I’ve always seen myself as a capable parent. I’m not one of those husbands who calls his wife and asks if the kids need to eat or anything. So I didn’t think it would be a big deal to take all my kids on vacation without my wife.
Now, mind you, I like my wife. It wasn’t a vacation from my wife. We were flying to a destination where we’d tackle a series of amusement parks in close succession, and my wife had no interest in coming. She says it’s because she doesn’t like waiting in line. But nobody likes waiting in line. But if something is good, there will be a line. That’s why there’s always a line to get your license renewed or to pass construction on the highway.
But if she doesn’t like waiting in line, there’s no way she’s going to like waiting in line to check her luggage so she can wait in line to get through airport security so she can wait in line to get on a plane so she can wait in line to get off the plane so she can wait in line at the rental counter so she can wait in line several times a day for a week, all for a couple of minutes of a ride that’s she’s not going to enjoy because she’s going to be too focused on the fact that she’s finally sitting. She’s like, “I can sit at home! For free!” And she’s not wrong. But what’s she going to look at while she’s sitting at home for free? So I’m going.
But I get it. I feel that way about outlet malls. Every store sells one item you want, max., and you have to wait in line every time you buy one thing, and there’s not even a ride at the end of the line. You just have to carry more stuff. Yet my wife will cheerfully stop at an outlet mall on the way home from every vacation we go on, and drag me along. So there’s no way I want to do that to her. I like her. Plus, I figured if we don’t take her, we won’t have to stop at an outlet mall on the way home.
It’s not like I love amusement parks. I mainly like the ones that have a flume ride. If you can afford to leave your water running all day, you must be a decent park. Unfortunately, those are the parks with the longest lines. And then after the flume, we’re walking around the park all day, on and off lines, with our socks squishing. And then the hotel room smells like wet socks.
Maybe that’s why she doesn’t want to come.
So I don’t feel that bad about not bringing her. I did for a while, until I heard all her friends being jealous of her. Not one of her friends said, “I can’t believe your husband is doing this to you! Your husband is the worst.”
So I was on my own. And as I mentioned, I consider myself a capable person. But that said, there are some things that my wife remembers to pack that I would not. For example, I didn’t bring anything for rain. I figured that the highlight of our day is going on water rides, but we need protection from the rain? Whereas some people at the park wore their rain gear ON the water rides, which is ridiculous, because IT STILL DOESN’T PROTECT THEIR SOCKS!
We also didn’t bring along band-aids. My wife usually brings the band-aids. I was like, “Why would we bring band-aids on vacation? We don’t want to get injured. We want to have fun!”
“Totty, I need a band-aid.”
“We don’t have band-aids.”
“Okay, then I need a tissue.”
“We don’t have tissues.”
“We don’t have tissues? How are we supposed to blow our noses?”
“We didn’t come here to blow our noses. We came here to have fun!”
Other than that, I liked that we didn’t take my wife, because it meant we could get out earlier in the mornings. If we’d brought my wife, she would have been all like remembering things in the morning when I just wanted to get out. Without her, we get out earlier, and then later we figure out what we forgot.
That was our system. For example, one morning, we got out of our room, and as soon as it was too late to turn back, I realized that my son wasn’t wearing his glasses. I hadn’t noticed this before we left the room. You’d think he would have noticed.
One technique I used to get us out early, besides for just forgetting things, was that I made lunches the night before, awkwardly on bad surfaces because I forgot to bring plates. I figured, “We don’t need plates; we’re eating sandwiches.” Yeah, how to do you make a sandwich without a plate? On the back of a cereal bowl?
In fact, there was only one night that my kids didn’t eat supper, and that’s because I misplaced the sandwiches. It was the night we were coming home. And the first thing they announced to my wife when she picked us up at the airport at 11:30 PM was, “We didn’t eat supper! Totty lost the sandwiches!”
Thanks, traitors. They told me they were perfectly happy eating snacks.
But yes, I lost the sandwiches. I spent a half an hour making peanut butter sandwiches in the dark with no surfaces, and we didn’t know where I put them. I thought I left them in the hotel.
The plan had been to leave them in the car, rather than schlepping them around all day. We had a large suitcase and a carry-on suitcase, and in those two suitcases, we had to put the rest of our food, the sandwiches, a huge laundry bag that smelled like three days’ worth of everyone’s wet socks put together, and everybody’s tefillin.
So my thought was that
The tefillin should be in the carry-on.
The leftover food should be in the big suitcase, because I didn’t have time to sort what we couldn’t take in a carry-on. Such as the knife.
The laundry should also not be in the carry-on, because it was already stinking up the rental car, and to be honest, I wouldn’t be upset if we lost it.
But it was a hundred degrees outside, and we didn’t want the laundry bag baking in the suitcase all day with the food, so in the morning, we brought it to the car separately, hoping the suitcase would protect the food. The plan was that when we got to the airport, we’d put the laundry bag into the suitcase, which was not ideal, but I’d rather stink up the food than stink up the tefillin bags.
Now I don’t know if you noticed, but at some point in that whole gesheft, I stopped mentioning the sandwiches. I didn’t know where they ended up. But I couldn’t find them when we got to the airport.
Anyway, when I unpacked later, at home, it turned out that the sandwiches were in the big suitcase, because I’d figured that I would remove them when we got to the airport to make room for the laundry bag. I didn’t. I put the huge, stinky laundry bag right on top of them, where it sat for the entire plane ride.
Now you might say that this wouldn’t have happened if my wife had come along. But this one wasn’t on me. The laundry bag was my wife’s idea. If it were up to me, I would’ve had everyone seal their own stinky clothing in a plastic shopping bag. This is the third time we’re running these clothes through the wash, and we have yet to get the stink out. There’s no reason my shirt should smell like my kids’ socks. Or that these sandwiches should taste like them.
Some other things I noticed about single parenting on the road:
- I’ve been wearing a knapsack for 3 days straight at this point.
- I find that I’m checking my pockets 5,000 times a day, because there are no backup car keys. It’s just me, getting up and down from a host of different rides, many of which don’t quite fit an adult who does not wish to have his knees touching his chin.
- When it’s just you, you can’t watch your kids go through airport security, because you’re busy going through security yourself 3 times because the guy can’t figure out what you still have on you that is setting off the alarm. But while you’re trying to prove that you -- as a parent flying alone with a pile of kids -- are not dangerous, there’s no one to watch your kids go through the other scanner at the request of a stranger, nor remind them to take everything out of the bin. Was my son wearing glasses when we got to the airport?
- When our alarm goes off, my son with whom I’m sharing a hotel bed wakes me up without opening his eyes by sinking his toenails into my shin. Shouldn’t someone be cutting those? Oh, right…. All I have is a pareve kitchen knife.
- I sleep a lot lighter when I know my wife isn’t around to be the one who doesn’t sleep. There has to be one parent alert at all times, I guess, and all these years, I didn’t realize it was her. Whereas she slept like a log the whole time we were gone. I have no solid proof she even went to work. She definitely forgot to take out the garbage.
Mordechai Schmutter is a weekly humor columnist for Hamodia, a monthly humor columnist, and has written six books, all published by Israel Book Shop. He also does freelance writing for hire. You can send any questions, comments, or ideas to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.