During the second week of summer vacation, our family went camping at Lake James, about an hour east of Asheville. I had anticipated the trip with equal parts dread and optimism. True, most camping trips thus far had involved torrential rains; soggy, grumpy, overtired kids; and Herculean efforts to get said kids to sleep. To add to this less-than-hopeful precedent, the girls had just begun full time potty training, except that the “potty” part was a misnomer, since, thus far, the toilet had played such a minimal role in their elimination. I was already feeling wrung out and worn down with the relentless chores of child-rearing and housewifery. Sopping up urine with paper towels and admonishing the dogs not to eat the poop on the living room floor while I dashed for a plastic bag just added the proverbial salt.
On the other hand, I was eager for a break from the daily grind. Plus, I wanted to be optimistic. I had such fond memories of camping as a child, my sleeping bag squeezed between my brother and sister in the dome tent we shared. I allowed myself to imagine my kids nestled together in their bags, chatting and giggling, before simultaneously falling into an exhausted sleep. I pictured Don and me sipping beers and gazing into the fire, the summer night darkening around us.
It was not to be. The first evening of our trip was still and hot, the tent sweltering. Don broke a sweat just reading goodnight stories. Three hours later, as I coaxed an exhausted Sylvia to sleep in our tent, I could hear Don muttering to himself in the kids’ tent as Dee Dee and Clayton ricocheted off the walls.
“This is hell. This is absolute hell.”
In the morning, we almost threw in the towel and high-tailed it back home. But there we were. I’d spent the better part of two days sorting through the camping gear, gathering supplies, and loading the car. Don had spent more than an hour the previous afternoon hauling wagon load after wagon load down the steep trail to our campsite. True, the night had been miserable, but leaving now meant that miserable was all we’d be.
“Let’s stay,” we agreed. Maybe with a little more time, the trip could redeem itself.
Miraculously, it did. Hiking along a lakeside trail later that morning, we discovered a sandy beach in a private little cove. Watching the kids bobbing around in the dappled sunlight, with the glassy waters of the lake stretching out behind them, all my frustrations from the previous night felt inconsequential. These were the moments to remember, the idyllic scenes that create that bright tapestry of childhood. I felt overcome with gratitude that we hadn’t sprinted for home, that despite the unrelenting travails of parenting toddlers, we’d managed to stumble our way to this magic place.
Swimming with the kids in our private little cove, I dove down through the sun-warmed water to the cool beneath. The fog of sleep deprivation, the quotidian tedium of my existence, the ennui that had engulfed me for weeks, the discouraging sense that I rather disliked my grumpy, defiant children-- all seemed to dissolve in the cool, dark water against my skin. Swimming just beneath the surface, I ferried the children around on my back, one after the other. My father used to do the same for my siblings and me on our Sunday trips to the beach, and I can still remember the powerful sweep of his arms through the green water, his black hair streaming, the unfamiliar skin on his shoulders oily and slippery beneath my hands. The memory is a powerful one, singular in the treasured physical connection between us, the way the surface of the water both separated us-- how eagerly I waited for him to emerge-- and made him wholly mine.
As I swam underwater with Dee Dee on my back, I could hear her chattering away at me from above the surface, babblative as always, even with no hope of a reply. A surge of joy rose in me. The world felt huge and light-filled again, and my love for my children pure and immense.
Later, perched on driftwood on the sandy beach, we ate peanut butter sandwiches and apples, and the kids sucked lemonade out of their water bottles, surprised by the sweetness. In the late afternoon the storms rolled in, and we ate our pasta dinner hunched together in the sodden tent. But soon the skies cleared and a cool breeze blew off the shimmering lake. The kids took a lukewarm bath in a plastic storage container, delighting in a fixture of the daily routine made so thrillingly new. They ate half-burned marshmallows for dessert, burned leaf after leaf in the fire, made up endless stories with their stuffed animals in the tent, and eventually-- miraculously-- settled down to sleep.
That camping trip was a highlight of the first few weeks of summer. “Our best yet,” I said to Don cheerfully as we drove home, all three kids asleep in the back of the van. “We should do it again soon.”
* * *
A month later, our annual family vacation was fast approaching. After a long road trip to South Dakota last summer, we’d opted to stay closer to home this year. We’d visit Congaree National Park near Columbia, then do some camping in the upstate before meeting up with my my brother’s family and my parents in Tennessee for a brief rendezvous before they continued on to Indiana. A week before we were to leave, Don came into the bathroom while I was brushing my teeth. I caught his eye in the mirror.
“I have to say,” I confessed through a mouthful of toothpaste. “I’m sort of dreading our
vacation.”
It had been a tough week. Dee Dee and Sylvia had been keeping each other up reading and playing long after their bedtime. Sylvia was sleep-deprived and weepy, Dee Dee grumpy and defiant. Back in the doldrums myself, I felt exhausted, impatient, and frequently enraged. The thought of battling with Dee Dee over bedtime for four nights in a row in a ninety-five degree tent deflated me. Nor could I summon the energy to tackle all the preparation and clean-up the trip would require. When I’d asked Don to check the weather forecast, I’d realized I was secretly hoping that we’d be rained out, but the ten-day forecast predicted one scorching, sunny day after another.
“Really?” Don said. “Me, too!”
With our dual confession, a weight lifted. We scrapped our camping plans and booked a hotel in Chattanooga on Priceline. Two rooms, free breakfast, air-conditioning, a swimming pool. The kids were ecstatic when we told them. “A hotel! A hotel!” We could be staying at the Holiday Inn a mile from our house for all they’d care. They just wanted to watch PBS Kids ad infinitum, eat forbidden Fruit Loops for breakfast, and sleep together in the king bed.
Travelling with young children is never exactly relaxing, but our trip to Chattanooga came close. All the house rules were off. One afternoon, I spent a whole hour reading on the bed while the kids watched Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood on PBS and Don napped. I didn’t cook, I hardly cleaned, the dirty laundry simply piled up in the corner by the dresser. When the kids asked me to read them a book, I never once said, “Not right now. I have to...” And how pleasant they were when they had my full attention! It felt wonderful to like my own children again.
The magic of Chattanooga was not the magic of the lake. But there was magic nonetheless. Rock City was my favorite. I’d seen the iconic advertisements and assumed it was some sort of touristy gem mine, not a true city of stone, with intricate pathways and lush gardens. I learned that the original owners of Rock City had considered calling it Fairyland, and I could easily see why. It was easy to imagine fairies flitting around those cool, dark passageways and lush and secret places.
Watching Clayton run ahead-- “Mom! Dad! Another tunnel! Come see!”-- I saw myself as a girl, exploring gardens with my parents on family vacations, proudly watching them admire a beautiful rose bush I pointed out, or a hidden bench we found tucked away midst the trees. There is something extraordinary as a child when you realize your own enjoyment is mirrored in the grown-ups you love. How marvelous it makes everything seem, to feel your own delight thus affirmed. We used to beg Mom and Dad to ride the roller coaster with us on our annual visit to Busch Gardens. How much more fun it would be if only they would love it too!
And how fresh it all feels through the eyes of your children: this tunnel of stone their first tunnel, this swinging bridge their first swinging bridge. I loved Rock City more because my children loved it, and they loved loving it because I did.
Is this what parenthood does? Suspends our own egos, relaxes-- for a little while--the tyranny of our own desires? Traipsing single-file with thirty other weary tourists down the underground tunnel on the way to Ruby Falls, with Sylvia, asleep, like a dead weight on my back and the cheery, practiced jokes of the tour guide grating on my nerves-- even that was worth it. “Are we really underground?” Clayton kept asking. “Are there people walking around on top of us?” Even stupendous Ruby Falls, when the tunnel finally opened up and the remarkable underground waterfall was revealed, was nothing compared to Clayton’s endless excitement to be below the surface of the earth.
And so it went, vacation magic finding us everywhere: in the civil war hospital tent at the children’s museum, where Dee Dee wrapped my leg in bandages and fed me medicine from a tin cup; at Rock City, when Sylvia wriggled off my back so she, too, could walk across the swinging bridge; at the top of Lover’s Leap on Lookout Mountain, where Dee Dee exclaimed with awe, “Look how high up we are!” It found me as I ran in the cool early morning through the streets of downtown, with the river, shining in the morning sun, opening up before me. It even found me unexpectedly, late one evening and long after the children’s bedtime, as I listened over the monitor to Clayton and Dee Dee talking in the other room.
Here’s your little cat, Dee Dee!”
“Hooray!”
“Do you want to make a little house for our animals?”
“Yes! I do! I do!”
“Shh! Don’t wake Herman. He’s sleeping.”
“My cat is sleeping, too.”
Normally with children who refuse to go to sleep, my patience is paper thin, my anger quick to rise. “They were being ridiculously cute,” Don will say about some post-bedtime shenanigans, and I’ll just growl about how they should be asleep by now. But that night, Clayton’s tenderness with his sister, and her pure joy at his attention, the sweetness of the little animal beds they’d made out of paper cups and Kleenexes, and the palpability of their excitement as they played together into night... Vacation magic had found us right there in room 309 of the Chattanooga Rodeway Inn.
