DEEP DIVE: Are Vacations Worth It?

0:00Study and play. Come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds. Get the Unreal College Deal. Everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 Premium and a year of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more at windows.com slash student offer. While supplies last, ends June 30th. Terms at aka.ms slash college pc. you're not reading a book if you've got a four-year-old near water that's for sure what fresh hell laughing in the face of motherhood i took time off from the office from this with margaret ables and amy wilson it can be anything but it can't be everything a podcast that solves today's parenting dilemmas so you don't have to whatever i'll do whatever

1:01Hey, everybody. Welcome to What Fresh Hell? Laughing in the Face of Motherhood. This is Amy. And this is Margaret. And today, Amy, we're talking about, is vacation worth it? Vacation for whom? Is it a vacation for everyone but us? Right. Stop me if you agree, disagree, have other thoughts. I think that vacation gets easier when your kids get older. For sure. That like vacation as with young kids, I'm going to come in hot with my favorite piece of writing ever. I'm going to read you the entire thing. OK. It's from The Onion. People still know The Onion, right? I mean, The Onion is still going, right?

1:39Yes. Young and still a thing. A parody newspaper. And I think this article, I don't know when it was printed, but I definitely remember seeing it as a mom of young kids and being like, this is a little too close to home. Yes. The article is called Mom Spends Beach Vacation Assuming All Household Duties Closer to the Water. And here it goes. It's dated from Nags Head, North Carolina, assume a fictional place. Continuously doing laundry, cooking or vacuuming in her family's rented beach cottage this week. Area mom, Catherine Yardley, has spent a much needed vacation performing all her usual household chores while in closer proximity to the ocean, sources confirmed.

2:20Isn't it nice to just get away for a while and relax by the water? Yardley said as she wiped down the kitchen counter and then took out the garbage tasks she would normally perform at a distance of 200 miles from the beach instead of 50 feet. I just love that I can be scrubbing the bathroom, look out the window and see the tide coming in. We should do this every year. At press time, Yardley was reportedly busy preparing a meal identical to what she would have made back at home, except for she planned to serve it on paper plates. Yeah. I mean, it's a little too true. It's basically vacation is home, but harder.

2:59You know, I think back to the, we didn't go to the shore every year, but we did a couple of times. We went to the Jersey shore and rented a condo. And I remember looking back at that, like, why doesn't my mom ever go in the water. Why doesn't my mom like ever go to the beach even? Why does she just hang out in the condo across the street from the ocean all day long? What's with that? Yeah. What a drag mom. I couldn't imagine what was keeping her upstairs when the beach was beckoning across the street. Now I know. We grew up going to my grandmother's house, which was on the beach. And it was the house that my mom's family had grown up going to.

3:39They lived in the Bronx. And then like, as you did, you had a little beach house. You know, my grandparents were teachers. It was like a very, you know, we're not talking about the Hamptons. Back when you could do such things, right? Yeah. They had a little beach house. Yeah. And we would go there in the summers. And I remember, I mean, it's like the magical place. And we talk about it as if it was, you know, Narnia, basically. Like it for us was this very, very magical place. And I remember as an adult talking to my mom about it. She was like, oh, yeah, those summers. Like it was obviously a very different experience for her, which was keeping track of us all.

4:16And then my mom also did. She put an ad in the newspaper. I mean, we talked about this again as adults at some point. And it was like, come spend the summer at this beach house. And this girl, I think from Kansas, answered this ad in the newspaper and would come and spend the summers. I mean, she was being paid. She came more than once. She came like three summers in a row. All right. And then I've told the story in the podcast. I got lost once as a two year old and I was missing for several hours. And the girl from Kansas had been, you know, kind of watching me when I went missing. And then kind of watching, it would seem clear.

4:53Right. Emphasis on the kind of. Yeah. I mean, it really was not her fault. It was totally my fault. I had said I'm going up to the house. And instead of going to the house, she watched me walk up to the house and at the very last minute because I'm an insane person I was like I think I'll go exploring and I walked off and I was gone for six hours and then the next summer my mom invited the girl from Kansas back again and the girl from Kansas as an adult when we saw her was always like oh that meant so much to me because I felt so guilty and then you you know gave me another chance and my mom was like please it's Meg's fault she's a lunatic.

5:26Don't worry about it. But anyway, it really struck me how much those magical moments were less magical for my mom. And I definitely see it now much more from the mom's point of view, the idea that like the magic has a cost. But at the same time, Amy, and we may debate on this, I do want to push back that this is the absolute default, that like the summer and the magic of vacation must be fun for everyone, miserable for the mom. And that is just the default in how we must operate. Right. We get into trouble when there is this notion that it should be or when the people in our families think like, right, I took time off from the office from this, so I'm going to do whatever I want.

6:11Right. Or the kids think it's their vacation. They don't have to do chores like they do at home. And I think sometimes the default parent who is the parent listening to this right now probably does sort of take that on like this needs to be special. This needs to be different. So all the things that have to remain the same, let me just do sort of over to the side with as little fuss as possible. Right. And that you are the maker of the magic at your own expense is just the story. Right. Because I do think that sometimes we contribute to that story a little bit as I am the maker of the magic at my own expense and it's horrible for me, but oh, well, I must do it because that is my lot in life gets in the way of us having more fun on our own vacations that like, right.

6:58Yes. When I go to Disney World with my kids, I was up every morning at 630 to like get on the stupid apps and my husband, I will say design the whole system, but I had to get up at 630 and pick the right, whatever, get on some stupid virtual line and ping the thing on the app to make us skip the line on the stupid thing. Horrible. That being said, that's Disney World. So like that's one kind of vacation also. And so I signed up to not sleep in on my week's vacation in Disney World, which I wasn't a big fan of. But I think what I'm saying is know what you're signing up for to get the vacation. So like, I don't want Disney World to be all of our vacations.

7:40I want some of our vacations to be, I sleep until 10 o 'clock in the morning, the kids eat cereal, and then we can go do whatever the day is about. But I definitely don't want every vacation to be like, I have to be up at 6.30 in the morning to fill out apps because I like to sleep and vacation. This is the reason we will never take a ski vacation. I'm not interested in that. I'm not interested in being up at 6 30 in the morning and hunting for gloves it's such a hassle yeah finding pieces and parts of equipment i am not interested in that because that does not sound like vacation to me i don't want to do it i will go we get a pass we have a little local mountain i will go for day trips but i'm never doing a week away in the cold where i have to get up to an alarm seven days a week to make everyone else happy i mean ski vacations and disney vacations Those kind of vacations are hard in a way because there is so much structure and demands and like the group lesson starts at 10 or whatever.

8:40You have to be somewhere. But what you won't hear on those vacations, at least, is I'm bored. There's nothing to do. Yes. True. Right. And when you start to hew towards the like, let's just all get a house by the lake and just chill, hang out and do whatever. Right. I mean, for me, like I'll bring six books and I'll see you at dinnertime. time. But kids, particularly older kids, will turn into, to paraphrase the Onion article, three teenagers consume six hours of TikTok 200 miles closer to the beach than they usually do. Closer to the water. Or little kids who have to be watched. You're not reading a book if you've got a four-year-old near water, that's for sure, you know?

9:23Right. So anyway, I think that sometimes we've been on vacations where I, as the ringmaster of obligations have been the legwork to do this. And my spouse, who's more like, don't worry about it, because that's, you know, the yang to my yin, right? If you don't have enough planned, particularly little kids, you need to go to the touch a truck at noon on Saturday to have like a linchpin in your Saturday. Like we all discovered this during the pandemic, right? You have to have Taco Tuesday. Did you say touch a truck? Yeah. Do you know what touch a truck is? It's just no. I'm so glad to be beyond these years, but it's a thing that different municipalities municipalities will do.

10:00It's touch a truck Saturday and they'll just bring out, oh, I don't know, the power and light truck and a fire truck and there's an ambulance and there's, you know, the police vehicle and all the little children who are interested in big cars and trucks can go touch the trucks, you know, get up and... Trucks. Touch a truck. Yeah. All right. Again, you don't do that for you. You do that for them and it's like a death march for you. However, not having any, it isn't as easy as like, just go with the flow because there has to be something to flow through or else everybody looks at their phones. Yeah, absolutely.

10:33And I think that to me, vacations follow the old rule that my pediatrician, not really my pediatrician, but my sister-in-law's mom, who is a pediatrician, gave me when I had little kids. It's 50 % what the baby needs, 50 % what you need. Like you have to match the needs. Like if you do everything for the baby, you're going to burn out and be tired. But if you don't take care of the baby's needs, everyone's going to be miserable. The baby's going to make sure of that. And I think that that rule applies to a lot of parenting. And I think it's good to apply to vacations. And it may be 50%, meaning if we do a Disney World vacation, that's all about the kids.

11:08My next vacation is going to be something that more suits my needs. It's not 50 % on every vacation, because I don't think you can have a 50-50 vacation between parents and kids when you're at Disneyland. I don't know that you can have a 50-50. I don't love skiing. So maybe for some people, it's like, well, I love skiing and I want to have that as a family activity. And so that's something we're going to do. But like, for me, that just comes off the list because nobody's that into it. And I'm not going to drive that train. Like, it's not interesting to me. You just hit on the hard part. Yes. For me, like a ski vacation.

11:44I am not into it. And my spouse and my kids, but I'm like chief enabler for an enterprise that isn't exciting to me and wasn't my idea, that's when I think I can get pretty frustrated. Keep it all inside. You know, don't tell anybody. Just push those feelings down, Amy. Push them down deeper, deeper, deeper. Here's an article that strikes on something that you were saying from Cafe Mom talking about going on vacation. And it says, and I thought this was really interesting. From the moment we decide to go on vacation, my mind begins looping the vicious cycle of planning, budgeting and panicking.

12:22And then here's what she says. We try to bring our husbands in it with no avail. She's talking to her sister-in-law about this plan. Whatever you guys think is best, they'll say, doesn't matter to where we go. They'll proudly state they think they are being helpful, easygoing. But we really want them to pick up the phones and look for places, too. And I think that, as we often say, you got to look at the problem and make verbal decisions. because, yes, there are situations where I would rather my husband just have nothing to say. Like my wedding, for example. I was like, just show up in a suit.

12:57I got the whole thing taken care of. Basically, my mom planned a lot of it. Any allergies I should know about? Yeah, but basically, like, I'm not interested in your input. But I do think that planning vacations, either it's I love planning a vacation. I'm going to put it all together. When we went to Paris, we went last summer for eight days with the family for our first time ever on a vacation like that with our kids. We almost always just go visit family. I was like, let's take a nice trip. Basically, I didn't want a lot of input from my husband. I've been to Paris. I knew what I wanted to see.

13:30I planned the whole thing, and I was pretty happy with that. But that's not every vacation. If we're going to your sister's wedding, you better be handling that. You do the tickets. But I think you have to give voice you want and not just be like, we're asking for help. They're saying whatever you want. That's annoying. Like, where is the point where you're saying, how are we doing this? I that thing about just do whatever you want. Like, I'll go with the flow. I'll do whatever. Yes, that's where I get stuck. Can we take a break? And I'll tell you how I fix that. Yes, please. So I just did the closet swap, right?

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17:08and lifestyle factors such as a plant-based diet, so you get the support that's right for you. Let your hair be one less thing to worry about. See visibly thicker, stronger, faster-growing hair in three to six months with Nutrafol. For a limited time, Nutrafol is offering our listeners $10 off your first month's subscription and free shipping when you visit Nutrafol.com and enter promo code laughing. That's Nutrafol.com spelled N-U-T-R-A-F-O-L dot com promo code laughing. So we were just talking about what it's like to be the vacation planner and to have the partner who is like, whatever, I'll do whatever, which they are meaning to be supportive, but just feels like so pick up the phone and do some research and call the hotels and find if the Great Wolf Lodge has room.

17:58I would get very stuck because it would be we're in this right now. Oh, are we going to go somewhere between Christmas and New Year's? I have big kids. Yes. Christmas and New Year's. I mean, I have kids in college. That's sort of like the one, like, you know, five day period when we know that you'll have all three of them, which becomes important. It's also a ridiculous time of the year to try to go anywhere. Right. And so my spouse and I have had approximately, you know, 10 conversations about like, we got to look. Oh, we got to decide on that. Then I'll think about it. I'll go to him and be like, what if we go to, you know, Orlando?

18:26And he'll be like, yeah, we could do that or this. And that's when I get frustrated because I have spent the person who will go with the flow. You go off and you present several options and you go to the go with the flow person. And they're like, yeah, or we could continue to go with the flow and come up with these other options that haven't come up with yet. And then several more months will go by. Oh, Amy, we have a term for this in my house. What is it? It's called alternate planables. And that is my husband's name. Right. Right. And it's because my husband likes to give an alternate plan. I'm like, hey, here's the thing.

19:00We've got the Boy Scouts thing and she's got to go to the friends and we've got the party. So why don't you pick up the present, take her to the party and then I'll take the other one to Scouts. Or I could take and I'm like alternate plan enables like if it's a lateral, I don't want to hear it. If you've got a better plan, I guess I'm open to it. But it's like my husband has this knee jerk reaction where he likes to just give voice to an alternate plan and a hypothetical alternative plan. Yeah. And I'm like, that's just moving all the pieces in a different order. And it's gotten to the point where I sometimes have to be careful because sometimes he might have a better plan and I just hear alternate planables.

19:37And I'm like, this is unacceptable to me. But yeah, I think this is where we've talked about this a long time ago. I don't remember who it is and I should give credit to them, but I don't remember where we were talking about like when you're figuring stuff out in a marriage that you bring stuff with like a number. Oh, it was Nick North. Nick North. Oh, good. I'm glad you remember. We the Norths on Instagram. Yep. We the Norths. Good plan. That you bring in like, I want to go visit my sister over the summer and it's like an eight for me. Out of 10. Right. And I also want to go visit this little cabin I found.

20:17And it's like a two for me that you kind of try to give things numbers. I do find this a little precious. Sometimes I was watching an influencer person on TikTok the other day and it was very like in every conversation my husband and I bring together. I am running at this number and you are running at this number. And therefore we have to pick each other up. I'm like, oh, my God, like my husband and I would do this twice. And then we would just start literally physically fighting. Like, I don't think that you can have every single conversation with your spouse. Be like, I want to sit down from my place of respect and say that I have these needs and they are at this number.

20:57Like, it's not realistic. But I do think that we sometimes skip the part in vacation where. All right, let's sit down for five minutes and just pick a place and get it done. And it doesn't have to be the best. This is also a great place for our favorite advice. Perfect is the enemy of done, right? You want to spend time with the fivesome that is your family, your nuclear family together during the one time of the year that's possible. Whether that happens in Orlando or Montana or just like at your sister's cabin in the woods, it doesn't really matter. So like you got to just sort of sometimes have the conversation of like we have these parameters and we have to get it done.

21:38Let's look at eight places on Airbnb and just decide on Friday night. Yes, I have learned slowly to do this, that when my partner just says like, I know, I'll do whatever. And then you bring two ideas and like, or the Galapagos, and they bring up a new hypothetical thing that I can perceive that as I haven't brought a pleasing enough answer to the table, right? And then I have to go do more work. I don't want to be assigned to now to go research the Galapagos. We're not going to go to the Galapagos. But I'm the one who's doing that when I think when my spouse says they just want to go somewhere and they're willing to go with the flow, I think they mean it.

22:15I think they are happy to have the flight details show up on their phone calendar at the end. And I keep going back and checking like, does this work? I am the executor in our family. I'm the one who has the time to do it and the bandwidth and I'm wired that way. But I don't really have to check. Like if we're going somewhere for Christmas, just do it. Just do it and then tell everybody where they're going and pick somewhere I want to go. Not the one that is the most perfect. Right. Yes. Or you give voice to that from the beginning. Like, here's the thing. We're going to go on vacation. I will take suggestions until this date.

22:47Then I will pick a place. And you now have grown kids. I mean, I haven't ever really been in a position. My kids just kind of are like, huh? Well, there's still like pieces of, you know, luggage. They go where we go and they never ask questions. Right, right. But yeah, you can either say like, here's the thing. We have this week of vacation. I'll take six suggestions. And then if you don't get a suggestion, it's like putting parameters around it. So it doesn't become a fight of like missing communication, I think is really important. That thing of like, right. Hey, this is the week we're going.

23:20I mean, my husband does not care. I put the whole trip together. You basically we started looking at camps. They were so expensive. I said, God, we could go away to Europe for what these camps would cost. I kind of said as a joke. And then I said, what if we just do like three weeks of total free for all? And then we do one nice trip. Oh, sure. I'd love that. What if we go to Paris and London? Great. I could have said Barcelona. I could have said Greece. I mean, he's happy for me to put it together. But then I also I'm like, I'm going to do all the day to day planning. I'm going to make a Google Doc and this is the train.

23:52This is. And then when the Google Doc says, buy this ticket, you go. He's better at buying tickets. He's good at finding the place. Like, that's your job. That's my job. But also, I'm not taking any notes on this trip. I will not be available for notes. There will be no like actually like. Why don't we get one facing the pool instead of facing the garden? We should have gotten an Airbnb. It would have been better. We would have been better if we were just staying in someone's apartment where we could cook. Like, that's something you should have said to me. Right. A month ago. Like, you could have.

24:21What's that called in like academia or whatever? It's like a reading window or something. It's like we have a listening window and then the listening window closes. I'm not defending this vacation live, right? I will not be getting up before you to take feedback. No, the listening window, either it opens or it's never exists or when it closes, it closes. And but I do think that clutch in this is building in. Like, for example, we took our RV trip a couple of years ago, something I've always wanted to do. it became clear that my husband was not going to be able to go on the RV trip. And so my father-in-law came with me.

24:59I wanted to do an RV trip. It's something we had done as kids. I kind of love RVs. I was excited to do it. But I recognized pretty clearly that it wasn't going to be a vacation for me, you know? And so I kind of built in like, okay, that's my vacation of the year that is not vacation at all. And then when we spent a week at my husband's house, I'm like, you'll be cooking all the meals, getting up with the kids. I'm sleeping in like I'm keeping track a little bit of who's doing what. And if I'm doing eight days in an RV, even though I want to, please be aware that part of this deal is on our next vacation, you're doing a lot of stuff.

25:38You may not be golfing as much as you usually do, because I'm really taking it on the chin by cooking in a moving vehicle and changing this thing over from beds today, six times. And you know, it's a lot. Yeah. But I think we skip that part where we're like, hey, let me voice my needs and see if I can get them met. Because the one thing I saw in a lot of articles I was reading is like, this is very unfair. And maybe it's unfair that you still have to voice your needs. Maybe people should just get your needs. But spoiler alert, they don't. Yeah. And so I don't think it always just has to be mom assumes all household duties closer to water.