I am a bit of a physical wreck these days — sore right elbow, sore left wrist, aching hip capsule. (“Hip capsule” is a term I learned from my osteopath brother-in-law so I believe it is something that exists, or at least I know I’m not the one who made it up.) These ailments, as you might suspect, can complicate a yoga practice. Make one consider not practicing yoga even.
Not me. I’m still practicing and hoping these are not signs of aging and suspecting they come from working a little bit too hard at the adjustments I am always making to my yoga practice and only occasionally becoming convinced I am suffering from an aggressive cancer that has eaten away at my bones and has gone undetected because I practice all this yoga, which is far more beneficial than chemotherapy but still can’t stop the inevitable.
This all seems to have precious little to do with the family vacation we took a couple of weeks ago. Except, in my world, it has everything to do with it.
The vacation was inspired by the panicked notion that with preschool closed for two and a half days for Rosh Hashana we would be faced with four and a half days of actually taking care of our kids.
This might have been less daunting this year, with Mike now working for himself and therefore theoretically free to help me out on the days when preschool cannot (in the same way I was theoretically free to take off from my own work for every school closing and twenty-four hour quarantine from a temperature surpassing 100 degrees in the years when Mike had a “real” job and mine was merely the kind you do in your own home). But these two and a half days happened to follow immediately on the heels of the three-day weekend for Labor Day. In other words, we were facing a whopping one-and-a-half-day workweek and a lot of time with kids who had not been sufficiently exhausted by the preschool playground.
You’d think we would have had plans in place to deal with this terrifying prospect, seeing as how we had for months been in the possession of a preschool calendar that warned us of what we were facing. This calendar had, in fact, been hanging on the side of the refrigerator next to the diaper coupons and right above the dog biscuits, so it’s not like I hadn’t taken notice of it in plenty of time to make some plans.
And yet. I didn’t. Mike and I talked about going away quite a bit. But he didn’t make plans either.
Which is how we found ourselves on Wednesday night — the first night of Rosh Hashana, which wouldn’t have meant too much in this household had it not been for the four days of childcare responsibilities facing us — sniping at each other for the other’s inability to use the internet to find exactly the Folly Beach beach house we had promised each other.
The idea seemed so simple. Folly Beach is about the closest shoreline to Asheville, despite being in a different state from our own North Carolina that does, if you look at a map, sport an impressive amount of shoreline. Just none of it as close to us at the South Carolina shore.
We had been romanced over the summer by the stories of friends who had taken a week off, rented a house in Folly Beach yards from the water, and motored to nearby restaurants on beach buggies, which I can’t quite imagine and don’t know how my eighteen-month-old would ride but still held great appeal for me. Nothing but bare feet and sandcastles and bathing suits, I thought. And since we were talking about the weekend after Labor Day we figured we’d hit the triple crown — lots of empty houses to choose from, low rates, and no crowds.
The first and last may have been possibilities — I don’t really know because we never did make it to Folly Beach — but they were stymied by the incorrect assumption standing in the middle of that trifecta like a lemon breaking up a row of oranges on the Daily One Hundred slot machine in a Vegas casino that would not be my idea of a good four-day vacation destination even if it were closer than Folly Beach.
Turns out you cannot rent a beach house in Folly Beach for less than a week, even if it is the weekend after Labor Day and even if the rates do, or so they say, drop a bit from the high season.
Again, a little advance planning might have provided us with this information in time to easily deal with it. But we have small children, so nothing really gets done in advance in our house.
Instead, as Mike suggested we resort to returning to the Homewood Suites outside Charleston that we visited when Jake was eighteen months old — a perfectly nice vacation and all, but not compared to a week stepping out my back door in a bikini that no one but my husband who is stuck with me and my kids who don’t care would see me wearing — I wrested the computer from him and began my own search.
This consisted of typing “suite hotels” into google maps and clicking on every one that showed up on the Carolina coasts from Wilmington, North Carolina, to Hilton Head, South Carolina. (The humor in this statement will become more apparent to you if you look at a map and see just how much coastline exists between Wilmington, North Carolina, and Hilton Head, South Carolina.)
I won’t share with you the gritty details of my search, the number of times I rubbed my contact lenses in the futile hope that they would somehow lubricate themselves so I could move my nose more than three inches away from the laptop screen. Suffice to say that I clicked on one link that led to another that led to — a beautiful and reasonably priced condominium in Myrtle Beach.
This is where the theme of my essay (finally) begins to emerge. No one really expected the condominium to be all that great, except maybe Jake who figured if it had a pool it rated five stars in his own personal AAA guide. And no one thought Myrtle Beach would be our kind of vacation spot, except maybe me who, after seven months without the slightest hint of an ocean smell in the air would have been content to spend a weekend on the oil wrecked shores of Mississippi.
In other words, I felt as if I hadn’t tried hard enough and therefore wouldn’t have a vacation worth having.
Still, come Thursday morning, Mike and I packed up the car, threw in the obligatory Backyardigans DVD’s (why make Lily wait until she’s older to acquire the television habit?), and headed for the coast.
Our first stop was a lovely little park I found about an hour and half from our home (again, the miracles of google maps). The idea was to drive to the outer limits of Lily’s patience, tire the kids out, and get them to nap the rest of the way.
The park was actually a great hit. So much so that — very much not according to plan — Jake didn’t want to leave.
“We need to get in the car to drive to the hotel,” I explained.
“Where’s the hotel?” Jake asked. He had asked this same question ever since the car was about about two blocks from our home, so by now I knew that the concept of why one stays in a hotel was lost on him.
“It’s really far away,” I said. “So you should probably take a nap.”
“I want to go home,” Jake proclaimed.
The promise of another Backyardigans DVD after a little quiet time so Lily could nap got him in the car. That and the fact that he really had no idea whether we were heading back toward home or, as was the case, in the opposite direction.
Quiet time got us a good fifty miles further and raised my hopes. If only our children napped the rest of the way there our vacation would actually be a vacation for Mommy too!
“Can I watch another Backyardigans?” Jake asked just as this thought took hold, thus shattering both the silence and my hopes that maybe we would have a real vacation of the sort one has before one has kids even though I hadn’t tried hard enough to plan one.
Here’s what I learned as we cruised into Myrtle Beach: sometimes it’s better not to try too hard.
Take the condominium. It was great. Amazing. Spacious and clean and reasonably priced and not full of tourists and with a pool we could see out the back door where we met a lovely retired couple who insisted we borrow their beach chairs and the raft that Lily especially loved for the remainder of our time in their new home. In my world, this does not happen. You do not find a place to stay at eight o’clock the night before you wish to begin your vacation and have it turn out to be really nice. Instead, you discover once you arrive that the email confirmation you received is only confirmation that you contacted the website, not confirmation of an actual, confirmed reservation. Or you discover too late that the webcam video you watched on YouTube was not, in fact, of the unit in which you are booked but of one across town that the rental company presents as (in fine print) an example of the properties they have on offer. Or there are no sheets or thin walls and child-hating neighbors or a cockroach problem.
We had none of these things and even a pretty good night’s sleep with Lily happily ensconced in the make-shift crib constructed out of couch pillows and blankets that I arranged on the floor next to my bed and Jake happily snoring in the sort of Big Boy Crib we made for him by pushing the couch and love seat together. The second bedroom with the two twin beds will be something we use in five or ten years, I suppose, but it was nice having it there, even unused.
So deeply had my accommodation triumph convinced me that our entire vacation would go just as planned that I failed to take seriously Jake’s demands that we go to the pool first thing the next morning.
“We’re here for the beach!” I crowed. “You’re going to love the beach!”
“I want to go to the pool first,” Jake pouted.
“We need to go to the beach now because it will get crowded later,” Mike said in another in a long string of unsuccessful attempts to use logic on a not-yet-four-year-old. One day it will work. Maybe when Jake’s fourteen. Or thirty-four.
“I DON’T WANT TO GO TO THE BEACH!!!!!!” Jake informed us.
“If you don’t like it, we can come home,” I promised, certain that he would like it.
And so we became possibly the first couple in history to drive to the beach on vacation with a car stuffed full of juice boxes and beach toys and towels and a child pleading not to go to the beach.
Luckily, it was a scant mile away, so we didn’t have to listen to the screaming for long. When we got there, I coaxed Jake out of the car and tiptoed across the sand with him and Lily while Mike lugged enough provisions for us to spend our entire four-day vacation literally on the beach.
“Isn’t this fun?” I asked as we kicked off our shoes and chased sandpipers. (“Tweet tweet!” Lily cried joyfully as she spotted another one.)
“I don’t like it. I want to go home,” Jake replied, proving to me as so many children have proven to so many parents that there are no such things as “vacation plans” when you have children.
But then Mike took Jake in the water and he discovered the joy of waves and undertow and wet sand in your bathing trunks and Daddy’s strong arms scooping you up before you swallow too much saltwater. Lily played with the new toys we bought just for playing in the sand and quite enjoyed building sandcastles with her father until a wave destroyed the castle and, more insultingly, got her bottom wet.
In the end, it was Lily who insisted we go back to the condominium.
By the afternoon, I was feeling strong enough to decide that we would confront Myrtle Beach, even if it did mean a bunch of touristy spots in which Mike and I had no interest and the kids too much.
Which is how we discovered the Ripley’s Aquarium.
“I need to do an internet search on this,” I murmured as we walked through a tunnel surrounded by sharks, both of my children mesmerized. “Maybe private aquariums mistreat their animals. Maybe they starve them and that’s why they’re so active.”
Because how could I enjoy an aquarium in a makeshift vacation to a tourist spot best known for being a spring break destination for alcoholic college kids?
(I did do the internet search. There is nothing at all wrong with private aquariums. They do not mistreat their animals. They do not starve them. They just have more money than nonprofit aquariums.)
The next afternoon — after an evening in the pool and a morning at the beach – it was “Broadway on the Beach,” a terrifying conglomeration of mall stores, restaurants serving friend food, and bright colors designed to attract children and annoying people. Here, we discovered a pleasant ride on a carousel and a bounce house yard where Jake ran from the Barbie bounce house to the Sponge Bob Squarepants one with a new five-year-old friend of the type one makes when one is three-and-a-half years old and playing in a bounce house yard until the rain drove us away.
Myrtle Beach, I managed to admit to Mike, was not such a bad place. I’d even — here, I pushed my luck — return some time.
And this was the theme of our vacation. Whatever I had planned, I didn’t expect it to be enough because I hadn’t really tried very hard. Whatever I thought I had planned adequately, either Jake or Lily disagreed (though, to be fair, Lily was pretty agreeable about everything). The harder I tried, the less it mattered. And we still had a great time.
I believe anyone would describe a vacation with small children pretty much the same way.
Which brings me back to my yoga injuries.
I think I got them from trying too hard. A couple of months ago, one of my instructors corrected my hand placement in downward facing dog, suggesting that my wrist creases should match up in a straight line parallel to the front of my mat. “I knew that!” I agreed, desperately grasping at my days as a yoga teacher, which are retreating as surely as my children are growing. As if to prove my yoga acumen, I corrected. Hard. Overcorrected, some might say. And ended up with the sore right elbow.
After living with that for months, I told another yoga teacher about it. She suggested half-chatarangas and keeping my shoulder blades well down my back. “I haven’t been paying attention to my shoulders!” I agreed in wonder, before spending every waking moment for weeks doing shoulder loops and thrusting my heart forward. It did end up benefiting my practice. Until I kicked my left wrist doing one of the jump throughs I finally figured out as a result of the overemphasized shoulder loops, thus causing the second of my injuries.
The hip capsule pain probably came from overstretching, in combination with carrying around a twenty-three pound child. When Jake was eighteen months old, it was the other hip that hurt all the time.
So here’s the thing you frequently hear in yoga class and perhaps never hear in real life, although it would be useful if you did: Trying too hard can hurt.
It’s so contrary to what we’re taught our whole lives. Trying too hard is what most of us do when you remind us about having a good work ethic. Try harder, we’re told. Get better grades. Get into a better school. Get a better job. Have better children. Okay, not “better” children, but smarter, higher achieving, cleverer. Whatever.
We exhaust ourselves trying to do it right. And we end up getting it wrong.
I have been recognizing this in my yoga practice for a little while now. The harder I tried — earnestly, confidently — the less I could just play and find the poses. On the days I told myself not to try so hard, I had fun and I found myself soaring.
Of course, the stakes seem so much higher in real life. How can you stop trying so hard when you’re talking about your career, your children’s well being, your own?
But it’s just when you find yourself in this position — trying so hard you can practically feel the wheels spinning — that you should maybe consider heading to Myrtle Beach with an eighteen-month-old and a three-and-a-half-year-old. Because I promise you, give them four days and they will convince you that you’re much better off trying less and living more.
Really. You can even borrow them and find out.
My Easy Yoga Tip of the Day (Even if You Don’t Practice Yoga)
You guessed it. Don’t try so hard. In yoga class, in life, whenever it feels safe to you. Stop making it all your responsibility. Take a vacation and realize that it’s not really vacation. It’s just a better way of living.