Why I Left My Family

Before you get your undies in a bunch, it was only for 11 days. But you’d think it was forever with the amount of undie-bunching I caused when I told people I was leaving my family to fend for themselves while I vacationed in Europe alone last year for 11 glorious days.

When I planned the trip, it was because my husband had planned a little trip of his own across the world to Bali. A fitness vacation (it’s an oxymoron, I know) where he and a close group of incredibly athletic people would be doing two-a-day open air workouts under the hot Thai sun. This sounded about as appealing as staying home alone with my kids, which is what I chose to do. When I gave my husband grief about going on a tropical escapade while I changed diapers and made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches – he suggested I plan a trip of my own.

“Yeah right” I thought. Until I thought…yeah, right. I can do that. And I will do that. So I asked a few friends if they wanted to join me. I got a lot of no’s, can’t leave the kids, can’t leave the job, can’t peel away from the daily ho-hum, you know how it is. Though conventional thinking would suggest a trip with friends would be the most fun, I’m a person who really likes being by myself. And what better place to be by yourself than in a warm, architecturally stunning, wine producing region like Porto, Portugal. So after copious amounts of Googling and feeling a bit guilty about spending the money on just me, I went for it. And I convinced my cool American-become-Danish mom friend to join me for part of my trip on the Southern coast of Portugal while she left three rambunctious boys with her less than enthusiastic husband.

I didn’t think too much about the trip in the weeks after I booked it, until I started telling people what I was doing and why I would be away.

“You’re going on a trip like that, ALONE?! Who’s going to watch your kids?” they would ask. Umm. Their dad, I would say. I got a lot of “How did you manage that?” and “Do you think he can handle it?” And “That’s so amazing you can do that.”

Revealing that my son was only 10 months old at the time only added fuel to the undie-bunching fire. In fact, some of the reactions – even from people I met once on the trip – became a little cold at that point. Shocked faces all around. “Bad mummy!” joked one sixty-something Scottish man on holiday with his Baby Boomer friends while their wives scoffed at my vanity.

I wondered if anyone would have said the same to a man on a trip with a baby at home. A dad on a business trip or a golf weekend with a baby at home whose age is still measured in months, not years. The answer is no, because men remain untethered from the moment of the positive pregnancy test, while a woman becomes a “we” instead of an “I” for the rest of their lives. I won’t go into all the ways that your body and mind are no longer yours from pregnancy all the way through postpartum and beyond, but even if you take your body’s abilities out of the equation, a mom going on a significant solo vacation *just for fun* (gasp) is more unthinkable than I would have thought.

I began to wonder the other, less vocal ways they were judging me – if they wondered why I wasn’t still breastfeeding or pumping. If they had asked, they would have found out I tried really hard but after having mastitis four times I was now glad not to be sick anymore. I wondered if they thought maybe I just wasn’t that attached to my kids, because it wasn’t that hard for me to leave. Because I wasn’t having a miserable time for missing them too much. If they had asked, they would have found out I cried the whole way to the airport after saying goodbye to them, but then I got over it and was so glad to be on my own, unattached, unbothered. Yes, I said it. Glad to be away from them.

There were days when I didn’t think much about my kids at all, where I was just me. It’s amazing how fast you can slide back into the life you led before, like finding a phantom limb and walking with it again even just for a few days. How comforting, how healthy, how rejuvenating.

And yet, how unusual. How oddly shameful. It became clear to me that this solo retreat, my own little Eat, Pray, Love letter to myself was completely abnormal. Shocking, even. Worthy of major congratulations and major judgment.

It makes me sad that it’s so shocking for a mom to take and thoroughly enjoy time away from her kids. I do feel grateful to have a husband who is incredibly involved in our kids’ lives, and willing and able to hold down the fort while I’m gone. But should I need to feel grateful? It should make me feel nothing in particular, because it should be unremarkable.

On days like today (Mother’s Day), it feels nice to be celebrated. But it also feels like the scope is all wrong. We weren’t born mothers, we had a life before kids, we’ll have a life after they leave the nest.

Moms need way more than just a day to get cute crafts from daycare and a brunch that they (hopefully) didn’t need to plan. We deserve to remember that we are, at the end of the day, not just a mom. We need to reconnect with ourselves - all the parts of us that come alive when we get to be an “I” again, just for a little while.

And, we shouldn’t have to hear anyone’s comments about it other than the flight attendant saying, “Welcome on board.”