Early Monday morning Char, the kids, and I will pile into the SUV, and head for the airport. She's headed off to Hawaii for a few days with her sister, and the kids and I will head off for three days of skiing and whatever trouble we can get ourselves into. Our original plans were to hang around the house after school and live on pizza and Trix, but then a friend mentioned going skiing, which made me ponder us taking the kids when she got back, and she mused that I might as well go while she's off drinking mai-tais with Nika.

I was frankly surprised when she agreed to me taking the kids out of school for a couple of days just to ski, but there's a method to her madness.

If I take the kids skiing, I can't surreptitiously go job hunting while she's gone.

She's still determined to keep me home and unemployed. While neither of us has tired of the togetherness yet, I keep thinking that sooner or later I'll need to do something to get out of her hair for a few hours a day, or she might start feeling a little homicidal. I know I'm not the easiest person to live with; one would think that being stuck with me for virtually 24 hours a day would be pressing on her last nerve.

I get why she's in no hurry to send me back out into the rat race; these days I'm a much calmer person, I don't fidget as much as I did even just a year ago, and I sleep. She doesn't have to wonder how long I'll be able to sit still if we're watching a movie with the kids, she knows I'm paying attention to what she or any of the kids are saying in a given moment, and if she wakes up in the middle of the night she can be pretty sure I'll still be in bed. If I'm not, she can be pretty sure I just got up to go to the bathroom.

She has the mostly normal husband she thought she was getting fifteen years ago and doesn't want to give that up.

I get it.

I also get that neither of us is exactly ready to spend large chunks of time away from each other. Until this weekend, I don't think either of us quite grasped that, not until it was bluntly pointed out to us. While we were lying in bed last night, Char confessed, upon advice from the friend doing the pointing, that she wasn't sure she really wanted to take this trip to Hawaii just yet. Maybe in a few months, but not now.

I had to admit that I'm not all that keen on the timing, either.

But she has to go. No, it's not the money already spent on tickets and hotels, and it's not the time Nika took off work to go. She has to go because if she doesn't, she'll regret it. And delaying the trip isn't going to make it any easier on either of us, because if she pushes it back a month or two or ten, we'll still have to face the enormous weight of being apart for the first time since her accident.

You're clinging to each other, our friend pointed out.

And she's right. After the horror of last summer, neither of us is ready to let go at all, but we have to. I'm not letting her back out of this trip because as badly as she doesn't want to go without me, she needs to. As much as I want her skiing with the kids and me, I'll take them alone and try to distract myself from all the what if thoughts.

Once she's there I know she's going to have a great time soaking up the sun, getting slight blitzed, and probably flirting with random guys who don't realize they won't have a chance with either of them. Once the kids and I are on the slopes, I know my gut won't be churning so hard worrying about every horrible thing that could happen to her while she's gone. I'll have a blast spending this kind of time alone with my kids, something that doesn't happen very often.

We'll get through the trepidation, and then maybe (maybe as in a long shot), she'll be a bit less reticent about the idea of me working, and I'll be a little more willing to push the point.

Mostly, we're both going to have a kick ass time.