluate the situation to see what can be afforded or what the right solution might be given the circumstances and the resources remaining for the year. I hate that I can’t simply wave a wand or a card and throw money at the problems, sometimes.
They try to help in their own way, though I’d not asked for these things. They don’t go anywhere they don’t have to, unless it’s very local so as not to use gas, and they don’t go out to eat, ever. I think they’re doing their very best to show in their daily lives that they respect how hard I work to provide.
The cost in the future will be even higher so as ever, Planning. Earning. Saving. Investing. It all keeps the reality of needing a strong financial edifice at the forefront of my mind.
In the end, everyone has to answer this question for themselves in the context of their own lives and their own finances and their own relationships with whomever they may be called upon to support.
If they hadn’t raised me with love and respect, if they hadn’t treated me with so much care, humor and just plain sanity during my formative years so that for those brief moments before everything went to mush we had a great relationship, this would likely be a very different story. And I know for many of you, or for many of the first time readers who came to the other posts, it is a different story. That’s ok. It makes sense. This is what makes sense for us.
“I know you’re not much of a romantic but …” as a friend outlines a proposal for our travel plans. “I think this room/hotel is a bit romantic for friends just sharing rooms …” (same friend)
At first I’d be inclined to agree that romance isn’t precisely my forte since planning this trip to Thailand with alone time factored in didn’t occur to me. Then I kept looking around the hotel room in question and couldn’t figure out the least romantic thing about it. Clean lines, 1940s-era modernist, more amenities than I’d seen in a week, kind of cute with the vase and a flower on a twig thing… but romantic? I just didn’t see it.
Perhaps the reality is simply that my (our) romance radar just isn’t tuned by the same fork as the general public’s. PiC agreed that he didn’t see anything inherently romantic about the rooms we’d booked for ourselves and our friends.
What IS romance? I’m not weakened in the knees by sparkles and flowers, grand gestures and sweeping statements. They’re pretty to look at, and make me smile, but they’re window dressing. What really defines romance?
My romance is over six years of being awakened by “Good morning, I love you” nearly every day, long distance notwithstanding. My romance is my partner who picks up the heavy burdens when I really need the help but don’t want to say so. My romance is my partner who trusts my capability to get things done even after I’ve shown weakness. My romance is a man who lets me change his channels even if he’s watching something and cooks for me when I’m tired. My romance is traveling with PiC on a nearly unplanned adventure with my friends he’s spent little to no time with before and spending even the frustrating moments of it laughing together.
My romance on this trip is asking PiC where the soap is, having him hand me water instead and start using the soap himself, then both start laughing so hard at the look on my face until we cried.
To continue my musings about the Monday incident, I was lucky enough that F wasn’t working on Monday so he, as one of my few IRL friends privy to the knowledge of my family, could talk through some of the boiling rage with me.
We both realized the two good things related to this incident.
First, thank all the things that I’m no longer living at home. I was so angry that I was literally dizzy, continuing to live in that just isn’t good.
Second, things like this used to happen regularly. They probably still are, but I’m not on every case. The last shenanigan I know about was when he brought home a stray puppy he couldn’t care for. Like a five year old, he let it romp all over the house, found out that it had parvo virus when it vomited & had diarrhea all over, shedding virus everywhere. His own puppy wasn’t even vaccinated. [See, irresponsible.] And he’d exposed my very old dog to it as well. While vaccinated, very old dogs can still have compromised immune systems. [See again, irresponsible.] He cried like a baby instead of dealing with it. Then ran to me to fix it. Of course.
While these specific things might not happen if I were home, I can’t be there all the time. The fact is, the occurrences that I still deal with are limited to those that wouldn’t happen if I were there, I haven’t been dealing with those Acts of Stupid that would happen no matter what. Selfishly, that’s much healthier for me.
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I keep thinking about the original sacrifices my parents made, and where they made culturally-influenced choices. Somewhere along the way, they stopped making what I understood to be the truly loving choice, the hard or harsh-seeming choice despite the guilt and pain. This wasn’t something they shied away from when we were children, so I have to wonder, what changed?
From having to deal with him myself, I can only say that I think there were definitely times when my parents’ style in adulthood was and still is counterproductive to the situation. Giving him a helping hand is not helping him. It’s just enabling now.
For example, mostly from my dad, “We wouldn’t ever ask a child:
— to pay rent,
— to move out,
— to find another way to get to work/school/where they needed to go if they were in need.”
In essence, if they haven’t learned how to function independently or coping skills, they’ll never have to as long as we live.
That’s great from a purely selfish point of view: If I ever needed a hand, my dad would always be there for me. Fantastic. Of course, we all know that even though the offer is there, the most I’ll do is ask for home-cooked food. And I’ll pay for all the ingredients. Or a lift. He’ll get me from the airport.
But in the long run, that is also totally short-sighted. How up a creek would they be right now, or even five years ago, if I hadn’t figured it out? And of course it’s not just for the sake of reciprocity but good gravy, for the right (wrong) person, it’s a crippling approach!
From early on it was clear the sibling was a born spender, scammer and manipulator. At the age of 4, he would memorize the stories he heard in class to recite back to my mom as she was falling asleep listening when it was his time to practice reading so he didn’t have to actually read. He was essentially illiterate through third grade because he was such a good faker and she was exhausted going school and raising two kids. Until she figured it out and gave him what-for, and intensive lessons, he wasn’t going to learn how to read!
Growing up, his “entrepreneurship” was all about making a quick buck and he quickly became notorious for his involvement in MLM schemes because of the number of people he convinced to waste their money. Now he’s many times lazier. He expects praise for basic functions like managing to wake up on time in the morning without someone else waking him up. He’s 30-something!
In the entire time that my idiot sibling has lived under our roof – he has never been required to ante up for his fair share of rent, utilities, or any living expenses, he has never been told to move out and be an independent adult who can earn his own living and support himself as a result of not contributing. Basically, he has never been told he needed to grow the eff up according to any societal norms by my parents.
Certainly, neither have I. But is fairness really the measure by which we ought to be parenting?
Until I barred the door after he made the mistake of moving out, mentally inflating his ability to earn an independent living and screwed it up badly running up his debt on crap and going out with his friends, until he was evicted and had nowhere else to go; until then, there were no consequences for him for not growing up.
For us, though, the consequences of being soft, of being too kind, of being too somethingwill be lifelong.
The consequences we’ll have to live with, for our sins:
Action:
Sending him to private school, nearly $10K per year.
Consequence:
They didn’t even try to fund retirement. He graduated but went on to do absolutely nothing with that expensive high school degree.
Action:
Funding his repeated attempts to attend college and after flunking out, community college.
Consequence:
Again, every penny on him. And as long as it was on someone else’s dime, it didn’t matter if he didn’t make it this time.
Action:
Not holding him financially accountable for running up household bills.
Consequence:
He learned to be wasteful and disrespectful of the resources in the household, and doesn’t contribute. He even had the nerve, when my mom was down to only $50 for her medical expenses, to take that money for himself.
Action:
Participating in his job search and subsequent jobbing as much or more than he does.
Consequence:
He just doesn’t appear to care if he has a job or not.
Action:
Letting him come back home after he’d left of his own accord.
Consequence:
Until I can move my parents out into a smaller home, I may well not be able to kick him out again. This is a reality I’m not happy with. I have no clue where he will go when we kick him out. That’s not my problem anymore. It can’t be. Fending for him well into his 30s should never have been the game plan because as long as we’re taking care of him, he is not taking care of himself. That’s just the way he operates and I can’t and won’t take away from my future family for his sake any longer.
Action:
My parents were always trying to save him at every juncture, no matter the cost.
Consequence:
I was the unintended sacrifice, and our relationship has suffered greatly because of it. I find it hard to relate to my parents as I once did, and I definitely don’t have a relationship with my brother anymore. But losing my brother isn’t really my parents’ fault.
*********************
This is on my mind more and more as I approach a major life change myself, as I plan my impending marriage, the formation of my own family and even the possibility of my own children. The challenges of parenting are not lost on me.
Was it that one size fits all, culturally-based parenting was a bad idea? Or was something that couldn’t have been helped? This stuff is insanely hard. I loved my brother so much that I nearly had an ulcer standing up to him. I can’t imagine what hells my mother went through. And is still going through. I ask myself every day if I would be strong enough to do what it takes to parent my own children? Especially with some chance that my children may inherit some genetic cocktail that produced him?
With him as an example, not being sure if strength, courage, tenacity and even ingenuity would have been enough to bring him into adulthood as a functioning and contributing member of society, I don’t know the answer to that question.
But in the aftermath of that Monday, I asked PiC if he could still love me if I put our child out on the street. If that’s what it took to get through to him or her.
And he said, If you could do it, of course.
It’s a question, I suppose, one must ask having been there and done that, but it should never get to that point, I should hope and pray. It shouldn’t have to get that bad. If we’d been doing our job before that, if we’d been parenting, and present, we shouldn’t, right?
A few Mondays ago, I wrassled a bear. Mid-morning, I had a bit of a meltdown because my idiot sibling had:
1. only been employed 2 weeks since the last job which was countless months ago, before his car broke down and he ran to my dad for help. Right. He has no use for any of us, he can’t be bothered to lift a finger to pick up after himself or his dog or maintain basic cleanliness for the massive favor of letting him have a roof over his head for the nothing in return he’s been paying these several years, but the second he is inconvenienced, he runs to us expecting us to solve it. Typical.
2. my dad makes a massively bad call. Because he can’t drive my idiot sibling to work himself – as if it was his problem in the first place – decides the only other option is to give him the car keys. MY car keys. Not just my baby car that I slaved for three years to pay off early but the only car they have for transportation so don’t you think it would be wise not to give it to your historically-proven completely irresponsible son to: potentially wreck, lose, lend to his friends to go joy-riding in, never bring back whole?? [See, what a PITA it is to replace a perfectly good used car. See also, hard to find a good equivalent.]
3. Idiot sibling went on to prove that past history is indeed the best indicator of future performance: gets nabbed by a random checkpoint for an expired license and carrying his martial arts gear in the car – which should never have been there in the first place if he was going to work and straight back home – got the car impounded and himself tossed in the clink for carrying “weapons.” It’s a grey area, but the city’s broke so before, when they would have said, carry it in the trunk (if he hadn’t been, I don’t know), off he goes.
4. I was called Monday morning and asked to drop everything to get a letter notarized authorizing my dad to pick up the car because idiot sibling’s license is expired so he can’t pick it up. A busyace Monday, and I’m supposed to drop everything to fix it because now, now we’re worried about having to pick up Mom’s medicine and not having a car to do it in. We didn’t think of that before lending idiot sib the car, of course.
[Insert **headsplosion**]
Following the clear-up, in one of three times in nearly 30 years, I had a nearly shouty conversation with my dad where I told him that this was totally unacceptable both on his and my idiot sibling’s parts. The choice he made was wrong and in direct contradiction to his promise to me never to let my idiot sibling drive my car specifically because he cannot be trusted.
He continues to put us in untenable situations – and I will not be able to continue to bail them out for self-created poor problems. This has happened before, remember. This saddens me. I’ve never been mean to my poppa. Saying that stuff felt Mean. But it’s true.
*************************
Professionally, I simply cannot keep dropping everything for “family emergencies” when they are not justifiably emergencies. A history of this will damage my credibility. Considering how much I’m killing myself to support them, and I’m putting almost everything I have towards them, they should have a vested interest in stopping the madness.
Emotionally, I find myself wondering who they are now, and why I have no family anymore. I had to cancel my trip home the following weekend. I’m still upset with them and feel adrift. Yes, I feel a strong sense of duty, but I don’t feel any sense of love, not from them anymore, I just feel like I’m a resource to be used. F said I’m just an absentee parent to them now and I think he may be right. For all that they profess to love me, they only reach out to me as a resource when something has gone wrong. If I come home, I’m welcomed but we don’t have a connected relationship anymore.
Realistically, I disagree with the way the situation is handled. Every single chance he has at learning to work and starts to flub it, my parents panic and try to salvage the opportunity. That does not help him grow.
Yes, they are his parents, so yes, I understand they are afraid for his future. But consider this: I have an equally, if not more, vested interest in his growth than they do – in theory, I should be living a far greater proportion of my life with him than they will. And I too agonized with them over the future of my big brother as he made stupid choice after stupid, selfish, @$$holey choice.
The first thing he did in his first year of college was flunk out. The first thing he did when I graduated high school and started college, other than sleep through my graduation, when my parents were flat broke and in debt, was run up a $900 phone bill. It was all downhill from there.
When they handed the reins to me in “parenting” and specifically policing him seven years ago because they couldn’t make him listen anymore, when they asked me to take on the responsibility of dealing with him, I cried acidic, bitter tears. I had heartburn and couldn’t sleep for weeks. Even then I still desperately wanted my brother back but I knew, I knew without a doubt that he was gone. The person I was dealing with was only a few concessions away from using me the moment I let my guard down. And then ultimately, I made the decision that he couldn’t come home and for a few months, he was on his own. When he was allowed back in, for the sake of my mother’s sanity, he knew I was serious, and toed the line.
For about a minute, it seemed.
As the sort that would take even when you hadn’t given an inch, he actually tried a bit in the beginning which was surprising. Paid up once a month for a while, a couple hundred dollars, on occasion, nothing that covered anything of his debt that he owed me, but it looked like a good faith effort. Then it soured again. I became a dunning agent and groundskeeper in addition to breadwinner, advocate, legal and IT. He did nothing but skate in and out, eating and sleeping at will.
Getting him home was not the answer for Mom’s mental health either. She continued to deteriorate, she needed attention and affection from him, so she made me the enemy. And she started undermining me, telling him when to break my rules because I wasn’t home, telling him it was ok to do whatever he wanted as long as my back was turned.
That was a blast.
I was not long out of college when this began in earnest. I was working a new job with a two hour commute, working 12 and 14 hour days and resentful as all get out over him. I used to have a big brother. For a long time, I’ve only had an idiot sibling.
Between our travel plans and the random breaches of security that the HOA has notified us of (garage break-ins, scammers getting access to the building), we’ve been considering ways to shore up the security of our home.
For sliding doors or windows, the standard rod dowels to prevent opening works well so that’s a cheap and easy solution.
For the main door, we’d noticed a while ago that several neighbors had had an extra lock installed on their doors and had been discussing getting the same done. While we’re generally DIYers when it comes to home repairs and renos, this one was a bit beyond us as it requires drilling through the door itself and I’m not prepared to invest in those tools just now.
PiC’s gotten one quote around $380: $150 for the lock assembly (the additional lock), $50 to replace the existing handle, $95 for labor, $65 service call and tax. This locksmith is recommending that we add a reinforcement plate which is part of the lock assembly.
He’s still waiting on the other quote from his second choice but I’m still reeling from the first quote. It’s been a long time since dealing with door drama and I’m not certain if this is just typical Bay Area COL or if these locksmiths are overly pricey.
A perhaps silent resolution on the subject of clothing has been breached.
After being introduced to the world of petite bloggers, I’ve continued to follow them fairly regularly, Alterations Needed, Jean at Extra Petite, to admire their forays into fashion, not to copy as I’d not quite be able to pull off for either PF or charismatic fortitude, but to learn from their self-editing and creativity.
As they’ve pointed out at time or two to a fairly clueless, probably troll, commenter, the offerings available to the petite community are limited and so what they share with each other is then taken across the petite blogosphere to become part of each woman’s own style. It’s really fascinating how one piece of clothing can be worn so uniquely and well when someone has a sense of how to style oneself.
*looks at self*
This is not the case. *waves hand* Hereabouts.
Since entering this community, though I hadn’t much to share of my own, I had resolved to learn what I could and the first lesson was to stop buying clothes that almost fit or was close enough in regular sizes. I’ve been really good about that.
The thing I’ve been total crap at is putting pieces of clothing together that don’t just say: BLAH. This partly stems from lack of creativity and from buying clothes that look fine by themselves but having no vision of how to wear them in outfits.
It’s taken me all year to stop just wearing a standard uniform of: button down shirt, trousers, plus a sweater and flats. I’ve been practicing really really hard this past month to try and create outfits: combining different layers of shirts and blazers (I only own two with odd length sleeves). For about two weeks, I did do a decent job with that.
But I’ve gone and done set myself up for failure again.
My shoes and I aren’t so fashion-forward. And the pants aren’t actually long enough to do THAT.
I needed a pair of more casual pants for the weekend that weren’t jeans.
When J.Crew had their chinos on sale, knowing that I wanted something practical, I ordered some to try on for size. They’re practical, durable material. They’re like workman pants. I can do home reno projects in them, I bet.
But they’re straight, almost tapered leg, hit me just above the ankle so I can only wear them with maybe .. flats? Certainly not my sneakers which are few inches off the ground. These’d look like high waters. And they gap in the back a few inches (hello memories of regular sizing!)
Hm. I really want to keep them but I think this sounds like it should be returned, doesn’t it?
I really do need a shopping buddy for these less fun clothing items!
Every trip I take, I agonize over the ideal travel wallet scenario. Unless it’s within the tri-state area, my regular wallet doesn’t come with me, but I’ve yet to find the go-to alternate player.
My previous choices have been: a small two-sided folding cloth wallet, a slim zippered make-up bag, a small coin purse.
The cloth wallet can’t hold change or a passport; the make-up bag has held money, change, and some other useful items so it just becomes a clunker of a thing but doesn’t hold my passport; and the coin purse can’t hold enough of anything but cash and coins.
I’d like the wallet to have the capacity to hold cash, cards, change, possibly a passport if necessary (in some countries I won’t want to have it in there).
I’ll adopt a two-part tactic for our upcoming trip which will be a bit more in-the-rough than my average business trip. I have a wallet that wouldn’t bother me to lose so I’ll use that to keep small amounts of daily spending cash; then keep some back-up cash….somewhere……
Of course, since I always carry a cross-body bag in the less natural parts (non-beach areas), it’s not as much of a concern as it is for the menfolk. Not really sure what the protocol is for beach days and how to properly lock up our stuff in hotel rooms as we’re not going to be staying in any high end places. I don’t feel comfortable leaving anything of value in our rooms but I don’t want to be lugging all our valuables like a netbook or camera with us to the beach either.
What’d ye ken? Have you any thoughts, suggestions or go-tos?
