I wish I could blame my month-long posting hiatus on my recent
vacation, but alas, I can’t.
I can, however, tell you that I learned some lesson while
visiting Virginia for a cousin's wedding.
When you go on vacation without your kids, you do a couple things
differently.
1) You
begin using your spouse’s name again, and what a nice feeling that is. Instead of “Mom” she becomes a wife
again. The shift was almost immediate
for me, and I don’t even thing I recognized it until about the third time I
called her by her name. It was both
awesome and freeing, as if I had been transported back to a time before kids.
2) You
don’t realize how stressed you are until you leave it behind. I’m such a better Dad the last two or three
days and I credit the vacation. I feel
less stressed. And yeah, I realize that
is the reason for vacations, but still, worth noting.
3) As
much as I missed the hell out of my kids, I also missed them like you miss scratching poison ivy. Its such a visceral and fulfilling thing,
scratching poison ivy, that you love it no matter how much the underlying issue
bothers you.
4) As
much as you might dread returning to the structure and the crying and the
diapers and the kid talk and the lack of personal time, the minute you walk in
the door, you’ll realize how much you missed being Dad.
I want to return to #2 for a moment and its interplay with #3
and #4, because I think its something that is easy to miss. It was hard leaving our kids behind. It was the first time when we did it last
year, it was this time, it probably will be next time, I imagine. It was made more difficult by the fact that
these are cousins I haven’t seen in 10 years or so, and who really wanted to
see the kids.
Make no mistake - taking the triplets on trips is fun. But taking the kids to Virginia is no kind of
vacation. It requires extra planning,
extra packing and extra managing, to say nothing of the extra room we would
need to book. Between the extra
planning, packing, and managing, it is more a chore than anything.
And that is where point number 2 comes in. Some stresses are immediate, like deadlines. The Supreme Court is going to issue an
opinion on the contraceptive mandate on Monday, so Monday is going to be one of
those immediate stresses type of days for those of us who write about the
litigation.
But other stresses are slow burners. The petty kid fights, the strain of
constantly being “on,” the need to always plan your next move so that one of
the kids don’t explode – it all adds up.
The stress sneaks up on you. Your
shoulders tighten over the days; your outlook darkens over the weeks; your mood
crashes over the months. And pretty soon
you aren’t the Dad you want to be anymore.
Being away for four days – glorious days of mornings with no
plans and days with nothing booked - washed the stress away.
I’m more calm now, more in control now, more able to see my “happy
place” when I need it now. So while my
kids may have missed me during those four days, they get a better Dad for the
next month or two as a result.
And for the record, they hardly seemed to miss us at all.
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