Celebrating Marriage Milestones Away From It All
Taking time away from the kids is one important way to keep your marriage healthy
I’m not sure why we decided we had to take that first five-year-milestone trip.
We didn’t have kids yet and life was pretty mellow, as long as we ignored the four to five months every school year that I devoted to directing high school theatre while trying to still do my all-consuming teaching job.
But we decided to return to a cabin in the Smoky Mountains. We could relive our winter honeymoon and enjoy a few days exploring around Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg.
By our tenth anniversary, we were parents to a toddler and an infant. Life was far from mellow. In addition to our parenting adventures, I was in the middle of grad school studies, we had moved into a “dream fixer-upper” that was falling apart around us, and I had started a new job in addition to my grad school studies. We decided we were going to take what little money we had and celebrate ten years of marriage away from our kids for a long weekend. To say it was a financial and personal stretch would be an understatement, but we needed that time alone to focus on us for once, so we did it anyway.
When fifteen years approached, we were in a much better place financially and personally. Since we were now living in Houston, New Orleans—a place on my bucket list of American cities—was only six hours away. We asked Jeff’s parents to stay with us for Christmas break, packed up the travel trailer, and camped at Bayou Segnette State Park, less than fifteen miles away from the French Quarter.
Our twentieth anniversary was supposed to be the super-trip milestone. We were going to fulfill my dream of going to Hawaii and our mutual dream of a long vacation focused on just the two of us.
Then life happened: a job loss, depression, a move back across the country, two new jobs in less than six months (for me). I didn’t have the energy to make decisions about what we were going to eat for dinner, let alone spending the most amount of money we had ever spent on a vacation and figuring out when we could possibly take a full week away from our kids.
For the first time in our marriage, we didn’t take a vacation on a five-year milestone.
But waiting three months for my two-week spring break was well worth the wait.
Because doing it at the right time became far more important than doing it on time.
In thirteen years of parenthood, we’ve come to firmly believe in the importance and value of going on vacation, even short vacations, without our kids. Adventuring on our own has allowed us to recharge and remember that we are not just co-parents; we are best friends, lovers, and individuals separate from each other and our children. And thanks to COVID and upheaval in our lives, we hadn’t had a real getaway from our kids in almost three years.
This time, for our twentieth, we knew that we had to do it right. This had to be a true vacation. A vacation that fulfilled some dreams and was a complete escape from reality. We weren’t running away from our children; we were running towards each other. We were devoting time to refresh and recharge and remember why we had taken those vows when we were just two 22-year-old kids with stars in our eyes and our whole lives in front of us.
Hawaii was everything I wanted and needed it to be and so much more. For the first time in a long time, I had no desire to come home. Oh, I wanted to see our kids, but also I wanted to turn around and bring them back with us. I wanted to soak up the time we had alone and then plan for a distant future when we could return with them so they could also experience the ocean, sea turtles, and volcanoes.
I have no idea what the next milestone trip will be, but I can say with absolute certainty that our trip to Hawaii confirmed the importance of making the trip happen, despite my apprehensions about life getting in the way. And I’m ok with just dreaming about all of the possibilities, for now.
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