As mothers, we supposedly have a “natural” tendency to nurture our children. We worry about their food, their clothes, their self-esteem, their activities and their friends. We want them to be the best they can be. Speaking for myself, I also like to nurture my friends, picking up some silly thing at Wal-Mart that makes me think of them, sending them just the right link to something on-line and texting/calling just to say hi. I nurture myself…allowing myself time to read, time to golf and time to nap.

Where my natural tendency to nurture often slips up is in my marriage. My relationship with my husband, Hurley, is probably the foundation that lets me do all that other nurturing, but it is the easiest to forget about and let slide.

A lot of people just figure that this is what happens after many years of marriage, so we ignore it and keep focusing on all those things that we are accustomed to nurturing. Worse yet, we exist in a state that has come to be known (amongst my friends anyway) as Stivorce. Stivorce is when you act like you are divorced but you stay together. Some do it because of inertia. Some do it because of the children. Some do it because they’ve come to accept that marriage is the state of two people making each other miserable.

What I have learned over the years is that the best cure for us is travel…without the children. We can argue about money and food and all kinds of other things at home, but throw us on a plane bound for another country and we become like this well-oiled marriage machine. We don’t argue about what we are going to do when. My husband doesn’t think it’s weird that I can choose to sit in a hotel room and read a book while missing out on a major tourist attraction. We gravitate toward local watering holes where we can meet the natives and really experience the location, not just what the Minister of Tourism wants us to see. We’ve had this experience in Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Ireland and Scotland.

But, it doesn’t always take a fabulous European vacation to jump start our marriage and keep us from slipping off into Stivorce. Last week our kids went to  NC Grange Camp and had an amazing time. While they were gone, Hurley and I loaded up the minivan and headed to Florida. He had a couple business things to do down there, we had a family/friends annual golf/pool weekend and we wanted to visit some friends we haven’t seen in too long. From the minute we got in the car, it was different than day-to-day existence. A nine-hour drive gives you time for your conversations to wander from subject to subject. The songs on your iPod (available to listen to thanks to my friend Pilar lending me her cassette adapter for my iPhone) giving rise to memories you have shared and things you’ve never told one another about. We took a long walk on a west coast beach at sunset one night and then grabbed  ice cream cones. We talked about how fabulous the pillows are at hotels. I read books. He went running. We had beers at lunch at beachside restaurants. It was invigorating. I remembered why we got married.

I suggested that we do this kind of thing every three months or so, but we won’t. Even though we know the “cure,” we will probably still ignore the symptoms until they metastasize and we have a big meltdown. But this past Saturday I saw that there’s even a smaller way to get that little jumpstart. No need for a hotel. No long drive. Hurley asked me (like there was actually more than one possible answer!), “Hey…wanna go to the Apple store today?” On the way, we stopped at  Performance Bike in Cary where my husband feels the way I do when I visit the Apple Store or  Quail Ridge Books. We discovered  Ollie’s where we browsed and browsed, never once feeling like we needed to be anyplace at any specific time. We marveled at the fact that no one has told the people at Crabtree Valley Mall and especially at the Apple Store that we are in a recession. When we got home, we started making dinner together and spontaneously invited friends for dinner. I felt reconnected.

Guess what? I guess we nurtured ourselves!

Diane appears Wednesdays on TriangleMom2Mom.com. Read more about Diane on her blog Live and Let Di.