What I did on my winter vacation (part one)

So I was in Honduras, with my mother, for my birthday.

My last few birthdays have gotten screwed up. My fortieth happened to occur just after we’d signed the lease on the apartment we were to share, birdnesting style, as we struggled to negotiate our separation. On my forty-first, my mom was recovering from chemotherapy. (She was diagnosed with breast cancer the summer before, right when the birdnesting arrangement collapsed and my ex-husband moved out. Not a happy time.) My forty-second…what happened last year, exactly? I can’t remember. At any rate, this year my mother took me to the same inn she and my stepfather visited a year earlier. “You need sunshine,” she said, and I did.

At the last minute, the whole thing turned frantic–a huge storm was closing airports and canceling flights, so I had to flee a day early and spend the night in a mephitic hotel near Atlanta. But the next morning my mom and I got on a plane for San Pedro Sula together, and then, only a few hours later, I was swooning with disbelief and bliss, as we sat in teak chairs on a lovely deck with rum punches in hand, watching orioles and hummingbirds and all manner of tropical butterflies flit from flower to tree on the eve of my forty-third birthday.

I am a complete ass about my birthday. I love it, and milk it shamelessly. I was always a year younger than everyone in my class, and so viewed February as the month I caught up, I suppose. And (for the massively egotistical) there is something wonderful about a holiday that’s all receipt, no gift. At any rate, I woke up the next morning in a tiny cabin in the tropical woods, listening to the oropendolas burble and squawk outside our window. I had read What Maisie Knew on the plane down, so it was dead weight. But I still had a couple of books in my backpack, and my mom had brought a few as well, so I wasn’t too nervous. We were two of only four people staying at our lovely hotel. The week ahead held horseback riding, hiking, birding, swimming, snorkeling, boating, and a day visiting villages with an organization that gives microloans to Honduran women. And lounging. And sunshine. And margaritas. In other words, the kind of week human beings dream about.

I’ll be writing about the week in more detail (and I simply must list the birds I saw–they were stupendous) but I wanted to put this up just to let you know I’m alive. I thought about this website, and the Babble one, an awful lot during my internet-free vacation. I haven’t been terribly happy with what I’ve written so far at Babble and I think I’m going to tweak that blog a bit. (My next post over there talks about the changes I aim to make.) But there has been an interesting discussion in the comments section about division of labor in marriage–how very easy it is to have your erstwhile competence wither on the vine if your spouse takes over certain chores–and I would like very much to keep the discussion going, both because other peoples’ relationships are fascinating, and also because I am determined not to repeat the same mistakes twice (though how could I, given that my present relationship is so different from my marriage that it seems silly even to compare the two?)

So, as I said over on Babble, in my marriage my ex-husband managed all the money stuff, and I managed all the kid stuff. Now I manage my money and the kid stuff, as well as the house stuff, the yard stuff, the various and never ending Möbius strip of errands and wage earning–and so must he, in his separate life, and I think we’re both surviving. We are now polymaths where once we were specialists. Should we have made sure we were polymaths while we were still married, though? And if so, why?

I’m still not convinced it is bad to divvy up the chores by person (from each according to his or her abilities, right?) instead of making sure one stays diversified, because when it came down to it, my learning curve was very steep. But perhaps it would be best to have kept my gears oiled and all my motors running, as it were, so that the initial fear I felt when I realized I was going to have to step up to the plate would not have been so crippling? Or perhaps the sense of triumph and mastery and Hey, that wasn’t so hard, I think I’m going to make it after all that came when I did, in fact, cope was a sorely-needed ego boost at the nadir of my life?

At any rate, I’m off to do my taxes in a slapdash fashion so that I can get my older son’s financial aid application in on time. Will I manage? Or will I collapse in a puddle of incompetence? My younger son, home from school with a mild case of the vapors, looked dubious when he saw me gathering papers and getting out the calculator. Of course I’ve left it till the last minute (some things never change) but–oddly–I don’t feel panicked or frantic. We’ll see how it goes. In any case, I hope I can at least serve as a reassuring example–even if your financial head has been in the sand (rephrasing one reader’s comment) for your entire married life, and you doubt your competence and your pluck, you can–I promise–manage on your own. Get someone to help you (I hired a financial adviser during the divorce, and it was the best thing I ever did) in the beginning, and don’t be afraid. I can barely manage to add single digit numbers, and now I run this little fiefdom with (I daresay) a fair bit of expertise. Learning to manage wasn’t fun, but you do feel awfully good about things once you figure them out.

And here is a picture of one of the birds I saw: the Lovely Cotinga. It took a few days–my mom started calling it the Lousy Cotinga–but I finally managed to “get” it, as the birders say. Hooray!

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