Florence, Italy at sunset (via romanticplaces.tumblr.com)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>On September 19, Chris and I are going to Italy. Without our kids. And we\u2019re going for ten days.<\/p>\n
There, I said it. I\u2019ve been so afraid to tell you and there are a lot of reasons:<\/p>\n
One, I\u2019m afraid you\u2019ll judge me for spending money on a trip like this.<\/strong> (Or even having the money to go on a trip like this.) If your upbringing was anything like my husband\u2019s, you\u2019ll think I\u2019m ridiculous. Why in the world would I judge you for spending money to go to one of the most beautiful places on earth?<\/em><\/p>\nIf you\u2019re from my world, your family only went on vacation to the mountains to camp in tents or drove in the minivan to visit family in California once every four years. If you\u2019re like me, the only people you ever knew who went around the world for vacation (Not a mission trip!) were the ones who lived in uber-large houses and wore Ralph Lauren and played tennis and you couldn\u2019t help but understand your separation from them. If you\u2019re like me, you trained yourself just fine in your prejudice against the ones with money\u2026<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t want you to think I\u2019m one of them.<\/p>\n
What does that mean? What does it mean to be \u201cone of them\u201d? I want to tell you how Chris and I have shared one car for the past nine years: how I\u2019ve dropped him off at work, day after day, through every kind of job, or picked him up from the train station in the rain. Or about the early years when \u201cour car\u201d was my red, two door Mitsubishi Mirage with only one working door and a permanently opened sunroof with Plexiglas duct tapped to the top during Syracuse winter. I want to say how hard it sometimes is to strap the kids in at 6 o\u2019clock pm to drive to the office when I really want to be making dinner so every one can get to bed on time. I want to say that we\u2019ve sacrificed in this way so that we can afford to do something extravagant every once in a while.<\/p>\n
But the truth is, my neighbors down the street (from our old house) share one car too and they\u2019re not in a place where they can be extravagant. The truth is we still have so much more than most people in the world, by far. Choosing to spend money on this trip is a choice. It means we\u2019re not spending it on something else. Is there something better? Should I be giving that money away? I don\u2019t know. That tension for me is still unresolved. But I know I believe in beauty and art and feasting. And I believe in experiencing those things with my husband.<\/p>\n
Another reason I\u2019m afraid to tell you? This trip is vanity. It\u2019s my own entertainment.<\/strong> My own time with my husband. We\u2019re going to see beautiful things, taste delicious foods, tour vineyards, experience the culture. We\u2019re going to meet up with friends we love and laugh and drink coffee slow and wear cute shoes and have long, uninterrupted conversations.<\/p>\nI can\u2019t wait to have this time with my husband. I can\u2019t wait to laugh with our friends, who share our exact same traveling beliefs: eat, read, see something beautiful, relax. Rinse and repeat.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve mostly moved away from the view I once held that questioned how any one could spend the money to travel across the world simply for the sake of \u201cvacationing.\u201d Even as I can wax eloquent about many of the problems of short-term mission trips and my questions concerning the effectiveness of using our resources to travel to impoverished places instead of using our resources to equip local people in those places to be the ones to bring about change, I\u2019m still so shaped by my former belief that traveling should be done for the sake of others, not one\u2019s self. I still feel strangely guilty about a trip overseas that does not involve building a house or singing songs with little kids about Jesus.<\/p>\n
And, last of all, I\u2019m afraid you\u2019ll think I\u2019m a bad mom for leaving my kids.<\/strong> (Let\u2019s be honest, you know enough about me already, you may already think I\u2019m a bad mom.) I\u2019m afraid you\u2019ll read this, close your computer, and say, \u201cWell I\u2019d never leave my kids for ten days because I\u2019m committed to fill in the blank<\/span>.\u201d (Emotional stability? Attachment? Your own sanity?)<\/p>\nI hear you. I\u2019ve struggled with this and prayed through this and cried about leaving them. But when it came down to it, this is why I\u2019m leaving my kids:<\/p>\n
1. If there\u2019s any man in the world whose love language is \u201cexperiencing beautiful things,\u201d it\u2019s my husband. I really believe that if I want to invest in my relationship with him, I have to get away with him and experience his love of culture, food and history. That\u2019s not to say I don\u2019t love culture, food and history too. I\u2019ve been to Europe once before when I spent a week in Paris. The entire time I sighed in bliss at how any place in the world could be so beautiful. I always loved culture and food, long before I knew it was a thing<\/em> to do so. In Paris (pre-kids), Chris and I drank wine and ate cheese, olives and a baguette for lunch every day in the park and I loved every moment of it just as much as he did. But Chris is not ruled by anxiety. He has not cried once about this trip. I could let my fear for my kids keep me from experiencing something so lovely with him. But if I do, I\u2019ll miss out on the beauty.<\/p>\n2. I have an amazingly generous mother-in-law and mom and dad who are all willing to travel to Austin and split the time to be with our kids. When I was trying to make the decision about this trip back in January, I called up a friend whose kids are high school and college age and she gave me the advice that it\u2019s always good for grandparents and grandchildren to have time together without parents around. I\u2019ve thought about that a lot. When families live near each other their grandkids can have one or two nights with grandparents fairly often. Because we\u2019re so far from our families, most of our visits with them include all of us in one another\u2019s homes for long periods of time. It\u2019s a gift to give our parents time with our kids without the stress of us around as well. With no one looking over their shoulders at how much TV they\u2019re letting our kids watch or how much sugar is being distributed. Our parents are wonderful grandparents and I want to give my kids the chance to have undisturbed grandparent time, even if it\u2019s hard on my worried mother-heart.<\/p>\n
3. I\u2019m so anxious about this trip that I think it\u2019s good for me to let go of my fear and do it. Chris and I just wrote up a will so we\u2019d be sure to have something in place for the kids if anything should happen. That made me crazy just thinking about it. But I needed to think about it. I want to control everything for my kids. I want to make sure I can keep them safe. But it\u2019s a spiritual practice to let them go, to trust my mother-in-law, to trust my mom and their love for my boys, which is probably a lot stronger than I can understand. It\u2019s a spiritual practice to believe that God will honor the time I give my husband and fill in the gaps with grace.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not all deep here. I really want to go to Italy with my husband. And you better believe I\u2019m going to eat lots of pasta and drink really good wine and stand inside amazingly beautiful architecture, and sleep-in and drink espresso. And I may be anxious, but I\u2019ll be doing it with a heart that prayed over this decision. And the struggle is sometimes what matters more than the answer, right?<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
What about you? Are you judging me? What do you think about a mama leaving her kids for 10 days? Never mind, don\u2019t answer that. I can\u2019t take it.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On September 19, Chris and I are going to Italy. Without our kids. And we\u2019re going for ten days. There, I said it. I\u2019ve been so afraid to tell you and there are a lot of reasons: One, I\u2019m afraid you\u2019ll judge me for spending money on a trip like this. (Or even having the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":999,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,11],"tags":[22,50,83,84,95,121],"class_list":["post-4437","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-beautiful","category-motherhood","tag-anxiety","tag-food","tag-mama-life","tag-marriage","tag-parenting","tag-spiritual-practice"],"yoast_head":"\n
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