Last year, I wrote an essay about parenting through winter vacations. I think a lot about this essay, as well as the essay I wrote about summer vacation moms. Both essays pinpoint a particular genre of labor that has been assigned to women during times when they’re supposed to be at rest, but the essays are about much more—like how our identities morph with the seasons, and how leisure time itself becomes an identity marker. I’m not doing any fancy snow thing this year, just holing up. But I’m still thinking about the physicality and phenomenology of different roles, and about how our bodies can long to touch and move and connect, while also longing for solitude. As we all wrap up our winter leisure time, whatever that looks like for you, I thought I’d pull this essay from the archives, in case you’re feeling it, too.
Just after the film version of Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter was released, I wrote about vacation moms and the moments I live for when I travel with my family—when I let my kids have their way with me:
For a short span of time, I pretend I am only a mother, with no other ambitions, no other aspirations. It’s part of the fantasy. I let them tell me what to do and where to go in the ocean or the swimming pool, anonymous and hollow. I stop aiming for the impossibility of being a mother in America and retaining a body and mind that belong to me. I refuse to intellectualize anything. I rarely read or write. I carry my children everywhere, they sleep on me like they did when they were babies, we eat up the sun.
After Christmas this year, we drove our car up to Lake Tahoe, trying to beat an impending snowstorm. We’ve driven into the Sierras almost every year since moving to Northern CA six years ago. When my two kids were very little, my husband Jon and I stuffed plastic sleds into the back of the car, along with layers of pants, too-thin jackets, and mittens that never seemed to stay on. Some years we got a hotel for a few nights. Others we just parked on the side of the road for a day of sliding down ice and snow, then drove home. We’re just over three hours from Lake Tahoe without traffic, but it’s a long day trip and the kids love to run wild in a hotel and feel like they can get away with anything—eating endless candy and ice cream, yelling and sticking random items in the hotel microwave, staying up late, jumping on the pull-out bed. We try to get away and stay away when we can.
This year we got a dated little cabin by the most inexpensive ski hill we could find. Winter sports are costly— rentals, lift tickets, attire, hotels, food—and we’re not in that income bracket. But Jon used to live in Colorado and I grew up driving up to Big Bear and Mountain High from LA every few years with my parents, then later with boyfriends, in the winters. My kids were gifted used snowboards from their uncle for Christmas, so this year we stuffed them in the car and headed out of town.
What I forget every time we visit the mountains is how breathless and dry the altitude turns me. How hard it is to lug boots and kids and boards and sleds and layers of clothing up and down stairs and snow. It’s not just that I feel out of shape, but that it’s challenging to parent when your body is just trying to adjust to the atmosphere, the thin air, the freezing temperatures.
Even in thick snow, my kids did well hiking up the little ski hill— which only had a pulley lift that none of us could figure out how to ride until the trip was almost over. When the kids got high enough, they plopped down on their butts to get their boots buckled into icy boards by the gloved hands of their grownups, all for a few minutes of fun.
What was going on in the background, with said grownups, was less smooth. None of what goes into a snow trip is well documented in representations of wintertime motherhood—which never show moms frantically trying to dry the wet gloves in the too-small ski hut, hanging up all the drippy jackets at the end of the day, huffing and puffing in the thin mountain air, whisper-fighting with their husbands about divisions of labor, trying to make the day fun while the snow turns to ice or slush and everyone is cold and cranky and melting down because of too-hot hot cocoa. The economic anxiety of the ski trip is also, of course, nowhere to be found.
I could go on about how the labor of every snowy vacation “disproportionately falls on women”— but ugh am I tired of that phrase, which is so passive, as though the labor just falls, like snow, rather than dumps, lake-effect-style, with great intention, the buildup caused by systemic failures and a lack of care for the bodies and lives of those who raise us. It feels necessary, predictable, and futile to say the snow vacation exists because of moms’ unacknowledged work. Everything does.
I don’t know if I’m a snow mom, though my kids are now convinced we should move to the mountains and “not go to school.” They had fun. But I lived in Buffalo, New York for five years, and witnessing from afar the deadly wreckage and loss of the most recent snowstorm there has been heartbreaking—and an example of how racial and class divides show up in the loss of life caused by extreme weather. Cold and ice and whiteout conditions can be fun— or terrifying— and the difference is often connected to class and race.
In Tahoe, we found ourselves in the middle of a once-in-a-lifetime snowstorm, though less extreme. Driving home was still all white-knuckles and anxiety until we got down off the mountain— fears that the car would slide off the road into a snow bank or over a cliff. In these kinds of conditions, it’s hard not to feel like the world is ending, or like we aren’t supposed to be here. Driving over Donner Pass, Jon and I joked about the family that ate each other before they froze to death— a bit of California history that my mother told me many times growing up. But we were also serious. Seeing all the snow, its impassibility, it all made sense.
I had fun, too. But on a snow trip I can’t sink into my body the way I do in the sun and heat, which carry with them their own signs of climate disaster and environmental catastrophe, but also an ease I sentimentalize and can’t access many other ways. I love hurtling down the mountain with my kids beside me, unsteadily balancing on a plank or sitting between my legs, tightly gripping my knees then no-hands-ing as we spin downhill on a saucer. But I remain a pool mom through and through.
What I didn’t mention last year in that first essay on vacation moms was that that trip was also one of my first big ones without alcohol. Being a sober vacation person has its own troubles— FOMO, temptation, the romanticism of booze all around you—but vacationing as a parent without the release that drunkenness provides is its own test. I don’t jitter and lunge for a drink anymore; I don’t need it to enjoy my kids or the day or just to stand not enjoying myself. I don’t really long to drink anymore because I don’t view drunkenness as liberation. But I do feel like an outsider abstaining. And being sober on a trip with kids means facing that I don’t always enjoy every part of “getting away” with my family— which, after all, is an illusion we are fed, another story that supports the false idea that our public and private lives are separate, which is how we got here, wanting to get away all the time, in the first place.
On our last night away, New Year’s Eve, the kids were tired. The adults were more tired. Everyone around us at the small lodge restaurant was getting drunk. Jon was melting down. I told him to get it together. I felt out of body—so spent from all the physical activity, the tending, the lugging, the changing of layered clothing, the socializing with extended family, the managing of emotions and needs, the fun, the weather and the gear, and the witnessing of “core memories” clicking into place for my kids, as they each grew up in their own ways in the week we spent away—all feelings I would not have felt in full force had I not been sober. My oldest kid was sad the trip was coming to an end. My younger kid— just five— was up way past his bedtime. Jon and I got everyone to sleep and fell asleep well before midnight.
This is my third holiday season without alcohol, but long before that I gave up going out and partying my way into the new year, which always left me feeling many steps behind before the year even started. Without the distraction of trashing myself, I feel more connected to the internal rotation the new year brings. Last year I wrote:
The emptying of self I pursue in vacation motherhood is what makes it hard for me to return to daily life once the trips have ended. Normally, I love the new energy of the new year, but this year, I’m finding it hard to invest in rebirth and regeneration.
I’m eager to get going this time around. I am happier and more excited about what this year will bring. I try always to be home for the new year and although the big snowstorm kept us away this time, I’m home now, nestling into the year, which promises, for better or for worse, to be a big one for me. It’s hard not to conclude this has something to do with not drinking. I feel this tug to say something inspirational here. To thank myself. Track progress. But in no longer tamping down my feelings every night, in spending more time just in it with myself, I’ve come to find that living in a body is an inconsistent, bumpy ride, no matter how many generational patterns you break. This year will be no different.
While I was writing this, my oldest kid brought in the battery-operated toy dog she got for Christmas. The dog malfunctioned and she sat by me while I wrote for a few minutes, hitting the dog and fiddling with it before it finally barked and made a pooping sound. She left the room, calling to her dad that the dog was “glitching.” We have one more week until everyone goes back to school.
May we all embrace the ways in which we are always, even in our best years, glitching.
Felt so much of this. We live in CO now with our 4 year old and this is far from my natural habitat. It sounds like you can get on board more than I can. I look around and feel like I’ve landed on a different planet. I honestly don’t know if I’ve found a subculture I can relate to less 🫠 I get anxious up there and feel trapped. And doing it all sober. Right there with you. I also found what you said about being in your body in the sun v cold and that hadn’t occurred to me, but it so tracks.