You've got to slack to get saved

Pretty soon I'll go on my fabulous solo vacation. After eight years of hanging around and vacating with children, I'm eager to see how I act without anyone around to read to, feed or clean up after.

I'm also a little apprehensive. The point of this solo trip is to get in touch with the person who exists under the layers of fatigue and Legos and Magic School Bus plot lines. But what if the real me is boring, or worse yet, an asshole? A road trip with screaming kids seems like a frolic compared to a voyage of self-discovery that reveals a troll.

But that's why I need to go. It's easy to hide from myself, or lose myself, with my kids, my family life and my to-do list. I don't want to lose my existential bearings. Someday, sooner than I expect, my kids will be grown and independent, and I don't want to have to add self-rebuilding to the trauma of the empty nest.

Also, I want to sit on my ass. A lot, with the reapplication of sunblock and the arrival of drinks being the only interruptions. I want to get in touch with my inner napper. My late grandmother and her surviving baby sister, now 95, were masters of leisure. I like to think I learned well from them, but I haven't had time to practice those childhood lessons in a while.

Each had her own approach to idleness. My grandma worked like a line cook in her tiny kitchen and washed all her laundry by hand rather than waste quarters at the laundromat, but mostly her days were about dog-walking, reading, playing canasta with friends, watching her "stories" and the sacrosanct daily nap. Her sister, my great-aunt L, was all about charity work, gardening, manicures, sand-dollar hunts along the beach, and the sacrosanct daily nap.

For a non-napper, it was surprisingly easy to slip into their routine when I visited them: Eat breakfast, run a few errands, piddle around with dogs or flowerbeds, lunch and then nap. Not that I slept. But there was literally nothing to do so I was happy to take a stack of the reading material on hand (Guideposts and Reader's Digest at Grandma's, Ladies' Home Journal and Prevention at Aunt L's) and flop on divan or deck chair until the grownups stirred mid-afternoon. Whether this month's marriage could be saved was of no consequence. Doing nothing while the sun shone was radical and contrary to my busy nature. It was the zennest thing I did as a kid, learned by example from two stalwart Baptist ladies.

Now, of course, there's little time for sloth. I have two high-energy children, more than a dozen pets (only eight if you don't count the fish), a spouse who can run circles around me, and a million things I want to do. Oh, and a vegetable garden. And an impending remodeling project. And a blog. Plus the whole free-range learning thing.

It's reached the point where idleness seems like not a luxury but a sin. And that can't be right, because my grandma and her sister were far from depraved. I don't think it's coincidence that they and their third napping sibling all made it to their mid-90s, either. Let there be sloth, I say. Whoever I turn out to be when I have a few hours all to myself, I hope she likes naps.