On a recent trip to Maine, I tried to be a different person. Let’s call her vacation mom.
Vacation mom does not schedule every moment. Meal times are ad hoc; bread is torn in huge hunks off the loaf, and vacation mom allows crumbs to litter the cutting board. She does not read all the online reviews before committing to an activity. She lets the kids dictate what they want to do, without reading the fine print of the liability waiver.
Vacation mom was feeling great about the brief respite from her home self, a Type-A nutjob who thrives on routine and gets a little anxious when life is untidy. My husband was happy to be vacation dad, even though he’s also wound pretty tight. He had already planned this trip and driven the whole way to Maine, so he was ready to let it all go. But my chill alter ego was challenged by a much more powerful and unpredictable force: Mother Nature.
I already started second-guessing vacation mom when we pulled into the parking lot of a tubing and boat rental outfit. We didn’t see any employees, just a bunch of boats spilling out of a cavernous, dark barn. I had only glanced at the website before booking the tubes, which were supposed to be for all abilities and ages. Eventually a woman emerged to give us our gear, including life jackets, and load us onto a minibus with another family of chumps.
I had imagined a leisurely float down the river, surrounded by glorious scenery. I began to wonder if that’s what we were going to get as we were bumping along on the bus. Before we disembarked, the driver pointed up at a plastic-covered map of the river that was curling at the edges and said something like: Here’s where you get off. Make sure you turn left at the buoy. It should take a few hours. If you pass the bridge, you went too far. Have fun! She’s being so casual, I thought, it must not be that big a challenge.
Then we got off the bus, and clambered down a bunch of rocks to the riverbank in our completely inadequate shoes. Vacation mom rallied and encouraged the hesitant children to just launch in, flip-flops akimbo, because the water was the perfect temperature!
Within minutes, the current had overtaken my older daughter, who was separated from her tube and had begun furiously swimming after it, and my husband was staying close to her in case she needed help. Then my younger daughter slipped through her tube and was clutching onto its handle as she floated behind it and past me.
By this time, I was actively cursing vacation mom, that moron. My everyday self would have paid closer attention to all the details, like the part of the website where it said that the river had Class 1-2 rapids, on a scale of 5, which required some maneuvering, and that the journey could take up to four hours. (These are not wild rapids, and are probably nothing for experienced outdoorsmen, but we are soft city mice.) I would have normally compared the multiple river rental companies in the area, and maybe even steered the kids into borrowing a boat, because tubing clearly made the trip longer and left us with the least amount of control over the water.
I was never worried that one of us would get really hurt. We are all strong swimmers and were wearing well-fitting life jackets, and the river wasn’t very deep. But our expectations of a relaxing day on the water were totally upended. My little one was briefly near tears when she thought she was floating too quickly away from me. I hopped out of my tube (scraping my knee in the shallow water) and swam as fast as I could to catch up to her while shouting a pep talk above the water.
Things eventually began to settle down. My 13-year-old caught her tube and figured out how to hoist herself back into it. She seemed both pleased with herself and mildly irritated that she was doing something strenuous on vacation. My 10-year-old started floating happily, after she had been assured that I would stay nearby.
After turning left at that infernal buoy, we collected ourselves on the side of the river. Even as a trickle of blood crept down my leg, I started to see the wisdom of vacation mom. Was the day turning out as any of us had expected? Not remotely. But were we having some productive friction, getting out of our comfort zones and overcoming some physical difficulties as a family? We were! And we were doing it with a minimum of complaining, which is probably the biggest feat for all four of us.
The second half of the tubing trip was much easier. We got the hang of the current, the girls remained in their tubes, and we all hit a few patches of quiet, drifting ease. At one point, I looked up at the clouds and realized that I had been fully in the moment the entire time we were struggling. I was physically and emotionally present with my family in a way that’s so much harder to achieve when we are distracted by work and school and the tightly managed hustle of our lives.
Still, we were extremely happy to see the bridge emerge in the distance, and even happier to scramble out for good. I have to hand it to vacation mom — a dose of her breeziness was ultimately good for all of us. But just a tiny dose. Next time, I’m renting a kayak.
End Notes
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Longtime readers of this newsletter know that my favorite type of book could be categorized as antique gossip. I just read a juicy example of the genre called “The Gilded Edge: Two Audacious Women and the Cyanide Love Triangle That Shook America,” by Catherine Prendergast. It’s about a circle of wealthy and dissolute Bay Area bohemians, real estate development in Northern California, the San Francisco earthquake and its aftermath and the difficulty of creating an artistic identity as an unmarried woman in the early 1900s. I had never heard of any of the three main characters — Nora May French and George and Carrie Sterling — and I was immediately drawn into their messy lives.
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