Why Jeff and I Travel Without the Kids During Their Camp Weeks

The frame: lean into the breaks the kids' calendar gives you

I want to start with this because I think a lot of moms in our orbit feel guilty about the idea. Here's how Jeff and I have come to think about it. The school-year calendar gives you weeks the kids are in school and not in school; the summer calendar gives you weeks the kids are at camp and not at camp. The kids-not-around weeks are not a moral test of how much you love them. They are an architectural feature of modern parenting and they exist for a reason.

We use them. Without apology. With a small wink at the working-mom-with-help reality that makes ours specifically easy to say yes to. (Yes, we have a live-in nanny. Yes, that is part of why this works. I am not pretending otherwise.)

Window one: the Upstate NY sleepaway weeks

The kids fly back east — usually with my parents, who fly out and pick them up in Park City and chaperone them home — and spend two weeks at the camp I grew up at. Same camp. Same lake. The continuity of it makes me cry every drop-off and I am not exaggerating. They do archery and canoes and color war and one slightly chaotic talent night and they come back two weeks older in a way that is visible in their bodies.

While they're there, Jeff and I do Tulum. Specifically: I do my yoga teacher recertification continuing-education at one of the shalas in the Sian Ka'an stretch south of town, Jeff works remotely from the casita in the mornings and reads on the beach in the afternoons. We meet for dinner. The window is exactly two weeks. It maps perfectly onto the camp dates. We've done it three years running.

Why this works:

• The recertification is real, accredited, and necessary for my teaching credentials. It is a working trip dressed in a vacation sun-hat. I file it as a business expense. (My accountant is a saint.)
• Jeff is in the deep summer trough at the bank. Tulum mornings are quiet and his EST counterparts are an hour ahead, which means he can wrap his work day by 1pm local and be fully present.
• It is, mechanically, our annual marriage tune-up. We need it. We earn it.

Window two: the YMCA stack

The local Y camp is, frankly, the unsung hero of Park City summer. Hazel and Owen do four weeks of it, non-consecutive, scattered through July and August. During one of those weeks, Jeff disappears for a Whistler reunion with his high school friends from White Pass. He grew up skiing Pacific Northwest hills as a kid — White Pass, Snoqualmie, Whistler — and the friend group from that era still does an annual men's week in Whistler in summer (mountain biking, lake days, beer on a deck). I do not go. He needs that week the way I need Sedona. The marriage is healthier for both.

During another Y week, I do what I call my Big Sur road-and-meditation week. I drive solo. I stop at Esalen if I can get a slot. I do not text Jeff every day; we have agreed on this. I journal. I sit on cliffs. I am alone in a way that I am almost never alone in my regular life, and I return to my family a substantially calmer human being. This is, for me, the single most important week of the year for the long-term sustainability of being a working yoga teacher and a present mother. The math works out.

The week we do together, mid-summer

Once a summer, also during a Y week, Jeff and I take a single trip together that is just us. No professional skin in the game. No old-friends reunion. Just a four-day window. Last year was Sun Valley. Year before was Mendocino. Year before that, Jackson. We're easygoing about the destination. We're not easygoing about the existence of the trip. It's on the calendar in February.

The live-in-nanny piece, said plainly

I want to be honest about this part because I think honesty is more useful than performed humility. We have a live-in nanny. She is a member of our family in the operational sense. She has her own apartment in our lower level. She has been with us since Owen was a baby. She loves the kids and the kids love her, and she is the reason that windows like "Jeff and Megan are in Tulum for two weeks" are even possible — because even when both kids are at sleepaway, there are inevitable logistics back home that someone needs to handle. House. Dogs. The mail. The plumber.

I'm aware that this is a luxury. I'm aware most families don't have it. I'm not going to pretend that the system we've built is replicable for everyone. What I will say is this: even if your version of "the camp window" is two nights at a lodge in Heber while a friend takes the kids, the structural insight is the same. The camp window is a real thing. Use it. Claim it. Don't let the entire summer be one undifferentiated parenting blob.

What we tell the kids

Hazel is eight, which means she's now old enough to ask pointed questions. She knows we go to Tulum during sleepaway. She thinks it's funny. We've been clear with her: we travel because we like each other, because we like our work, and because the time apart makes the time together better. She's known her whole life that her parents have a marriage that exists separately from her, and that has, if anything, made her a more secure kid, not a less secure one.

Owen is five. Owen does not care. Owen is at archery.

The intention behind it

Listen to your body. Listen to your marriage. Listen to your business. The summer is long. The summer has shape. Lean into the breaks that the kids' calendar gives you. Build a small set of repeating annual trips that map onto those breaks — the recertification, the men's week, the solo road trip, the four-day couple's window — and let those become the spine of your adult year. The kids come back from camp tanner and louder and ravenous for home, and you greet them with the kind of full cup that only comes from having actually filled it.