I Know I Need a Small Vacation
A mother of three hungers for even the tiniest of getaways, just a weekend in a cabin in the woods. But solace isn’t a destination. Maybe it’s in the journey?
A few months after the baby was born, we tried to go on a vacation. We booked a nonrefundable cabin in the hills of West Virginia, and several days before the trip, my husband came down with COVID. And then the COVID came for me—and well, isn’t that how these things go? I sighed as I put our suitcases back into storage. I said it with the nonchalance of a third-time mom. Exerting more emotional energy than a shrug was more than I had to spare.
The older children seemed happy to cocoon. We’d loosened the reins on them since the birth, allowing them to wander the neighborhood more freely, hoping our stranger-danger bedside chats and “Slow, Children at Play” yard signs would be enough. To, you know, protect us from disaster.
Disaster might be an appropriate word to describe our next attempt at a vacation. The baby was nearly eight months old at that point, and elementary school was closed for teacher training. I booked another cabin not so far away. Our trip was for two nights—enough time to refresh, make some memories, tell ourselves we had finally had a vacation and could resume our normal, boring, but chaotic lives.
“You know, we don’t have to bring everything,” my husband said one morning before leaving for work, surveying the empty suitcases I prepared to fill.
I ignored his comment, the inference that if I could just let things go a bit, re-wear some underwear, stick with a single pair of shoes, the trip would be more fun for everyone. I knew the truth: kids needed Band-Aids for their bloody, scraped knees, babies didn’t like to recycle their diapers, and it sure was nice not to run out to buy Tylenol when someone spiked a fever late at night.
Easy, breezy was a facade I could wear for a day or two as a childless woman. But as a mom? The easiest, breeziest route I could take would be to pack for disaster—but not complain about it.
The night before our trip, the van was loaded, and the dog was boarded. I’d set out shelf-stable food and drinks for the road. I was caught up with work, and no one was febrile or vomiting—so far. All looked well until just before we fell asleep. My husband checked his schedule online and said, “They have me scheduled to work!”
Except he didn’t use the exclamation point when he uttered this aloud. His voice wasn’t exacerbated—just weary. It was as if he had expected if not this, then something all along.
“What are you going to do?” I demanded as he rolled to his side for sleep, not frantically sending a message on his phone, not immediately launching into Plan B.
Even with the older children enamored with their bunk bed, I had an unrelenting desire to flee as I stood in the cramped kitchen and cracked eggs over a skillet on a barely functioning electric stove.
The kids were excited—a cabin in the woods! They’d been buzzing all day. I’ll just take them all myself, I decided as I turned off my bedside lamp, knowing full well that a venture of that sort might melt me.
My husband got his schedule changed the next day. “An oversight,” his boss said. “Not sure what happened.”
Though he handled it with ease, I’d spent the entire night awake, worried about it. This was my pattern: I planned five steps ahead, and then I worried five steps ahead. Sometimes it felt like the time I spent planning was cancelled out by the worrying: The math almost broke even. But my husband seemed even, cool, all the time.
Why couldn’t I be as steady?
My husband could handle some chaos. He wasn’t thrown off by mixed up schedules or health crises. He took life as it came.
I, on the other hand, contemplated if it was even worth keeping on (with, you know, life) if I had under six hours of sleep or an irregular bowel movement.
Still, we were off! First stop, the new fried chicken restaurant ten miles down the road. I brought some spinach on the side to make a salad, because who could live with themselves eating only fried chicken for lunch? My family could—that’s who. They even fed bits of the breading to the baby in her car seat. Our poor third baby. She absolutely loved it.
We arrived at the cabin, a community of tiny Nordic homes on a winding road in the Ohio woods.
“Did you realize you rented a tiny cabin?” my husband asked as we pulled into the gravel driveway of our destination.
I’d been lured in by the smooth minimalist shots posted on Airbnb, a welcome departure from the Live Laugh Love Americana decor that characterized so many other rental properties in the area.
But no—I hadn’t paid close attention to the square footage of the space. I hadn’t calculated that the baby’s pack and play would not have enough room to fully open. The area was claustrophobic. Even with the older children enamored with their bunk bed, I had an unrelenting desire to flee as I stood in the cramped kitchen and cracked eggs over a skillet on a barely functioning electric stove.
We ate slimy eggs for dinner, and afterward, the boys played baseball between the trees. I opened a beer and sat in a lawn chair watching their game. I set up the pack and play beside me to give the baby space to spread out and gaze up at the canopy of not-quite-green leaves. She just cried and cried. I took another sip of the beer and lifted the baby from her container, placing her on my breasts.
I removed one breast from my sports bra, then both, two engorged sacks of flesh flying free in the breeze. I placed the baby’s mouth to one nipple, then the other, and then again. She was having none of it. I laid her on my lap as she writhed and screamed.
I removed my shirt. I didn’t care. I didn’t care if another tiny-cabin resident saw me on their evening hike. I didn’t care if a truck drove by. Maybe I wanted someone to see me, maybe I wanted a little excitement, or at least make a stranger feel strange, to give someone a story—didn’t we all need some fun?
It was time for the baby to go to sleep, which meant it was time for all of us to go to sleep because the cabin was a room, and a small one at that.
“Is this how Laura Ingalls lived in that cabin in the woods?” I asked my husband as I prepared a nest in the corner of the bunk for the baby.
“This is probably smaller,” my husband replied.
When the baby finally settled, it was just past 8 o’clock, and though my older children were whispering and wielding flashlights, I hoped I could follow the rhythms of the baby. I briefly let myself consider the me from a decade ago. She was never an exciting woman, but she could read or watch a film until at least ten. That impulse—to submit myself to mind-numbing entertainment—had been purged, like it had been disgorged with the placenta in the afterbirth. I felt emptied. Not hollowed but pruned. Sharper. Efficient. Without space for excess or bullshit.
We told ghost stories on the top bunk while the baby slept below. The five-year-old began our series of tales, and we concocted narratives about characters with names similar to our own. Car crashes, specters, hallucinations, bad men. My stories always featured bad men. I didn’t have to dig too deep for those.
We ran to our car—it was raining sideways—and our middle child splashed through the deepest puddles and made a dash to dive into the ornamental fountain. My jeans were soaked, and so was the baby.
The next day, we drove to the city to visit a museum and then a mall. It was raining—the effects of Hurricane Helene. My mother had warned me of the weather, perhaps because she knew I was too distracted by the baby to recognize what was going on in the world—but also because one of her love languages was to share meteorological info.
We bought Legos at Legoland and bath bombs at Lush. We ate at a Korean fresh-food-fast restaurant in the mall food court. Then, a message appeared on my phone:
Are you guys okay?
Did the tree hit your house?
I simply turned my screen toward my husband as he read the message.
“Well, good thing we took this vacation! We could’ve been home and died,” he replied.
Photos arrived moments later: a large oak, now horizontal, had crashed onto our porch, precisely on the part my husband had spent days repairing at the end of the summer.
“Everything is entropy,” my husband shrugged as I bemoaned the dozens of hours of labor he’d completed at the end of summer, now wrecked by the fall. He didn’t seem perturbed. He just stood up and walked over to Cinnabon to buy himself dessert. And as he divided up the gooey roll among all five of us—even the baby—he began talking about how eager he was to start the project of clearing branches, hauling wood, and repairing the fence line.
“Should we just head back now?” he asked, wiping glaze from his mouth. “What else do we really need to do here?”
And I agreed: might as well end our vacation of barely twenty-four hours. Our home held more tasks than we could possibly accomplish during our remaining time off work.
We ran to our car—it was raining sideways—and our middle child splashed through the deepest puddles and made a dash to dive into the ornamental fountain. My jeans were soaked, and so was the baby, and we wrung out our clothes in the back of our SUV.
It was Friday at 4, and there was rush-hour traffic, downed power lines, stoplights turned dark. When I checked online, I saw our home was without electricity, too.
Still, we decided to drive home to our cold house to better assess the damage. The route determined by our GPS was blocked by the storm’s detritus, and so we took turns that set us back hours, ending up on winding roads in Ohio backcountry.
For dinner, we drove through a Taco Bell near a desolate gas station and ordered bean burritos and ice water. As we ate our cheap family vacation dinner, the baby cried, and we turned the radio up loud to listen to the oldies station playing songs from the ’90s: the music of my childhood, now nostalgia radio. Shawn Mullins’s “Lullaby” came on the air—I'd won the album from my hometown station back in 1998 after being caller ten. That was nearly thirty years ago. Would my children remember this same song thirty years from now?
The rain kept falling, and frogs hopped from one side of the dark country road to the other, like a biblical plague. Were they an omen? Did a disaster await us? Perhaps. But it would always be something. That is, until there was no longer anything at all.
So we hurtled forward into the night. I knew I did not need a new destination to fill my already full life. I needed to be inside my already full life. And in that moment, I was. We were all alive, together, enclosed in our warm, dry vehicle, engine heat warming our damp feet, a lullaby on the radio.
Anna Rollins's work has appeared in The New York Times, Slate, Salon, Electric Literature, Joyland Magazine, and other outlets. Her forthcoming memoir, Famished: On Food, Sex, and Growing Up as a Good Girl, (Eerdmans, 2025) examines the rhyming scripts of purity culture and diet culture.