My husband and I finally took a trip without our 5 kids. It didn’t go at all how we expected.

My husband and I both work and parent our five kids, and some days the rat wheel of events and responsibilities feels endless.

So, during a particularly tough season, we started scheming about whether it would actually be possible to “get away.” First, we tried to plan a little weekend cabin retreat nearby, but I knew I’d just come right back if something went wrong, and it didn’t feel like a real getaway without sand and water.

How hard could it be, really, to hand off our day-to-day responsibilities to a fully qualified adult babysitter who is also a local teacher in our area?

Once we planned to travel further, we started a spreadsheet to help us map out a few logistics.

Four pages later, we were able to see the load we’d been carrying and how complex it would be to transfer it over.

We headed to Florida from Ohio for a four-day beach getaway, hoping for the best.

I’m not someone who typically has a tough time being away from my kids.

I don’t struggle when we’re separated at day-care drop-off, on date night, or during their occasional overnight stay at grandma’s.

However, as our plane landed several states away, anxiety started to build around how complicated it would be to get back in an emergency, and whether the sitter would really be able to handle five kids.

It took a good 24 hours to calm down about it, which unfortunately was 25% of the vacation.

I did notice that it was nice to be able to think about my own needs first for a bit.

These mini luxuries helped me start to understand why rediscovering yourself on getaways is necessary.

But when you run your own seven-person three-ring circus, you can’t really just turn off your phone, or it might all come crashing down.

So I left it on, and couldn’t really disconnect.

The messages and notifications wouldn’t stop.

It started with a forgotten uniform.

Soon after, it morphed into a disagreement with the babysitter about the rules.

A grandparent wondered what time something was happening.

A practice was canceled on the app that only I could see.

A few beachside cocktails were a little bit helpful to get in the vacation spirit, but this didn’t feel the same as a real vacation.

I found this incredibly frustrating — we’d worked hard and paid a good amount of money to make it happen, and I couldn’t calm down about my kids over 1,000 miles away?

We found a nest of bunnies living next to the beach, which was the most shell-covered beach I’d ever seen.

I wanted to show my kids, and I missed them.

I’d head into the tourist shops to buy them shell necklaces, and feel nostalgic watching other families dig on the beach.

I was sad they were missing this trip, and no amount of logic about how we really needed a break seemed to counteract the feeling.

How ridiculous, I’d think to myself, that I spend time with them hoping to get a break away from them with my husband, and a break with my husband wishing they were there.

Despite the crises with my kids — which kept getting more severe and distracting, from behavior issues to logistics problems — one bright spot in the vacation was some uninterrupted conversation.

I learned that my husband and I actually have a great time together when we can finish a dang sentence.

That made me excited for future trips where the kids are a little more self-sufficient and a couple’s only getaway can feel a little more like that — a getaway.

Until then, I’m already planning to head back to the beach with the kids, where I’ll probably spend a lot of moments wishing I were able to get out of my head and enjoy an adults-only trip.