If history is written, as they say, by the victors, then the official account of last weekend’s activities will one day be provided by The Kid. He definitely emerged in the “W” column after our family road trip.

The Husband and I decided a few months ago to take a July 4 weekend trip to Charleston because (a) he’s never been there; (b) my parents decided to come along and help with childcare; and (c) weekend trips on holiday weekends are something a normal family does, right? Even with kids? RIGHT? Charleston is such a lovely city: waterfront, historical, quintessentially Southern (ie, hot as hell and a little bit racist). I went once, eight years ago, for The Sis’s bachelorette party. Strangely enough, I don’t remember much from that weekend, and I’ve never been there with a year-and-a-half-old, so we were all, “Here’s to new things!” and “This sounds like a great idea!” And we loaded the car with every toy and diaper we own and set out for the five-hour journey.

A half hour in, TK began to cry in the backseat. This began my anxious-mother seat-crawling dance: unbuckle my belt, contort my body into a pretzel, flash the other cars on the highway, land my tailbone square on the seat belt buckle in the backseat, cry out and give thanks that TK doesn’t know English yet. Had you asked me two years ago about the appropriate way to address a toddler screaming in the backseat, I would have advised, “Open the flask and turn up the radio. He’ll quit eventually.” Since then, I have become mother to a child I kinda like, and emotion has a funny way of creeping into the decision-making process. Plus, we had no alcohol in the car (rookie mistake). So in the interest of risking over-placation to conserve sanity, I spent much of the trip riding bitch beside TK, reading him books and trying not to vomit from carsickness. He took a lovely, roughly 40-second nap at one point, and we got there alive, so…there’s that.

At our neighborhood pool recently, with our husbands and kids splashing nearby, The Sis mused, “When did we become these people?” By these people, she meant, of course,  those moving about frantically, trying to keep their kids from drowning, rather than the bastards lying leisurely in the sun with a magazine in one hand and a beer in the other. I used to be that bastard! I thought of that moment several times during our family-friendly adventure, as TH and I moved from one situation to the next like firefighters putting out flames. I think vacation is less of an accurate description than disaster control. On Friday night we loaded TK into his stroller and set out with my parents for our 5:00 dinner reservation because that is what time people with children are allowed to eat in public, and walked the scorching streets of Charleston toward the restaurant. About a third of the way there, we passed a carriage house for horses and breathed through our mouths as the scent of manure coated our hair and clothes. About halfway there, the sky opened up and, drenched, we ducked into the closest doorway, which happened to be half organic diner/half biker bar. “You have a baby! In a bar!” The Mom whispered to me, and I laughed until the entire population of the joint turned to stare at us and I wondered if the record-scratching sound effect was real or in my head. We stayed for a drink anyway, since that’s the kind of “wet” we prefer, then headed back into the 99% humidity to our destination–which turned out to be packed and way too nice for TK’s plate-throwing antics. I felt the helpless tears coming, and The Dad kindly told the staff that we would not be joining them for dinner this evening. Which is how we found ourselves in an open-air section of Satan’s armpit for dinner, feasting upon subpar seafood as sweat ran down our faces.

The next day went better, mainly because we had been broken down and put in our places by the previous one and didn’t set out with sweeping ambitions like “eat normal food” and “walk around in the sun.” We headed to a museum down the street and paid the entry fee in exchange for air conditioning. For the next hour, we each took a turn watching TK walk up and down a hallway as the rest of the group gazed upon Revolutionary War artifacts and fashions. In a room full of silver and china, I thought about my very different experience a decade ago in Charleston’s sister city, Savannah, where I spent a few weeks living during a summer off from dental school. My preparation for that trip involved required reading (Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil), required viewing (Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil), and self-protection (learning from The Dad how to shoot a 380 revolver and carry it across state lines). Much different from, say, calculating diaper consumption and dinosaur books. Legend says that Sherman spared the cities of Savannah and Charleston from his torches because he found them too beautiful to burn (he didn’t run into that dilemma with Atlanta, apparently). As I walked through a room filled with silver and china from Charleston’s oldest families, I thought about history and the traditions that compose it.

We Southerners have some skeletons in our open historical closet. We’re acquainted with being on the wrong side of the war–the side that doesn’t write the recap. But we’re also acquainted with periods of reconstruction, with trappings of society like silver and china that get passed down from generation to generation and, though often overvalued, are–at their best and deepest–symbols of endurance and commitment. Gentility and manners that can seem (and sometimes be) arbitrary or insignificant unless regarded for their original intent–to show acknowledgment and respect. I’ve lived on both sides of the Mason-Dixon and have a heart split between them, but I do love that my side of our family’s tree comes with the full-bloomed magnificence of a region both broken and healing, wrong and redeemed. The whole package. Kind of like all of us, when we’re honest.

The weekend improved, thanks to some emptier restaurants and flowing beverages and a little help from each other. TH and I put TK to bed and met my parents in the courtyard outside of our room, where they had snagged us the last of the free happy hour drinks–two for each of us. One of our family traditions. My baby asleep in the monitor beside me and in the bed a few feet away, I took a drink, felt the A/C, and looked around at our group. We are what we have in common, and that makes us a family. I let out a breath held for the last twelve hours and sank into the feeling of being one of those people.