I married very well.  At the moment of this writing I am aboard my FIL’s trawler steaming from Martha’s Vineyard back to Cape Cod.  My BIL has been hosting our family at the old home place on Chappaquiddick -- one of the last authentic places on earth.  Chappy would be the ideal place to unplug -- it’s a rustic spot with no TVs, no AC, limited electricity and spotty phone.  Overall, a great place to get low-tech.

Would be.

Two laptops with DVDs spinning -- one rigged with internet, cell phones chirping, my iPhone bringing me the latest emails and updates.  I Twittered.  

Despite the rustic setting and all the impediments to technology that a small island in Nantucket Sound can present, the best our little tribe could manage was a kind of digital diet, a low pixel plan with slim bandwidth.  Unplugged?  No way.

And here I am, rocking and rolling in the snug salon of the Camano, three miles off Hyannis, clicking and clacking away.  Bubba is perched happily at the helm station, doing his best “Deadliest Catch” imitation, watching the GPS system and monitoring the marine radio.  But there’s no avoiding it.  I’m working.

It’s not something I’m proud of: I sneak off to check my email like an animal skulking into the woods to take a dump.  I cower, curled into a fetal position under a staircase, listening in to a conference call.  I tuck in the kids, have a nightcap with Aunty Kendall, then tiptoe to the computer for just a late night paragraph or two.

I know that I would be a better father if I just shut it all down.  I would be more attentive to the kids, more available to my wife to help out with the endless vacation logistics of lunch packing and sunscreen applying.  I also know that choice is involved.  I could clearly choose to unplug it all for just a few days: DadLabs will run crisply without my interference, more so than ever, in all likelihood.

But unplugging doesn’t seem right.  It doesn’t seem like something I can do without serious consequences, so I try to make it all work with rigged-up, lame-ass compromises.  Stay home a day when the family goes to the beach, but don’t check the phone when you are with them.  Write at night, make the side trip to New York as quick as possible, but, in the end, what I’ve got is a working vacation.

Does a working vacation function as either work or vacation?  For us the  answer is: well enough.  Like most things with parenting, it’s an art of compromise.  We’ve kept alive the essential family tradition that has taken us more than a decade to build, while at the same time allowing me to meet the my work obligations well enough not to harm the business.

Not perfect.  Here I sit writing.  But the seas are calm this morning, and my son just caught a glimpse of the lighthouse that stands above his summer home.

My oldest recently celebrated his tenth birthday (Happy Birthday, Bubba), which means that I’ve been in this parenting business for an even decade now.  So perhaps it’s time to reflect on that experience for a moment.  Because, after all, it’s all about me.

So, as a result of being a parent for the last ten years, am I happier?  The question, raised most recently in an editorial in the Charlotte Observer, is one that pops up from time to time in the media, and also in the minds of veteran parents.  A number of studies, including those cited in the article, have answered the question “Are parents happier than their childless peers?” with a resounding “no.”

My wife and I spent many years together reading newspapers on Sundays, going to movies without animated characters, and generally trying to figure out what to do with all the disposable income, so I get it.  Since then, I’ve had my share of kids power vomiting on airline flights, producing blowout diapers in carseats, injuring themselves, and generally worrying the hell out of me, but would I really be happier if I were childless?

No, but I’m not sure that’s inconsistent with the studies.

The problem with these studies is that they depend on self-reporting, and it’s tough for any one person to both be a parent and childless in a given moment to decide which makes them happier.  And how can we be sure that the impulse to remain childless is not linked with the tendency to self-report happiness?

Are there any twin studies out there comparing the childless twin to a parent twin?

And, as an imagination exercise, what would your childless twin look like?  Maybe a little skinnier and better rested, but happier?

For me, I don’t think that there is an alternative.  I am who I am.  Not being a parent means not being me.  Happier or not happier seems irrelevant.  If I were not a parent, I would be less myself.

Besides that, I’m happy (bonus), thanks in large part to my kids.  Starting with my oldest.  Almost exactly a decade ago.

Thanks, Bubba.

What do you think of these studies?

I was feeling a little nostalgic and drifting back through years of family summer vacation pictures, including those I have just recently taken.  It struck me in this viewing that the children change and grow, but the background remains fixed.  In the photos the themes recur.  The beaches, the boat, to boogie boards and buckets full of sea creatures.

There is the annual beach cookout, there is the week out on the island, there is the rainy day at the aquarium.  Even the beach toys carry over from year to year.

Our summer vacation is steeped in multi-generation family tradition.

I know that there are families out there that could not fathom returning to the same spot year after year.  These folks would gently remind me that there a subtle curriculum to family travel, exposing kids to the wider world, teaching them about new cultures, new environments.  They would inform me that summer is a great opportunity to expand the child’s horizons.

I get it.  And I sometimes fret, but I still would not trade vacation tradition for innovation.

For my buck, finding a place that works and sticking to it has the advantage of clearly being “vacation” -- we’re clearly away and not at home -- but without the stress of trying to figure out a new place (maybe this is not stressful, but exciting to some families, and thus the different choice).  I like the combination of being away, yet being familiar.

The kids can set their own agenda because they know what is on the menu.  They actually have more freedom because we have comfort with the area.  They have developed stable friendships with kids from like minded families that perform the return migration.

There are meals and outings featuring stories about meals and outings from the past.

And the place is beautiful.  And my in-laws have a house here, so the price is right.

What are your priorities when it comes to creating a family vacation?  Do you seek out new experiences or return to familiar haunts?

My family has been away on vacation for the past week, leaving me behind to have a career.  For a family man, time away from the domestic cohabitants is always disorienting, but remaining behind while the family goes away is much more vertigo inducing than the more familiar business trip arrangement.  Coming back to your own empty home at night can evoke for the modern father something of an existential crisis, for the behavioral cues remain, but none of the stimuli.

Some things I have learned from being home alone for a week:

-That by turning over the TV remote to my wife and children for the last decade, I haven’t really been missing anything.

-That I had been unjustly blaming my children for the quantity of laundry we produce every week.

-That eating certain types of foods at certain regular intervals is just a socially assigned convention that can easily be dispensed with.

-Same with sleep.

-That being childless would not have resulted in greater overall work productivity (please note blog posting frequency over the past week).

-That the pleasure, joy, depth, structure and meaning in my life comes from being a husband and a father.

Time to go get on a plane.

Here’s a tip for you: if you are feeling a little guilty, a little insecure about the general quality of your fathering because you recently sent your whole family off on vacation while you remain behind to work, watch There Will Be Blood.  Seriously.  Daniel Day-Lewis’ character is such a terrifyingly driven and obsessed man, such a monstrous dad, that you will walk away feeling like you can’t be all that bad.  That tip is in no way a condemnation of the film; it’s brilliant and you should put it in your Netflix cue if you haven’t already.

Movies are the theme this week in my world -- today we shot a minivan review of Wall-E.  I don’t want to spoil that episode (it will air 7/2/08), but I was particularly impressed with the first half-hour of this movie.  There a lot to like, though I’m curious to see if it’s a hit with the kids.

And I’m hoping to see a lot of movies this week.  Because I’m on my own.

I put the crew on a plane yesterday, and I fly up to join them in a week.  Staying behind from a family vacation to work pretty much flies in the face of what we stand for here at DadLabs (dad first, work later).  I’ll still make it up there for a Swedish-sized vacation, but it’s still trimmed back from the two-teacher family days when the summer was our playground.  I’ve sort of decided to quit feeling bad about it and kick ass on the work.  We’ve got a double dose of production next week, so we can stockpile enough episodes to get what vacation we can manage.  And we just got our first draft of the book back from the publisher with some edits to attend to.  So, if I’m going to stay behind, it’s head down and after it.

And, yes, it’s true, there will be some wild Baldwin-brother-on-a-Vegas-bender style partying.  Last night I ate ice-cream.  Right.  From.  The Carton.  Tomorrow night: dinner with my parents.