Second Honeymoon

First honeymoons celebrate two people finding each other, coming together, and surviving the daunting task of not only making themselves fancy, but also of hiring people to feed and photograph other fancy fully-grown people for one entire evening. You spend perhaps six nights and seven days recovering–eating, sleeping, having lots-o-sex—and anticipating a full set of Wustof knives awaiting your return. This first honeymoon serves in stark contrast to your twenty-something life with no children, largely spent eating, sleeping, having lots-o-sex, and surviving with nary a decent knife to your name. To make the transition from coupledom to first honeymoon, the stagehands need only turn the revolve to “tropical location.”

Yes, you worked hard at your gainful employment and carefully budgeted your dual-income-no-school-fundraisers. You juggled your loyalties of partying with single friends vs. partying with couples friends, and slaved over those two loads of laundry once per week. There was band practice! Rehearsal!! You two deserved something more than ordering in four nights and going out the other three, dammit. Your legal union merited room service every morning and ocean-side dining nightly. At last, you earned rose petals strewn about your bed and towels fashioned into exotic birds and/or teddy bears wearing sunglasses.

Yesterday we boarded a plane in Madison, Wisconsin, and landed in a parallel universe I’ll call Second Honeymoon.

Fourteen years after our first honeymoon and twenty-four hours into the second, and Second Honeymoon WINS. And that’s not only because we haven’t vacationed just the two of us for a decade, nor due to that fateful Puerto Vallarta day-trip away from first honeymoon resort that culminated in fireworks of the intestinal variety.

It’s eight AM on the Pacific coast—nearly hangover AM central time. Husband sleeps in the next room. No one nags at him to get up or tackles him in his vulnerable state. Instead of packing lunches, meting screen time, or struggling to recall if I already switched the paperclips on the chore chart (indicating who unloads silverware vs. plates and fills cat food vs. cat water), I did yoga on the porch of our rental overlooking the beach. Now I’m typing with no one reading over my shoulder or demanding I “search something up” for them. Nirvana, I tell you.

For five days we’ll extricate ourselves from the stress of nurturing our children and immerse ourselves in nurturing ourselves, together—Us. Today we’ll hike in Muir Woods. We plan on trying a Punjabi Burrito for lunch because the 50 percent of our family represented believes that Indian food served Mexican style sounds tasty, and the two in absentia don’t get a vote. Tomorrow we might drive to Point Reyes National Seashore and spend all day absorbing the majestic surroundings, instead of exhausting them in a vain attempt to Keep! Everyone! Interested! AndAwayFromSteepCliffsides! We’ll have dinner at a crab shack on the water. When we return, nothing—especially not our children’s used tissues—will festoon our bed. Our towels shall remain where we hung them, free of toothpaste-globs from smaller people’s mouths.

In Second Honeymoon we’re marking the fact that seventeen years after becoming a couple we love each other–not just in rote hanging-up-the-phone word, but also in deed. More importantly, we like each other still.  Or again. Or both at the same time right now because we’re actually rested. We delight in making each other laugh. We know this in theory—but to experience it in reality for more than a nanosecond feels, well, monumental.

At our wedding, both of our brothers remarked in their toasts on the harmony between Husband and I. We shared this easy dynamic between us—his rhythm to my song. Then that easy harmony eluded us for our baby-raising years. It was all we could do to reach our own notes, and remember our parts. We couldn’t afford to worry about the blend.  But as our children grow so has our ability to listen and tune-in to one another again.

We planned this trip last-minute, giving us mercifully little time to set high expectations. If anything I think both of us pushed down fears of what if we have nothing to talk about? Does our connection still exist without the kids? What if we have so much to talk about and feel incomparably happy without the kids?

Muir Woods will remind us. The steep path and redwoods will hearken us back to the Rocky Mountain trails we traversed together the summer we met. The lack of stress and constant interruptions will allow us time to both merge and syncopate, like the alto line you never hear until the conductor reins in those beasty little sopranos belting out the melody.

We’ll remember that familiar tune of Us after all, and we’ll carry it with us as we leave Second Honeymoon. Our easy harmony will, in fact, resound.