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Editor's Note: Week-need
By Steve Lange
And every year, Lindy and I dream about our possible plans months in advance. Las Vegas? Mexico? A Caribbean cruise?
Of course, the mandatory disclaimer: We love our kids. Oh god we’ll miss them. Our baby’s only 16 months old and how will we possibly survive without her for seven whole days? THE CHILDREN! WON’T SOMEBODY PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN?!
But that’s just something you have to say, even if you don’t buy into it 100 percent. Like when people say they don’t really want to win the lottery. (“Win the lottery? No, thank you. That kind of glorious joy coupled with multiple speedboats breaks families apart. And the only thing holding our marriage together right now is our debilitating credit card debt.”)
Because anyone who has a nine-year-old daughter, six-year-old son, and 16-month-old daughter has to admit—a week without them would be a guilty pleasure, like eating ice cream for breakfast. Especially if eating that ice cream somehow magically transported your three kids 800 miles away for seven days.
So, for that month before the kids leave, Lindy and I try to imagine that certain-to-be-magical week. Maybe we’ll find ourselves standing under tropical waterfalls. Drinking daiquiris and slow dancing to steel drum bands. Maybe we’ll spend our dinners eating in intimate restaurant booths whispering adult things in each others’ ears, then throwing our heads back and laughing, laughing, laughing. Oh, Steve, that was priceless.
Like a Viagara commercial set inside a commercial for Sandals Resort.
The kidless week, though, is one of those events that rarely match our expectations. Like the time, for a column, that I tested five different aphrodisiacs in five nights (“Spanish flyboy,” January ‘04). Sure, the Horny Goat Weed ($1.99 for two tablets from Loving Fun Lingerie) promised to be a “healthy libido fortifier to push those love buttons,” but really the niacin just made my ears feel very warm for about a half an hour.
Today is Day Five of the Week Without The Kids. And while we have eaten at Michaels and had drinks at McMurphy’s, we have yet to walk barefoot on a beach or stand hand-in-hand under a tropical waterfall. We’re just too busy. Travel is too expensive. The price of plane tickets prohibitive. It’s been five days and Lindy has not said anything close to “Oh, Steve, that was priceless.”
So, instead, we’ve had conversations in which someone did not immediately make a reference to Harry Potter (daughter Hadley) or Star Wars (son Henry). Played cribbage without someone trying to eat the cards (baby Emma). Saw a concert that did not feature a giant yellow bird or a person in a map costume singing “I’m the map, I’m the map, I’m the map, I’m the map ...”
The real beauty of the Week Without The Kids, we’ve found, is that it’s our one real chance a year to, if we want to, do nothing. Or at least do nothing until we want to do something. The one chance a year to sleep in until 10 a.m. on a Sunday. The one chance a year to, on a cravings whim, head out to Newt’s for a 9 o’clock dinner.
Yesterday, when I came home from work, Lindy was not, in fact, waiting for me wearing a slinky dress and asking if we were going clubbing. She was, truth be told, wearing brown sweatpants splattered with blue paint. “Got the second coat on Henry’s room,” she said when I walked in. “And I got a lot of stuff ready for the rummage sale. Now I may go take a nap.”
I did not whisper anything in her ear. There was wet paint on her lobes.