Ah, income tax return time! That time of year when some of us (single parents) get back the money we’ve overpaid all year to use for paying ahead on bills …. Or fixing the car and buying tires …. Or finally getting braces for the kiddos.

Or, you know, if you’re me, you plan a vacation with the money. It’s not that I don’t need to pay bills (never-ending!) or buy tires (Sears same as cash!) or buy braces (aw, the teeth really aren’t that bad!), but those things never go away. So last year at this time, with a “windfall” coming my way, I decided that the money would be best spent by taking my girls on a real vacation.

Since the divorce, vacations are a luxury that we cannot afford; luckily, they do get to go to the beach every year with their dad so it’s not as if they never get to go anywhere. They just don’t usually get to go cool places with their mom. And as a child who has faced the deaths of a mom, a sister, and a brother, I generally try to carpe the hell out of the diem as much as I can. With my oldest (Chrissy) being a freshman and my youngest (Carolyn) a seventh grader at the time, suddenly the realization hit me that my summers with them at home were limited. Precisely because of this fact, I decided to throw caution to the wind (something a single parent can pretty much NEVER do) and take us someplace that the girls would never forget.

We brainstormed: a cruise? No! No sinking and drowning on vacation, please. Disney? Fun, yes, but we did do that once as a family pre-divorce. The Outer Banks? Again, a nice place but we’d already been there in the past. Hawaii? HELL, YESSSS! Alas, my tax return was not THAT big! My next thought, then, was the Florida Keys. It was as close to Hawaii as I could afford and I thought my girls would get a kick out of snorkeling and the amazing blue water.

With the help of kayak.com and vrbo.com (vacation rentals by owner), I was able to get great prices on plane tickets, a rental convertible, and a condo on the beach. We would leave on my birthday (woohoo!) and stay for a week. There would be layovers for the flights (Minneapolis on the way down and Atlanta on the way home. But seriously? Cleveland to Minneapolis in a trek to Miami?! How does that even work?!) and my dad agreed to drive us to and from the airport. That was the easy part.

Okay. I’m an independent woman and all that, but the idea of doing this vacation all by myself, with two kids looking to me to navigate EVERY SINGLE PART OF IT, was terrifying. I think that for about a solid month before our departure, I never thought of any aspect of the vacation with excitement. It was all terror, all the time. Now, I am not a naturally anxious person. I don’t freak out if my kids are out past dark. I never used to lock my doors in my old house (we lived in Mayberry, then). I don’t think about cancer or predators or all of the things that go bump in the night. Until this damned vacation. I couldn’t think about it without envisioning me getting lost in the bad part of Miami. Or getting into a car accident. Or having the plane go down in flames (I seriously played this scenario out in my head so if it happened, I would know exactly what to say to the girls!). People would say, “Oh, my gosh, Jen, aren’t you so excited for your first vacation in seven years?!” and I would respond by turning white, gulping, and muttering some half-hearted affirmative reply.

But you know what? I did it. We did it! Three women, inexperienced travelers, trekking to the Keys for a week by ourselves. We survived the plane travel and layovers. We survived me having NO idea how to start the rental car (who invented keyless vehicles, anyway?!). We survived massive construction and detours in Miami and found our destination. We survived a dead car battery on our first full day on the island (thanks again for a fancy keyless car with no automatic light-turner-offer.) We survived MASS amounts of jellyfish in the water (Boo, beach! Yay, pool!). We survived navigating everywhere all by ourselves, making all our own plans, making all our own dinners, and doing whatever the heck we wanted to for one full week in a new place. We even survived getting lost going back to Miami for our return flight (okay, not without copious amounts of swearing on my part, but we survived!).

Was it my dream vacation? Nope. It was too windy to snorkel and I felt like I hadn’t done enough research ahead of time to really make the most of our time. But is it the best vacation I’ve ever had? You betcha. In a lot of ways, it didn’t hold a candle to our stay, pre-divorce, at the Animal Kingdom Lodge at Disney, or our big Beitko family vacations in the Outer Banks with ALL cousins, but this was our first (any quite possibly last) vacation where it was just the three of us. We didn’t do it perfectly, but we did do it without any help. We relied on one another and that part of the vacation was magical. That part of the vacation is what I will never forget.

And so, as I’ve decided to have a canvas print made of one of our photos to hang in the living room, I began to look through all of my photos. I thought I knew which picture I would use, but as I started reminiscing about that trip, I realized that I had to choose a photo from that vacation. We kinda found ourselves on that vacation—it was the perfect symbol for our new life as a new family: a little crazy, a little chaotic, a little disorganized …. But full of laughter, full of love, full of memories. And now, when we look at our new print on the wall, we can all tap into that magic. And that’s living.