A few years ago, I began to suspect that my kids did not love going on vacation with me. Perhaps because our ideas of vacation differed. Some of our more memorable trips—for me, anyway—have involved: backpacking through Cambodia (in August), hiking up the base camp of Mont-Blanc (and getting lost), and driving through the Costa Rican jungle, stopping to sleep on the floor in strangers’ homes because, as it turns out, there are no hotels in that area of the jungle, or official roads.
My feeling is that if I factor in visiting family for holidays as well as the needs of my job, our vacation time is pretty limited. So whatever break we take has to be unforgettable, so unforgettable it encapsulates all the fantastic, adventurous lives that I dreamed of us leading every day…but actually don’t. In the process, we have to undo our soft American lives, we have to learn something, and most of all, we have to better ourselves or at least learn a few foreign phrases. Even if that means sweating up the steps of an ancient temple when it’s 113 degrees.
At the end of the pandemic, while attempting to get my career back, I took on a full-time job, and mistakenly, a full load of writing and teaching assignments. My kids took their spring breaks with my ex-husband, and my idea to compensate was to schedule one amazing long weekend with each boy during which we would accomplish everything we would normally do in 10 days…but in four.
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It was around this time that I read Elise Loehnen’s book On Our Best Behavior—the second chapter of which left me horrified with self-recognition. “Sloth,” the title of the second chapter, is all about how women flog themselves into one task after another in order to justify their existence on the planet. By “work,” Loehnen is not speaking of actual work, which so many of us must do in order to pay for wacky things like groceries, mortgages, and dental care. Instead, she is talking about the 24-hour-a-day slog that goes far, far beyond any job requirement because we feel, as she writes, that “if I don’t do enough, I won’t be enough. Work is what distracts me from anxiety. In my world-view, ‘making it’ means putting my shoulder to various boulders like a multi-tasking Sisyphus—it doesn’t mean I know where I’m pushing them, only that should I stop, I’ll be crushed.”
Hhmm. There were reasons why she and I shared this feeling. I grew up around hard workers. My dad was a doctor who had to dash off to the ER on Christmas morning. My mother was a social worker who worked all day at Head Start, then moonlighted on the weekends at nursing homes. My profession—writing—is hardly as noble as either of theirs, and yet I have this belief that if I’m not busy doing for my kids, for the planet, for my dogs, for the house, for my boss, for my mother, for my father, for my career, for health insurance, life insurance, then I should be growing my own food, learning Italian, working out, or making obscure Moroccan tagines that I have never made before, then inviting over the elderly, lonely neighbor to eat the tagine so that I will participating more actively in my community.
It occurred to me that my work life and vacation life were the same thing: punitive. My 12-year-old son had some time off in April. I decided, right that minute, that we were not going to Jordan or Istanbul or even Detroit for our long, amazing weekend. We had to relax. We had to change our attitudes. We would go to Miami!
Unfortunately, after I had done a few hours of research and thinking, the schedule I developed included a swamp boat tour of the Everglades, a walking tour of Little Havana, a lecture on Cuban music, a visit to the Rubell Museum, and a visit to the bookstore Books & Books in Coral Cables. We were arriving on Friday at 10 p.m., leaving on Tuesday at noon.
On the flight, I continued reading Loehnen’s chapter on sloth. A few pages after discussing her own work compulsions, she writes about the person she used to be before her kids, jobs, and full adulthood. In her 20s, Loehnen went on a trip to Mexico with her parents and brother. The latter three woke up every morning at 4 a.m. to go birdwatching. She, on the other hand, ambled down to the beach to doze in a lounge chair, drink margaritas, eat guac, and read novels. These choices did not go over well with her dad—a man who had paid for the vacation and, understandably (to me, at least) expected his kid to “get something out of it!”
One morning, to Loehnen’s surprise, her mother opted out of the pre-dawn birding and went down to the beach with Loehnen, where she drank booze and sat under an umbrella. Her mother’s conclusion? “This is really nice. I get why you come here. It is so relaxing.”
Loehnen’s conclusion? “Wow,” she thinks. “It’s as if this lady has never experienced a vacation before. Then I realized, she hadn’t.”
My conclusion? How had Loehnen become her own mother? More importantly, why had I become Loehnen’s mother? Why did I wake up at 4 a.m. to write and exercise before work? Why did I drive myself over the cliff, wringing the pleasure out of every moment in my life in an effort to rigidly and relentless self-improve? It wasn’t the joy of the learning (though I do love to learn). But just maybe it was exactly as Loehnen pointed out: I wasn’t worthy enough the way I was.
Worse, if I were to stop doing, what in the hell would I do? I didn’t know. I really didn’t. Except to do what good, clueless girls do when they encounter cooler girls like Loehnen: rigidly and relentlessly copy them.
All I needed now was a lounge chair, an umbrella, and a stack of novels. Breaking with my rigorously fun tour of Miami, I changed plans and poured us into an Uber headed for the Acqualina in Sunny Isles Beach—a good 30 minutes away from all the wonderful, cultural-inspired educational opportunities of the city.
As we pulled into the resort, my son’s head fell off. In his experience, we did not go to resorts. We went to practical, affordable Marriotts, Airbnbs, the sofa beds of friends. The Acqualina looked like a cross between an Italian villa and a Minecraft temple. Before we got out of the car, I asked him if he wanted to go get anything at the mall. He loves a mall. He said no. I said, “Are you sure? Because once we go inside there, we are not coming out.”
“What about the alligator tour?” he said.
“No alligators,” I said. “No hiking around, looking at owl droppings for digested mice bones.” (One of our fun family excursions while camping in the Smokies.)
“Right,” he said. Perhaps because he didn’t believe me. At some point, obviously, I was going to pull out flashcards and start drilling him on wetlands biology.
As we squished in our flip-flops through the marble lobby—which put so very many post offices and banks to shame—something giddy infected my soul. I didn’t let the bellman take our bags, of course. But I did let that bellman lead us to our room, which was the size of an apartment with a sweeping balcony that overlooked the ocean, the beach, and the four massive pools. A grove of palm trees fringing the entire property, rustling in the sun.
We dumped our suitcases—without unpacking!—and headed down to find lounge chairs. A girl in a uniform scurried out, encasing our every cushion with fresh, fluffy towels and adjusting the umbrella to a perfect, readerly angle. We laughed our heads off with shock and happiness. We lay down. I had a 715-page novel in my hand called The Covenant of Water, by Abraham Verghese. Two other backups lay at the bottom my bag: a slim, poignant Irish novel called Small Things Like These, by Claire Keegan, and Owner of a Lonely Heart, by Beth Nguyen, an achingly beautiful memoir about a Vietnamese-American daughter separated from her mother during the war.
As soon as I cracked open The Covenant of Water, my son began to fidget. “They have a basketball court,” he said. As if by magic, a man presented him with a real, live basketball. We both giggled. And blinked. On any normal vacation, I would have insisted on playing basketball with my son. So that we could bond. So that I could finally learn to keep score, stop elbowing, and maybe win a single round of horse. But not today! My job was to be on vacation, to lie there, learn nothing, and read.
Off my son went to play. There, I stayed to read. When he came back, sweaty and hungry, he suggested we walk down to a Walgreens and buy some Lunchables so that we didn’t waste our money on expensive hotel food. I ignored him and, to his confusion, raised the little flag that came with our lounge chair that alerted a waiter to come rushing over. “I’ll have a margarita,” I said. “And a guac and chips.”
My son glared at me. I looked at him, with eyes that I’d been saving for some rare occasion when I went against everything I believed in just because it just felt so darn wonderful. Then I ordered a hamburger, chicken nuggets, and a shrimp cocktail. And when the food came on a tray, straight to the pool, it was glorious. We stuffed our faces. We read. We paddled around in the water. I had a second margarita. We read some more. We napped. We waddled upstairs in the dying light to change, then go downstairs and eat in the hotel because this one time we didn’t have to find a wonderful, unknown local eatery in a distant, unexpected suburb. No, we could just plop down in the sushi place in the lobby (Ke-uH, which was amazing; please try the Bonzai “Truffle” roll) then waddle back upstairs to sleep on beds that weren’t covered in dog hair or sprawling with the limbs of my son’s sibling, beds that felt as if they had been stuffed with the breath of gods and made up with sheets woven from thinly sliced clouds. I stared up at the ceiling (yes, there was a chandelier). I was stuffed and openly, proudly slothful. I had done nothing with my day. Nothing! And yet, I was exhausted. I was falling asleep and vaguely aware that I was resting. Resting, it turns out, was so much better than I had ever understood. I needed to do it again, just soon as I woke up—an activity that on this vacation would not happen until noon.
On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to Be Good
On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to Be Good
Acqualina Resort & Spa
- Where to find this tropical oasis: 17875 Collins Avenue Sunny Isles Beach, FL 33160
- The number of acres of private beachfront property to explore during your stay: 4.5
- The number of pools you can lounge by: 3
- The number of dining destinations where you can sample the high class resort fare: 4
- The number of spa treatments you can indulge in: 28
