Is There Such a Thing as a Graceful End to Vacation?

First published June 9, 2008

I can't say I remember ever having had a graceful end to any vacation in my life.

I tend to be the type who gets stuck somewhere between the utter relaxation that is, to me, the whole point of a vacation (soldier on, you exploring, traveling, learn-something-on-vacation types, but do it without me) and the pressing urgency to do everything I let myself not do during my vacation that awaits me on my return. The feeling resembles nothing so much as my worst memories of being stuck in a car on long trips with a great need for a bathroom and none to be found for thirty or forty miles -- a sweating, suspended state in which I know I will be fine but wonder when exactly the relief of normality will return. (We spent a good amount of time in a car on this trip, by the way, and I am happy to say I experienced no bladder distress.)

While I've had few peaceful vacation's ends, I feel pretty certain that none has been quite as harrowing as watching my child scream out of a face full of red blotches and throw himself from his teacher's arms as I left him at school this morning.

Sure, it was fun for all concerned spending a whole week watching him read books with Grandma and play ball with cousin Jim, but much of my vacation arose from the fact that Grandma and Jim were providing the necessary distraction to let me . . . ah, just not have to be the sole entertainment. And so, much as I would love to continue spending such time with my boy, it is not possible back home in Asheville where neither Grandma nor cousin Jim live.

Unfortunately, neither, it appears, is it possible for me to hang onto the modicum of sanity that descended over me when thrust into a place where I had, like, social things that were more pressing than work.

Things I Learned on Vacation

1) Even if you have a headache that hangs on all the way from Asheville to St. Louis, it will magically lift with just one lazy session of yoga on your mother-in-law's deck.

This is an important point because that first deck session took the place of what I expected to be a challenging yoga class. "Damn it," I thought before we left, as I spent two days with a sick child and a morning feverishly packing everything a family of three might need to spend a week and twelve hundred miles in a car during uncertain weather conditions with a sick child, "I deserve to go to a yoga class and no one better try to get in my way."

I was armed and ready with the location and time, and only a little bit bashful when Mike said he'd have to leave church with his mother early to relieve me of child care so I could go. Probably it would have been wise to shore up directions some time before his arrival that morning half an hour before class. Just as likely, it wouldn't have made a bit of difference, or at least that's what I told myself as I drove in confused little circles looking for the yoga studio tucked unobtrusively off the main road in a part of St. Louis with which I am not terribly familiar.

I had some inclination to blow up with frustration and annoyance at missing this crucial class. But, to be honest, I wasn't sure how well my practice would hold up after two days in a car, and the two Advil I had popped on my way to class hadn't kicked in yet. In fact, I realized, vacation includes a change in yoga practice, such as doing sun salutes in the morning breeze on my mother-in-law's deck beneath pots of flowers and next to a sliding glass door through which I would occasionally spot my little boy running across the room with an excited grin and a Matchbox car from his father's childhood in his hand.

Relaxing already. And yet still very much aware that I am giving myself a break precisely because I am on vacation and will inevitably end up eating things that aren't good for me, getting soft around the middle, and finding my yoga practice reduced to a little bit of mat work because it looks like everyone else is having such a good time sitting in the air conditioned living room drinking the gin and tonics Mike taught his mother to make.

2) Old friends are much more interesting than putting together a web site.

Well, duh. But try telling me that when I'm at home ignoring cell phone and email because there just isn't enough time. For some reason, the website launch seems so much more pressing when my computer is sitting on my desk at home than when it is in my lap on my mother-in-law's couch. Or, better yet, forgotten completely as I linger over lunch and laughter with a good friend.

3) I am a good mother.

Sure, we know we're good mothers in a general sense, but get around family, and it could get dicey. But somehow I didn't worry the whole week. I didn't sweat over not knowing as many children's songs as Jake's great-aunt (he didn't seem all that interested in them anyhow) or having as interesting toys as the ones Grandma had packed away in her basement ("It's the novelty," Mike assured me when I suggested a shopping spree upon our arrival home) or even, for the first time in weeks, not being able to ease his horrible nighttime cough. The pediatrician had handed off a big box full of free samples of children's Zyrtec the day we left, and neither Mike nor I thought twice about dosing him daily. At some point, a full night of sleep trumps all considerations of keeping your child free of unnatural substances.

4) I can relax and still get work done.

Did I really learn that last one? Because, like cramming for a test and forgetting every bit of information packed into my brain the second it is placed on the page, I can't quite remember how the relax-and-still-work thing goes.

I have some hazy memory of playing with Jake until someone else caught his attention, then grabbing my computer and writing me some HTML code. (Sorry, but I feel inappropriately and incorrectly young and hip writing simple links for the YogaMamaMe website. In truth, it reminds me an awful lot of writing my senior thesis on the mainframe computer in college because that was the only way to print "book quality" type back in 1988, so, you see, writing code actually makes me really old and, thus, hopelessly uncool. But I prefer not to think of it that way.)

The key element that is now missing, I suppose, is someone else to distract Jake. Unless you count the teacher who held his struggling little body as I threw agonized kisses his way when I ran out the door of his school this morning. Also missing, I might add, is a husband who feels guilty because I was having a mental breakdown just before leaving for vacation as the result of spending several days home with Jake, who was not feeling up to school. And a mother-in-law who could happily play with Jake until he goes away to college and then would stop only because they wouldn't let her live in the dorms.

And yet, my anxiety seems to be about more than just circumstances. As I walked away from Jake's school this morning I felt both overwhelmed by all the tasks that needed to be done and frightened of how open my day seemed. I craved structure, grabbed at it, even though the whole point of vacation is to heal us from our dependence on that very structure, the thing that keeps us catapulting ahead through exhaustion and malnutrition because . . . just because it HAS TO GET DONE.

This is the queasiness that has not changed since I became a mother. Whether it's Jake's laundry or my own bills, when I finish vacation I find myself huffing in shallow breaths of anxiety over getting my life back into a set of boxes I can place in front of me, organize, and cautiously pat to assure myself that I'm okay. Sure, I felt much, much happier when I let go of those boxes and just let life happen for a week. But even then I did so within another structure -- my vacation.

Why is it, I wonder, so difficult to let go when we're back in the lives that we live most of the time?

Somewhere Between Structure and Chaos Lies Strength

Structure is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. I, for example, need to have a way to make time for myself during the day. This way involves getting Jake to school, and getting Jake to school entails making his lunch, getting him dressed, and putting on a semblance of an outfit that can get me out the door for a few minutes in the morning. I need to be sure I pick him up before he melts down, spend time playing, feed him, get him to bed in time for me and Mike to have some adult time. (That last piece is a kicker, isn't it? So much easier, we learned on vacation, to keep him up until he flops onto the bed with exhausted relief and no coaxing on our part at all. Easier, but probably not the model of responsible parenting.)

Without structure, how would we pay the bills, do the gardening, live in this world?

And yet. Structure can also make us ill. We get so dependent on it that if something goes wrong -- if, say, Jake isn't up to going to school during the week I am supposed to learn how to finalize my website -- we can break. Literally. There were many, many moments that week before vacation when I folded over my lap sobbing about the state of my life and murmuring to Jake in a barely coherent voice, "You haven't done anything wrong, Sweetie. Mommy just needs a moment."

And, of course, when you break down in front of your child you end up in even worse shape because you know you have scarred him for life with this unguarded display of despair in front of his wide, blue, confused eyes.

See? I want to start crying now because the damage is already done.

So where is that safe space, where you have enough structure to survive yet enough freedom to let yourself breathe and live and not miss the important things because your calendar says you must take the dog to the groomers at 3:15 on Wednesday?

Grasping at this question in an attempt to ward off a violent anxiety attack this morning, I found myself thinking about asanas.

There is a definite structure to a yoga pose. A good teacher will tell you so many things about which way your thighs should be rotating and how to make your heart lift even higher that you may find yourself wondering if you will ever be able to do it right.

But the beauty is that you are. Because as many things as there are to work toward in a pose, as soon as your body assumes the pose in the way that works for it, the pose becomes yours. You own it. You keep working for something even stronger, you keep striving to open more deeply, build more strength, breathe more freely. But you are in the pose.

So structure exists to give us a direction, an intention. But along the way, we should remain conscious of what the structure is there for in the first place -- to help us become strong, flexible, and able to breathe. If we forget about these things, so overwhelmed by the structure that we fail to see our place in it, then what's the point of practicing at all?

Furthermore, yoga poses and the structure they impose are merely vehicles for finding our way into peacefulness. We assume a finite universe of asanas because it is in the familiarity that we find the space to go deeper. You can do a million sun salutes in a lifetime, but the beauty lies in being conscious of every one of them, of every movement that makes every one up. You learn to observe rather than push, to recognize slow growth, to find the beauty in where you are in the present moment.

What a lovely intention to give to your every mundane, frazzled day. Of course there are a million things on your to-do list; they give you momentum, a place to practice, a beautiful life. Really. That trip to the dry cleaners is, if you use it correctly, the road to inner peace. If you don't let it waylay you into a frenzy of checklists and frustrations, running late and thinking only of those five minutes tonight when you will slip under the covers and read Entertainment Weekly until your eyes slide shut and you dream of writing checks while singing onstage in American Idol.

So lucky me for being just back from vacation. Rather than cower in front of the pile of things I healthily abandoned for a week (writing blog posts, depositing checks, making doctor appointments) I can take a deep breath of that freeing vacation air and walk forward with a lazy sense of adventure, ready for what comes and, more importantly, for what doesn't come just when I had planned.

Surya Namaskar A (Sun Salute A)

If you practice in a yoga studio, chances are you've done Surya Namaskar A before. Maybe a hundred times. Or more. And there's an equally good chance that, however great your intentions when you began class, there comes a point when they are nothing more than the glue between the more interesting asanas your teacher is throwing at you.

There is a reason (of course) that the astanga sequence begins with five rounds of Surya Namaskar A. Sure, it physically warms you and works your joints, preparing your body for the practice to come. But it is also the time to settle your mind. The repetition is both a challenge and a vehicle for quieting your mind. Done it before? Not a reason to mentally wander to your to do list. To the contrary, a perfect time to be aware of how easy it would be to let your mind slip away.

So, you see, beginning a practice with Surya Namaskar A provides the answer I was looking for this morning. It is the structure that makes everything else possible. Without it, how would I ever be able to soar?