There is one week of the summer that is the best week of our lives. Summer cabin week. We rent a cabin up north in Minnesota like Minnesotans do, and we, as a family of five, unplug from the world, spend long days on the shore of the lake, in the water, on a boat, eat s’mores and egg my husband on to make a better “World’s Best Toasted Marshmallow” than the last. In the evenings, my husband and I kick back with a glass of wine, cheese, and admire the lake or let our inner competitive natures take us to a different level in a cut throat game of Scrabble. Even rainy days can’t get us down. We watch morning cartoons, make bracelets, color drawings, and build legos. It is our week of complete togetherness and pure fun. It is the one week I look forward to the most all year long. Summer cabin week. The best week of our family’s year.

Except this past summer. It had been a grueling fall turned winter turned spring. It was a blurry concoction of muddy distress and gasping for air. I won’t get into the details, but my endurance had been my whimpering crutch to lean on through a difficult season of life. Our weeklong summer vacation was the horizon that I daydreamed about and when I took deep breaths, I imagined smelling the lake air that was just around the corner. But as the week drew closer, my husband and I both knew that we would not be out of the woods of our hard year that was wearing us both down in the worst of ways. And soon, we went from panic to surrendering that our magical summer week would be edged out by my husband’s work demands. Determined to still go, we went through the motions of packing, driving up north and settling into our cozy cabin with the sparkling reflections of the gorgeous lake taunting us from our cabin window. The week of vacation was filled with long, full work days for my husband and full, effortful days for me of trying to preserve the magic of the lake and cabin for my kids. From my kids’ perspective, it was still the best week of the summer. And while I will admit, I still enjoyed the joy of my kids as they laughed and buried one another in the sand, it ground at my patience that here I was, still leaning, trying to stay upright and keep together the fabrics of my family. I tried to hold on to the fact that all things considered, we were lucky to have this trip at all and that the bottom line was that my kids’ memories of our summer week would still be ones filled with happiness. But it was freakin’ hard.

My husband and I are always surprised when people comment on how we “have it all.” Handing off the baton stealthily as we pass one another during all hours of the days and weeks. Him out of town. Me working a string of overnights. Him working long hours. Me working the weirdest of hours. We still choose to manage our kids’ hockey team. I still choose to participate in the PTO at both our kids’ schools. He is on the board of a non-profit charity that helps provide support for legal representation for foster children. I like to bake goods for his office on days off. He trucks the kids along to their various activities on weekends I am working. I love to write on the side. He gets honored with awards and makes national lists of awesome lawyers I disgruntling agree to not share on social media. We plan big parties for our kids’ birthdays. We host evenings with friends. We plan date nights and sneak long weekends away to ski, to our favorite retreats, to Napa, to spend with friends. We plan week-long summer vacations for our family. We make crazy choices to train together for half marathons.

How do we do it all.

I will be the first to laugh maniacally and flail my arms like a rabid animal that we are hardly capable of “doing it all.” Except, most of the time, I’m too tired to flail my arms at anything. If you asked me, we are scrambling to “have it all”, one day at a time, with nothing truly figured out. Our priorities tug and pull at us and bicker with one another to edge out their competition.  We get stuck in the middle feeling like we are watching the construction of an overambitious house made of cards that might blow over at any given moment if one flimsy card is misplaced.

This is something we never trained for when we said “I do.” While I thought I knew when we were dating that my husband would be a good father and partner, I truly and foolishly had no idea what gave me that impression. He could have turned into the worst. So, first and foremost, I am thankful that did not happen.

What makes us functional is our uncanny awareness of one another. We both carry an internal stress barometer for the other. And when the other’s stress is ticking into the red, our ability to take over expands. When the other’s frustration and mood takes a nosedive for the worse, the other is their to lay out the trampoline so when we fall, we bounce and don’t hit the ground. When these safe measures are too late and we do crumple into the ground, we snatch up the super glue and mend one another the best we can with the fiercest devotion to one another.

This is how we make it doable. The to-do’s, should-do’s, already-late-but-still-have-to-do’s catch up and cripple us at times. Those seconds during the day that we are passing the baton are wobbly, we often both come close to dropping the hand-off or colliding, and our legs buckle as we try to run in stride with one another.  But somehow, we pull it together, for one more task of the day, week, month.

It is not easy. Oh man, it is not easy. Our days are infiltrated with irritability, disappointments, resentments, frustrations, misses, falling asleep on date nights. There are demands, setbacks, things we say yes to, many things we have to say no to–however much it pains us to say goodbye to new opportunities in our careers–but we remind ourselves that this is about our family. That this is our ultimate goal. The raising of a family. A marriage, kids, the preservation of love. All this that we are doing, it is about this core unit that we uphold over everything. If the baton is a little wobbly today, and even if we flat out drop it somewhere along the way and have to run back and pick it up, our team efforts will ultimately keep us in forward motion.

All things considered, we make it work because we carry the same vision and ultimate goal: to protect the best part of all of this—our family. We may have seemingly insurmountable days, outright failed days, and make all sorts of wrong choices along the way, but as we pass this family baton back and forth, we will fervently protect it with what we can and shoulder one another the best we can. Cabin week last summer is one I don’t care to replay–in fact, last year in its overall entirety is one I am okay to leave behind–but we are already planning for our cabin week this summer; the kids could not be more excited.