The First Vacation

We lost in the playoffs the week before.

Fifteen years of coaching, and every season ends the same way for everyone except one team. You ride the bus home in the dark and you tell yourself you'll get back here next year. That night, watching my kids clean out their lockers, I wasn't sure I had a next year in me.

I drove home, sat with Cassie, and we looked at the calendar. The trip to Colorado with her whole family was eight days away. If we'd kept winning, I wasn't going. Now I was.

I didn't know whether to thank God for the loss or not. I'm still not sure I do.

The Colorado trip was something my family had done several times in the past. My parents, my two sisters and their husbands, all the cousins. It was loud and chaotic and one of the traditions that somehow survived after Cody died.

The first year without him, I almost didn't go. I went anyway.

I cried the minute we walked into the house.

I was surrounded by my family. My sisters with their husbands. My parents. The cousins. Everyone whole.

Except me.

Cody was missing. He was never coming back. And no Colorado trip, no Christmas, no Sunday morning was ever going to feel the same again.

Then one of my girls got hurt the week before the trip. So while everyone else was on the slopes, I had a choice. Stay off the mountain with her, or ski with the other three. I couldn't do both. Four kids needing four different things from me, and only one of me to give.

I sat in that house and felt more alone than I had since the day Cody died. And in that moment I knew something I couldn't unknow:

I cannot do life alone. I cannot be everywhere my kids need me to be.

This year I was bringing Nick. And his two girls who'd never seen a ski slope.

I wanted them to love it. I wanted my family to wrap around them the way they'd wrapped around me after Cody. I prayed about it every night for a month. God, let this trip do something. Don't let it just be a vacation. Let it be the moment our family becomes a family.

We pulled up to the house and the kids exploded out of the van. The whole family came out to greet us. Cassie's parents, her sisters and their husbands, all the cousins. Hands grabbing bags out of the back. Kids running each other's gear inside. Nobody asked who needed help. Everyone just helped.

My girls and I had walked in expecting to be the new ones. The outsiders. The plus-ones who had to earn a seat. Instead we walked into a house that already had our seats waiting.

Cassie's dad walked up, shook my hand, and said, "Glad you're here, son."

Son.

I went inside before anyone could see my face.

The bunny hill was the second day. Nick's youngest cried before we got to the lift. Wet gloves. New boots. A whole mountain that looked impossible from the bottom.

And then one of my boys walked over, knelt down in the snow, and said, "Hey. I got you. We'll go slow."

He took her hand and walked her to the magic carpet.

I watched Cody's son teach Anna's daughter how to ski.

There's no grief book that prepares you for that. There's no chapter in any blended family handbook for the moment you realize God has been weaving something together with two broken threads while you were too tired to look up.

I stood at the bottom of that bunny hill and cried into my neck gaiter.

By the third night the kids were a pack.

Hers. Mine. Her sisters' kids. They moved through that house like one tribe, inhaling chicken tenders at the lodge, falling asleep in piles on the couch. My girls weren't Nick's daughters anymore. They were just part of it.

One night they took over the living room and put on a dance-off. The whole pack of them, choreographing something only they understood, taking it dead seriously. The adults sat on the couches with glasses of wine, holding up imaginary scorecards, arguing over who actually deserved the win. Cassie's dad. Her mom. Her sisters and their husbands. Cassie next to me, shoulders shaking, calling out scores like she'd been hired for it.

I looked around that room. Our kids dancing, her family judging, my girls in the middle of all of it. And I realized I hadn't lost a family.

I'd been given another one.

Before we left Colorado, we all hugged in the living room to say our goodbyes. Eighteen of us. Cassie's parents. Her sisters and their husbands. All ten kids, ours and the cousins. Two families that the world might've called blended, but in that moment looked like one thing.

We thanked God under our breath. For the snow. For the safety. For the cousins. For Cody and Anna, who weren't in the room but were never not in the room.

And for the kind of timing only He pulls off. A widow with four kids and a coach with two girls, both ending one chapter, both walking into the same one without knowing it.

You don't engineer this. You don't strategize it. You don't manufacture it.

You walk through the door God opens, and try not to fall down crying when you see what He's been building on the other side.

If you're carrying loss into a holiday, a vacation, a tradition that used to look different, hear this:

God isn't asking you to replace what you lost.

He's asking you to trust Him with what comes next.

In Romans 11 it says wild branches can be grafted into a tree they didn't grow on, drawing life from a root they didn't plant. That's what happened to us. We didn't blend. We were grafted. God put us into something already living and let us draw life from it.

Two broken families. One mountain. One God.

Whole.

Forward this to someone walking into a season that doesn't look the same anymore. They need to know God isn't finished with their story either.

Hold on.

Still standing.

Nick & Cassie

Next week: "The Ins and Outs of Blending a Family." Six kids, two sets of rules, and the questions nobody warns you about.