This past weekend was a weekend filled with tremendous, heart-busting joy. It was also one of the most personally disappointing weekends of my entire life. My head is spinning a little from the existential contradiction that this represents.

I took the brood to Disney World, and one of the objectives of the trip was, of course, to have a good time, and having a good time at Disney World is not a particularly difficult thing to do, what with the spinning teacups and fireworks and pirates and flying carpets and pixie dust and all, and so to say that we – and more importantly, our coterie of pixie-loving badgers – had fun is to understate things dramatically. But having fun was not the only objective of the trip, nor even the primary objective of the trip. The primary objective of the trip (which saw us drive from Toronto to Florida in a vehicle provided by GM Canada) was me tackling the Disney Princess Half-Marathon, aka the Tiarathon, as the first race in my year-long quest to run 100 miles for Tanner. I’ve been training since last year to do this run and all the other runs – runs that will cover a total distance, I hope, of 100 miles – to follow. I had my tiara and tutu packed and ready.

I never got the chance to wear them.

The night before the race I had a series of dizzy spells, the last resulting in a nasty fall while carrying Emilia – herself a little broken from falling on the monorail off-ramp – across the resort grounds. I wasn’t badly hurt by the fall – just sore knees and neck – but the fact that I’d been dizzy enough for black spots to distort my vision and skew my balance and send me careening to the ground, child in arms, was enough to sound the warning bells. “You’re not running,” Katie said, as she helped me back to the room. “I will stop you.”

So. I did not run the Disney Princess Half-Marathon.

In hindsight, I can speculate that my dizzy spells and my fall and my consequent failure to run was due to a lot of things that were more or less beyond my control. Doing a week-long long-distance road trip with small children who do not sleep prior to running a half-marathon is, perhaps, something that I could have controlled – simply by not doing it – but then we wouldn’t have had our adventure, and who’s to say that it was the seven nights without sleep that brought me down? It also might have been the Florida sun, or the food (Mickey-shaped waffles have been proven to cause light-headedness in tutu-clad lab rats), or the fact that I’m only about a month past a bout of pneumonia and have bad lungs and ignored all of that when I resumed training a few weeks ago and didn’t pay any of that any mind while carrying a 35 lb toddler through the Magic Kingdom and Animal Kingdom and Epcot Center under the decidedly un-Canadian sun for two days. It could have been due to a lot of things, most of which were almost certainly my fault.

Which is why I’m having a hard time clinging to the joy from this weekend. The smalls had a deliciously wonderful time, chasing Space Rangers and splashing down mountains and racing race cars and goggling at pixies zipping through the sky, and their joy was contagious but still: we were supposed to do all this – we were supposed to be pursuing joy and chasing pixies and princesses – for Tanner. I was supposed to do this for Tanner. And I f*cked it up before I even got started.

It’s kind of hard to not hate myself for that.

(I ordinarily close comments for this kind of post, because I hate being sucked into the temptation to seek reassurance and back-pats from the Internets for my own twisted issues, but you know what? This shit sucks so bad that it is taking all of my limited self-restraint to not out-and-out beg everyone, everywhere, to tell me that I am not, in fact, all total fail and a disappointment to humanity. So. If you feel like telling me that I don’t suck, I will totally take that. Please excuse my neediness.)

Mr. Jasper, being assisted in the luge by his sister Miss Emilia, at the home of Mrs. Fussypants.*

*This is how we road trip. On skateboards. Etc.

**Actually, we’re in a Traverse, courtesy of GM Canada. But still.

I’ve seen a lot of the world. I’ve traveled across Canada, and the continental U.S., and parts of Mexico, and most of Western Europe. I lived in Spain for two years. I’ve taken the train from Barcelona to Brindisi and a boat to Greece and  had a misadventure on a Greek island. I’ve canoed up remote lakes and hiked into the back-country of British Columbia and I’ve rafted the Thompson River, a few times. I’ve taken a tugboat up Indian Arm, in waters thick with jellyfish. I’ve traveled through the Mediterranean singing show tunes with a proto-Wiggles live stage show for children. I’ve taken my two small children, on my own, to Disneyworld.

I’ve had some memorable trips. I’ve had some wonderful trips.

The very best trip, though – the best of this year, the best of all years – the trip that I will hold tightly in my heart as yielding the most precious, sacred memories is this one: the trip that I took this past summer. The final leg of that trip, specifically, which took me to my mother’s home in Cache Creek, British Columbia, where I saw my father for the very last time.

I didn’t know that it was the last time, and that was, in some ways, a blessing. We had our time, a few days, sitting and talking and watching the kids pick strawberries and make cocoa and frolic in the river. He met my friends. When we parted, he said that he had things to tell me, difficult things, things that he didn’t want to talk about during such a happy time, but that we would talk about them soon, really soon, and I implored him, as I always did, to consider coming to live with us in Ontario, to come and build a straw bale house in the woods that we own, in the middle of nowhere, with the deer and the quiet, just the way he’d always wanted, just how he’d always wanted. And he said, maybe, maybe. Maybe it’s time to do that. And, we’ll talk, soon. And, I love you, sweetie.

And we hugged, tightly, and I inhaled the sweet, smoky smell of him, and I wished that he would stay longer. But he couldn’t, and we said goodbye.

And then he was gone, and then I traveled home, and then, three weeks later, he was really gone, and that was that.

Sometimes, the best trips are not the ones that involve adventures or passports or sunny beaches or the Magic Kingdom. Sometimes, the best trips are the ones that take you home, the ones that fill your heart with sights and sounds and smells that are so familiar but so precious that your heart could and would expand a thousand times over to hold them. That your heart will expand a thousand times over to hold. That you would travel a thousand miles a hundred thousand times over to rediscover and relive.

I would travel hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of miles to get to that place again, that place where I was in the first week of July in 2009, that place with my dad, that place in the sun. I can’t. But I will carry its memories with me, always, wherever I go.

(This post is part of the Best Of 2009 blog challenge issued by the lovely Gwen Bell. Thank you, sweet Gwen, for providing the opportunity to reflect.)