What Vacation Looks Like for a Working Mom

Years ago, after my friend Tina adopted her first daughter, she told me something that her mother had once told her: "Mothers never go on vacation. They just change sinks." I laughed at the time, but I knew it was going to be true. Now, with two small children, my husband and I have been on a dozen trips with them both; we travel to Seattle and Alabama every year, often more than once, and they are wonderful trips. Our families are a huge help, and often give us time to sneak off by ourselves, sometimes even overnight. But these trips are not vacations.

What is a vacation? As an academic it's a little hard to say. I have "worked" every major holiday of the year, except, perhaps, for Christmas. I have worked on my dissertation on the 4th of July, finished a book manuscript in August, and used many, many a Thanksgiving Break and Spring Break to do research and writing. So what is a vacation?

For me, a vacation is taking at least 30 minutes to wake up. For most of my adult life I thought I was the laziest of creatures, lying there in bed, every morning, telling myself to get up. But then I had kids, and I began to realize that those 30 minutes were important. That was my process for waking up. I used those 30 minutes to remember my dreams, or I thought about what I wanted to accomplish that day. Sometimes I fell back asleep again, and woke up again. 30 minutes of half-waking bliss.

For me a vacation is also visiting an archive. Right now I'm at Duke University looking at film "press books." These are large, 11" by 17" broadsides that tell theater owners and movie distributors how to advertise a particular film. This collection specializes in press books for films starring African Americans.

This might not be most people's idea of a vacation. It's weirdly arduous work, involving odd shaped boxes, dusty documents, and bad lighting. I'm always a little cross-eyed at the end of the day. But it's fun, and creative, and liberating---liberating because it's just me, and the past. Sometimes I emerge into the light of the day and I forget where I am, or what year it is. Is it 1958, when Sidney Poitier starred in The Defiant Ones, handcuffed to Tony Curtis as the ultimate metaphor of postwar race relations? Or is it 2010, where, at Duke University, whites and blacks walk side by side in pleasant conversation.

For me a vacation is also getting to be as messy as I want with no one there to grumble at me. Right now the floor of my hotel room is covered with towels, clothes and sugarless gum wrappers. I put a "do not disturb" sign on the door so that not even the hotel maids would have to see my mess. It's my mess. I can't wait to go back to it after I'm done in the archives!

I miss my kids. I miss Josh. The novelty of being in a hotel room by myself wears off quickly. But make no mistake, I am on vacation. And, now that I have people I really love to come home to, I can savor the loneliness while lying in bed for those precious 30 minutes every morning. I know it won't last, and that's a good thing.