Building a Life on Purpose

Image: Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash

This morning I had yet one more dental visit. This was the last filling that needed replacing. It lasted a very, very long time, and I'm grateful for that. At the beginning of the appointment my dentist and I had a couple of minutes to chat. In different life circumstances, I think we'd be friends. She and I share the same faith background, we both garden, we're both mothers, and she's down to earth (as I like to think of myself). Her mother was a stay-at-home mother like my own. I think there were some similarities in our upbringings.

But she chose a different path in life. She's about 10 years younger than I am, and maybe that has something to do with it. She chose, by all accounts, a stressful career. There is a lot of burnout in dentistry. And it's no wonder, with patients like me who deal with anxiety, I'd soon lose my enthusiasm for the field. But she is so good at what she does, I'm glad she chose this path.

Her "rewards" for pursuing a career include intellectual identity, financial autonomy and security, demonstrating how to balance career and family for her daughter, and of course, the physical things and luxuries that this second income affords. Also, she appears to have a good relationship with her children and husband. So I don't think her career compromised her personal relationships. 

For myself, growing up I never wanted a career. My sister did. But I wanted to be with and serve my children and husband. That sounds so old fashioned. I get it. But I see serving as an honor and not a duty. I wanted to imprint my husband's and my values onto our children. I wanted to experience all of the milestones first hand. I actually felt bad that my husband had to hear after the fact about all of the "firsts." I wanted to be the one who sat on the floor playing cars with my young son. I wanted to teach my children to read, and listen to them as they tried reading themselves for the first time. I wanted to play Barbies, build forts, chase butterflies, and experience the joy I could see in my children's eyes as they met each challenge. I wanted to take care of home details so my husband could put his focus on his career. I wanted to be fresh when my husband came home at the end of his day. I wanted to take care of a family. 

As our children grew up, I still wanted to focus my energy on caring for our family. My kids and husband still need my care, but in different ways.

I knowingly traded a higher family income and intellectual identity to have all of what I have had. 

A couple of weeks ago, when I discussed needing to work in small ways well into retirement years in order to afford travel or have a greater financial cushion, I didn't view our situation as a failure. I hope you understand that. This was something we'd known we would have in later years, and we accepted that as the trade-off to have me work at home. 

I invested in the people in my life. The return can't be tracked in a bank account. I don't dread needing to do a few things to supplement our income. I see my husband's and my situation as a life timeline that is simply unfolding on a different, deeply meaningful track than a two-career household. No regrets. I am a satisfied customer of life choices.

My husband and I have made sacrifices along the way. We have lived a simple life often dictated by our bank account. We haven't traveled much, we have far fewer toys, we cut our own hair, shop for our clothes second-hand, and don't pay for expensive experiences. I don't say that as a moral victory. I fully know that we make these choices so that we can have the life of our choosing. But I do try to reframe how we view our simpler life. When a flower in the yard blooms, it's an event in our family. "Did you see the tulips?" "Did you see the roses?" "Did you see the begonias?" It isn't just me who urges the family to see what we do have. All of us here do this.

I don't ask others to pay for my choices. And I think this is important. If I were choosing to stay at home but asking someone else to provide food or heat for me, in my mind that would be wrong.

Do I ever complain about our hardships? Of course I do. Career women complain about their difficulties, too.

Today I wanted to write about my life choice because I feel it isn't always well-represented. There is an audience of women actively searching for the perspective and validation my experience offers. Whether young women at a career vs. family crossroads, homemakers facing "empty nest" or aging anxiety, or  those also entering "soft retirement," there is value in presenting a realistic picture of this life choice. It validates the experiences of women who made similar choices. It offers balance when making that big decision. And it presents a reframe of the need for work after retirement as a second act.

That's all. 

I had these thoughts this afternoon and wanted to share them with you all. And to think, this morning when I was getting dressed I was actually working out the details of a post on favorite kitchen tools. But you got my thoughts instead. 

The Art of the Day-Cation: Weighing the Balance of One-Day Escapes

image: esrannuur on Pexels

By the time mid-July arrives, facebook, instagram, and conversations are often filled with the logistics of grand summer travel. We see the photos of packed suitcases, long airport lines, and beautiful Airbnbs. It is easy to fall into the trap of believing that the only way to truly rest, reset, and experience the magic of summer is to pack up your life and head hundreds of miles away for a week.

There is an alternative: the day-cation.

A day-cation is a dedicated, single-day outing—whether it’s a morning picnic at a quiet regional beach, a slow afternoon browsing antique shops in a nearby historic town, or a day hike in a state park. You leave in the morning with an adventurous spirit, and you return home that evening to the comfort of your own pillow.

Some of my sweetest family memories revolve around our one-day outings. The day we drove up into the mountains to visit a Bavarian-inspired town, and it turned out to be the weekend of the apple festival. We all enjoyed bratwurst, strudel, and a marching band streaming down the main street. 

Or, the family birthday when we took a long ferry ride out to one of the islands in the Sound, and we were entertained by the antics of several sea critters en route. 

And not to forget, one spring day when we visited the tulip fields, and I was able to get all of the family on board with looking at flowers for a day. Now that’s a feat!

Like any lifestyle strategy, choosing a series of day-cations over one grand vacation comes with a unique set of balances. Let me share both sides of the ledger.

The Merits: Why Day-Cations Feel Like True Luxury

• The Huge Budget Win: A longer vacation is costly. The lodging, transportation, and meals out over multiple days gets expensive. In contrast, a day-cation has no lodging expense, a smaller transportation cost, and it’s possible to bring all of the food we could want for the day packed in a picnic basket and cooler. The plain truth is we need time away more often than our budget allows. We can afford an "away" vacation once per year or two years. But a day-cation can happen at any point in the budget.
• Zero Travel Friction: Planning a longer vacation takes time and energy, often weeks of checking fares, researching hotels, making packing lists, and of course that initial travel day can be brutal. A day-cation generally requires planning around one venue. It’s a lot easier to look up the ferry schedule and parking at our one-day destination than to track prices, book a hotel, airfare, and transportation at a miles-away destination. A day-cation can be as simple as checking the weather for the day and saying “let’s do it!”
• Coming Home to Comfort: Sleeping in strange beds for many nights compromises sleep quality. We all do better when we can sleep in our own beds, which we appreciate at the end of a day-cation. 
• Timing Is Everything: A long vacation in summer comes at the exact wrong time for my family. Our garden is in full swing, so we would miss the fresh produce. I also wouldn’t be around to tend the garden and do the watering. It could jeopardize some of our harvest that we depend upon for the fall and winter months. In addition, summer is the most beautiful time of the year where we live. We have 9 ugly months and just 3 beautiful ones. Going away in summer just doesn’t make sense.
• Eating Without Repercussions: On our 5-day vacation to California in winter, I struggled a bit to find foods that worked for me and the others. 5 days of sourcing eating possibilities which could meet my allergies and intolerances. Again, here’s an area of bringing our own food that really works for me. We usually bring a picnic lunch composed entirely of homemade foods that I can eat.
• The Power of Anticipation: Instead of waiting all year for one single week of freedom, a series of day-cations spreads the joy across the entire summer. We can do two or three distinct "mini-vacations" scattered throughout July and August, keeping the entire season feeling fresh and abundant.

The Flip Side: The Unavoidable Drawbacks

• The Temptation of the Familiar: Because we begin our day at home and end it also at home, there’s the temptation to do just one load of laundry before heading out, or water just the pumpkin patch, or do that one kitchen cleaning chore. You don’t fully disconnect from home life the way you do when you jet away to a distant venue.
• The Geographic Limit: Taking a day-cation means going someplace sort of nearby, perhaps 2 hours away. If we’re really wanting to get out of our area, into a better weather situation, or experience a different culture, that’s not going to happen 2 hours from our front door.
• Countdown to Time’s Up: As a day-cation happens all in one day, there’s a sort of internal countdown clock that begins to tick away sometime midday while on our fun escapade. We are keenly aware that at the end of this day, the “trip” is over, and we’ll be making the drive home in just a handful of hours. We can’t linger over a lovely sunset or stay for the evening concert in the park if we know we still have a ferry to catch followed by a long drive back to our humble abode. There is a sense that it ends all too soon.

Making This Work When I Still Have to Do My Work

Since a day-cation is a sort of a whirlwind event for us, my energy is spent by the time we get back home. One of the things I do to counter this is prepare a meal in advance, something like sandwiches, carrot sticks, and watermelon wedges, then pop it all into the fridge. When we walk in the door and drop the picnic cooler, I pull out our pre-made dinner. We get that nice and peaceful meal before hitting the hay. I also try to do a thorough garden-watering the day before our excursion, so I can skip watering when we return without fear of wilting plants. As for packing the picnic lunch and jugs of iced tea and lemonade to bring along for the day, I enlist all of my family to help in this work. Spreading out the work amongst all of us makes my job just a little easier.

Finding rest and rejuvenation this summer is all about choosing the option that provides what we need for the least burden. For my family, choosing a series of one-day escapes meets our financial and practical restrictions while offering many of the benefits of a traditional multi-day summer vacation. It’s a wonderfully sustainable choice for us. It also reminds us that adventure isn’t only in far away locales. It can be found an hour down the road, if we make the time to reach out for it.

Your Turn: I would love to hear how you are finding your rest this summer! How do you feel about day-cations?  Do you get that feeling of rejuvenation from a day outing? Or, do you find that you need to physically leave your house behind to truly relax?