As we’ve moved through our last vacation day at Afterglow, I’ve missed my husband. When our family used to travel from home in years past, Nate wasn’t just my spouse. He was my same-age buddy, a pal, someone I could talk to and share with, knowing he’d see things from my same-age perspective.

Today for example, our last chance to pursue Northwoods activities, my vote was to travel 20 minutes into Upper Michigan to revisit the spectacular Bond Falls, but with the complication of baby naps and the guys wanting to fish, there were no takers. But if Nate had been here, he’d have gone with me.

This week of family time has brought several unexpected jolts related to the problem of not having Nate with me as a vacationing peer. Last night as we finished a late dinner, I watched and listened to our adult kids talking, laughing, moving in and out of topics, and suddenly I felt like a fifth wheel. It was a quick flash of, “I’m the odd-man-out here.”

I know the kids weren’t thinking like that, but as I looked around the table, my mental status made a major shift from co-parent to single mom, something that hadn’t occurred to me yet. And it felt awkward. Although the label “single mom” is accurate, it doesn’t dictate I’m now a fifth wheel around my children.

I miss my partner a great deal, especially at our shared vacation place. But would I have wanted him here this past week with piercing back pain, struggling to maintain his composure with crying babies and crazy schedules?

Would Nate have been able to cope with sleeping in a set of bunk beds as I have this week? Would he have been ok with the two young families using the two bigger bedrooms?

Would I have been glad he was with us if he’d had the cancer death sentence hanging over his head and ours?

“No” to all of the above.

The Nate I’ve been missing was the one who stacked all our vacation debris on a makeshift trailer and towed it behind a station wagon for 350 miles each summer. I missed the guy who taught the kids to bait a hook, cast a line, reel in a fish and fry it in a pound of butter. I longed for the man who’d been happy to ride double on a horse with a toddler, triple on a motorcycle with two pre-schoolers and who’d run off the high dive like he was a kid himself.

But that man, that pal, that father… can’t be here.

The bottom line, as always, is that our family scenario worked out this way because God orchestrated it as such. But I trusted him back when Nate was healthy and happy at Afterglow, and I’m trusting him now.

After all, Nate is, indeed, healthy and happy again. He’s just not at Afterglow Lake.

“Let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God’s will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect.” (Romans 12:2)