A few weeks ago, for the first time since our second child was born, my husband and I went away together. We got on a ferry and left the kids with my parents on the small island where they live. The night before we left, these were some things I said:
We cannot do this.
What if something goes wrong and the ferries aren’t running and we can’t get to them.
We are going to be across a body of water from our children. This is against nature.
It’s going to be physically impossible for me to relax.
I have an idea: You go! I’ll catch up to you if the vibe is right!
He’s still breastfeeding every morning so this is essentially a mastitis vacation for me.
My parents can’t negotiate at bedtime. The Goof will be awake all night.
So it’s settled: I’ll not go and you’ll go.
That morning, my mom got a minor injury and, as is custom in our family, was rushed to the medical center by my hysterical father.
“Thank you,” I said to my dad when he called screaming from the car. “This is great news.”
Unfortunately, she was completely fine and sent home more determined than ever to “be there” for her grandchildren.
“But your foot!” I pleaded. “It’s gravely injured!”
“It turns out there’s nothing wrong.”
“But shouldn’t you go to the mainland for an X-Ray?”
“Nope. They did an X-Ray here. There are so many hypochondriac Jews on the island they got an X-Ray machine for the medical center! All’s fine.”
“Damnit. But doesn’t it hurt?!”
"Not really. They gave me something.”
“AH!” I’d won. “They gave you painkillers and I’m supposed to leave you with my CHILDREN!? I’m supposed to hand over my BABY to a woman strung out on HEROIN?!”
“Bess they gave me Tylenol and your father does all the lifting with The Goof anyway. Plus there’s the nanny.”
At this point she reminded me that the lovely, responsible, professional young woman I hired a year ago to take care of my children so I could write was, indeed, here taking care of my children so we could go on this trip.
I was fucked.
The reason we were going was my husband got free tickets to a nearby music festival through his job as a music journalist, and My Favorite Singer of All Time was headlining the second day. She is my Favorite Singer of All Time in that when I listened to her first album at fifteen, it articulated my angst and, as I announced to my high school boyfriend on the back of a mix CD later returned to me, “She narrates the most poignant truths of my soul.” Every album she’s released since has done the same thing and she remains the soundtrack to whatever mood I’m surfing through. I love her voice, I love her wit, I love her melodies, and I love her whole vibe. A few years ago, she posted the cover book she “read in a day” to Instagram and called it “so good.” It was my book. I sadly died.
At the festival, she would be playing songs from throughout her career and I would get to stand there in some sort of VIP Press area and watch her and levitate. I was not going to let an aging mother with a stubbed toe and a breastfeeding baby (He’s eighteen months old! Enough already!) get in the way. Plus, I had used a truly humiliating, honeymoon-level amount of travel points to book us a hotel room.
We got on the ferry. I was silent the entire time staring at the horizon like a sailor’s wife searching for his ship’s safe return. I do not recall the trip to the hotel because my organs were shutting down one by one from sheer panic. Then my husband said something that changed the trajectories of our lives. He said it in a voice like a dog owner trying to perk up his dog’s ears using key words:
“Maybe when we get to the hotel we can order a big room service lunch and eat on the balcony so we’re full in case the VIP Tent doesn’t have enough food?”
“Okay,” I shrugged. I was on fucking vacation.
We walked into the hotel lobby, which was by divine intervention a bar, and I immediately ordered a glass of rosé wine that reminds me of when I graduated college and stayed with my friend in Paris and had no problems except maybe looking too good in a belted trench coat, and I injected it directly into my jugular. I felt great (day drunk) and announced (yelled) “Let’s pound some chicken Caesar salads and see some fricken tunes, bro.” My husband regretted choosing to attend the college where we met.
I went on to tell every person we interacted with that we had left our children for the first time.
“Would you like to use the hotel’s complimentary car service?”
“Yes thank you. This is our first time away from our children. One is almost four and one is one.”
“This is the historic downtown. Have you been to Newport before?”
“Nope. And we’re here without our children, ages four and one, whom we left for the first time.”
“Welcome, shuttle bus riders! Are you excited for the folk festival?”
“Yes, we’re excited. He knows all the acts and I’m just excited to be away from the kids. HAHAHAHA!”
“You need backstage credentials to enter this tent.”
“We have them! Here’s mine! He’s press, and I’m just a mom! Away from our kids for the first time!”
“Would you like an oyster?”
“Wow! I’ll take two! One for each kid that we left home!”
“I have been playing in an extremely famous musician’s band all summer and I’ve been on tour in Europe. I am friends with your husband. Let’s have an interesting conversation in a cool VIP tent about being on tour in Europe.”
“No thanks! I have two children, one’s a baby and one is four, and this is actually the first time we’ve both been away from them!”
It was awful.
As the afternoon cooled and my rosé flush faded into a sloggy, sharpened awareness I noticed other families around us wrangling their kids. We are not Concert Parents. We do not take our kids to cool adult places and though we own those cartoonishly large noise-cancelling baby headphones for the idea of taking them to a concert, we have not used them.
Some of us are a mom in aviators and a leopard print baby carrier waving a beer in one hand and a pacifier in the other, but I am a mom who politely likes that mom’s Instagram post as my kid plays on the playground equipment closest to our house. In my personal experience, it can be fun to take a newborn places as long as you don’t mind having to shush and soothe a screaming potato in front of your friends and strangers. It can be fun to take a toddler to adult spaces as long as he is asleep.
We were on vacation before having children (of course) and noticed a family with three small, perfect children all dressed in fancy little white linen outfits eating at a table with a fancy white linen tablecloth. “This will be us,” I said to my husband. “We will do this.” Due to not 100% successfully internalizing the lessons in How to Raise a French Child Who is Better Than Your Disgusting American Children this is not us.
Our toddler is unfailingly polite (he once apologized to a fire hydrant) but at a restaurant, his mood can best be described as Running. Our baby is perfect and we could absolutely take him to Buckingham Palace if invited, but he does have a habit of finishing his meal and rubbing the remaining food in his hair. The reason for this is they have only been alive, as I have mentioned, for less than four years and are operating with the brain function of very smart, often shockingly well-spoken monkeys.
With toddlers, there are realms “For Them” (museums with animals and planets, zoos, parks, playgrounds, friends’ houses, a padded room full of someone else’s toys) and there are realms “For Us” (concerts, restaurants, movies, non-family or frankly all weddings) and in my time as the decider of where we go and how many of us go there, keeping them separate is generally great. This is not the case for everyone! But it should be! (The downside to this is we have not done anything fun in an entire presidential administration. Also ignore all of this if you have two nannies and four assistants and a household staff. Do whatever you want. Host the Grammy’s. Fly to Ibiza. God bless.)
As I looked around at the other families with kids, I tried to give my best empathetic “Been There” look to parents who were — I am ashamed to admit how vindicated it made me feel — wishing they were dead. I saw a parent hand a baby to his partner and say “Your turn!” before jogging away as if he were passing her a stick of lit dynamite. I saw far more parents just trying to appease crying, complaining, exhausted, bored kids. There was a “family tent” with activities set up. Even cool parents take their kids to the playground. The playground is just at the cool place.
As we waited in the shuttle bus line to head back the first night, an elementary school aged child (I am not great with guessing ages of kids who aren’t exactly my kids’ ages! He was between six and eleven?) asked his dad “Do we have to come back tomorrow?” and the dad immediately started listing foods served at the event as bribery. I have done this. When they struck a deal, the dad took a selfie and posted it to his stories. I couldn’t read what his caption was, but I bet you one epi-pen full of rosé it was “My favorite concert buddy.”
Then the bus arrived and the kid hugged his dad’s leg, full body, and the dad and I briefly locked eyes as the dad rumpled the kid’s hair. Without thinking I told him:
“I wish mine were here. He’s almost four.” I meant it.
For a fleeting moment.
And then I let something else wash over me, something more terrifying than panic: Relief.
Of course there was a low-grade fear of something happening to my children when both their parents were a few hours away from them, but they were in the hands of two capable adults and one mother with a partially severed foot. But the more acute, buried-in-the-belly fear was far more sinister: What if I liked it too much? What if I had fun? What if everything ended up fine?
There is a moment in the excellent Michael Cunningham book (and excellent Stephen Daldry film) The Hours, where the 1950s housewife character Laura Brown (a Top Five Julianne Moore performance), makes the most Unforgivable Choice in all of literature. She leaves her children. Cunningham makes the moral extension of her decision clear when her adult son kills himself. The lesson here is clear: If you are a bad mom, your kid becomes a tortured poet who jumps out a window in front of Meryl Streep.
I read the book as a sad Virgina Woolf Child in high school and was simply aghast at Laura. “She should have just killed herself!” I wrote in an essay to the horror/disappointment of my English teacher, “It would have spared her son!” Here’s where I stand now: She shouldn’t have ever been in this position. But would Laura Brown been spared the agony of fleeing if she’d been allowed to leave for a couple nights to see Aimee Mann in concert? Probably not! But it wouldn’t have hurt.
I come from a long line of ambivalent mothers who were captives to the expectations of their unforgiving eras. My great grandmother had a daughter, my grandmother, at 40 and couldn’t relate to her. She was done having children and became a circus spectacle in her Brooklyn neighborhood as a middle-aged woman with a pregnant belly. When someone told her “Your granddaughter is beautiful,” she stopped taking my infant grandma on outings altogether and let her teenaged sons do much of the public baby-care.
My grandma grew up to be a mother who left her children for weeks and occasionally months at a time on trips to Europe with my grandfather. I have one of her old postcards on my desk, writing in her gorgeous swoopy handwriting to tell her three young kids Greece was great and the babysitter should borrow a slide projector from the neighbors so she could show them all pictures when she returned. She was a housewife with a college degree and a passion for literature and she had nowhere to go but anywhere in the world she wanted. I wonder if she was taking those trips to save her own life, and I will never know what she thought about on the plane ride back to her suburban reality. What I do know is she always came back. And there was a slide projector whirring away in the dark showing my furious mother monuments and hotel restaurants she wished burned to the ground.
My own mother broke with that legacy when she became a doctor. She had a place to go every day outside the house. She had lives to save besides her children’s, and doing that saved her own.
And she raised me, a person who can barely get on a ferry boat without quietly wondering if I could row a lifeboat back to my kids with nothing but a water bottle and a hardcover book that I am not particularly enjoying.
I have never once worried I’ll become Laura Brown, but the specter of her tragedy haunts me as the ultimate worst case scenario because it was a choice made in increments in my lineage. Leaving breaks the implicit contract upon giving birth to any wanted pregnancy: The worst thing that could happen to me is I lose my child, the worst thing that could happen to my child is they lose me. Having fun at a concert away from those babies is flirting with breach of contract.
But on the second day I had true, unfettered fun. I scream-cheered when my favorite song started. I briefly, terribly danced when a group of people started dancing around me. I drank two (!!) glasses of day wine and I ran into friends and ate food I’d never eat and got a low-grade sunburn on my chest. I noticed my husband looked good in grey and called him, to his horror, “a babe.”
And on the last ferry home to the island where my kids were already asleep, I felt my whole body relax when the lighthouse finally came into view. If I had wings I would have flown to it.
I’ve been to a wild amount of music festivals with young children because my husband’s a touring musician and the only thing harder than going to a music festival with a toddler is staying home alone with a toddler for a month. I think my most enduring Newport Folk Fest memory is being punched in the face by my (then) three year old in front of my high school bestie. And I’ve seen Dolly Parton there. But honestly lots of this resonated regarding the heavy push and pull of motherhood. Thanks for writing.
Loved this series so much as a mom of a 1-yr-old and 3.5-yr-old boy, who in June just took her very first trip without kids to . . . New York. I sobbed leaving the house for the airport, and then miraculously almost never thought of them the rest of the trip. Can't wait for the next one.