After three years of marriage and one toddler later, my husband and I are finally going on our honeymoon! I have to admit, it still feels incredibly surreal. We’re kind of getting a two-for-one special out of the deal. We’re taking our first vacation from parenting (and from family in general for that matter), and it will be our first vacation alone together ever. So we picked someplace kind of exciting that neither one of us have ever been before: Vegas! Okay, so Vegas wasn’t at the top of our list as a honeymoon spot, but the constraints of time and money demanded we make some practical decisions, and that meant 1. Flying to a destination that the soon-to-expire free tickets I’ve been hoarding for a year and a half will take us to and 2. Going somewhere that’s desperate enough for business that the rates are at an all-time low. Vegas fit both criteria.

When I think honeymoon, images of sipping margaritas on some white sands beach in Mexico come to mind, but only the truly brave would even think about crossing the southern border right now. (Since the birth of our son, my husband and I have grown incredibly less brave). Vegas has always been described to me as Disney Land for grown ups, so while it’s someplace I’ve always wanted to see at least once in my lifetime, it never struck me as a particularly romantic destination. I even started getting a little depressed in the initial planning stages when I discovered the only hotels in our price range looked so old, the smell of musty bedspreads wafted up from the room pics and emanated right off my computer screen. And that’s when I heard the voice of my sister-in-law ask, “Is this one of those times you just suck it up and charge it?”

I’m one of those people who gets stressed out by debt. Any amount of debt makes me uncomfortable. The size of my credit card debt is large enough that it’s not going away anytime soon, but it is still considerably–immensely–smaller than the debt of the average American household. Paradoxically, I also consider myself somewhat of a credit card queen. I’ve never used a credit card for a shopping spree or a vacation or something else extravagant I couldn’t afford, but when I was young and trying to survive on a pretty piddly salary in NYC, there was more than one occasion I had to tap a cash advance offer to make the rent. During that time, I picked up a few tricks, and since then have developed a policy: I don’t pay interest. If I still have a balance on a credit card when the introductory 0% interest period is over, I accept one of the gazillion new introductory 0% interest offers I get every month and transfer my balance. Of course, if you keep racking up the debt, eventually you will run out of available credit, and the new offers will just stop coming. The idea is to keep the balance manageable and as low as possible of course. Even if you don’t open a new account, if you’re lucky, one of your old cards may miss your balance enough that they’ll bribe you with a 0% balance transfer offer, and you can keep rolling that balance along until you either pay it off or run out of offers. I haven’t reached either inevitable conclusion yet, so I decided the answer to the imaginary voice of my sister-in-law was a resounding, Yes, this may just be one of those occasions.

Once I got comfortable with the idea of racking up the credit card a little bit, (okay, I’m still not “comfortable” with it, but I’m successfully ignoring the discomfort for now), I decided if it’s going to be a honeymoon in Sin City, we might as well spend just enough for a room that feels like it could be on a white sand beach somewhere and not across the hall from a wise-guy crime scene. And that is when I discovered the shimmering pyramid better known as the Luxor. I nearly fell off my chair when I saw the weeknight rate was only $50 a night! This was considerably cheaper than the other hotels in its class–that class of hotel being the ones that are too new to have any musty rooms in the back wing where they stick the cheapskates like us. The weekend rate jumps up of course, but if you make two separate reservations, and make the weekend reservation an all inclusive one, it comes with the all-you-can eat buffet all day long and free show tickets. And almost as if the universe was rewarding me for letting go of any spoiled princess notions I had of what a honeymoon should look like, I discovered the all-inclusive comes with tickets to a Chris Angel show and the Bodies exhibit! I never in a million years thought I’d have the opportunity to go see Chris Angel live, and the Bodies exhibit was a show in NYC that I’ve actually tried to get to more than once and failed on both occasions. It’s kind of funny that we have to fly all the way across the country to see something that was in our own back yard for the longest time, but I took that as some kind of sign that we chose wisely in planning our unconventional honeymoon.

And why should it be conventional? My husband and I have done everything backwards. We got engaged, pregnant, married, had a baby and then a wedding, all in that order. Nothing about our family has been typical or conventional by any standard measure, so why should our honeymoon be any different? Don’t get me wrong–the whole experience has given me a newfound respect for convention. Sometimes breaking with tradition is the best way to learn why the traditions came to be in the first place. There is no question that our path would have been far easier and smoother had we gone through the steps in the conventional order. This became most clear when I was trying to plan a formal wedding while nursing a three month old. There’s a reason why, traditionally, people got married before making babies. The crazy thing is, it doesn’t seem like anyone does it in that order anymore. I can make this statement with some degree of confidence because my husband sells jewelry. Engagement rings to be exact. He would say about 75 percent of the couples he sells rings to have already had a child together. He even had one poor customer who had been browsing for the right ring come running back into the store in a panic one night because his girlfriend was in labor, and he wanted to propose right after she had the baby. He said he wanted it to be right at that moment, to make their family complete.

I was always very cognizant of how children dramatically change your life. I’m the youngest in a family of five, and all of my older siblings had their children in their early twenties, before they were really ready. So I took heed of the message they repeated constantly, and that was to make sure to go to school, get an education, and wait until you’re “older” to start your family. I did all those things and more–I got a degree, started a career, got some more education, changed careers, joined the Army, deployed to a combat zone, and even waited til I was in my thirties to start my family. Somehow I thought if I just did enough, and waited long enough, then I was doing things in the proper order. But in spite of all my best efforts to make good choices, to be independent and self-sufficient, somehow I still managed to do it backwards. And that’s okay, because I know that when my husband and I finally get to more solid ground, we will appreciate where we are on such a deeper level than if we had taken a more traditional path. I just wish my poor parents didn’t have to put a roof over our heads and be as inconvenienced as they have been while we’ve been busy learning what should have been rather obvious life lessons.

So I had some guilt stepping onto the plane. Part of me feels like we don’t really deserve to go on this trip, even though we’ve heard a lot of, “Have fun, you guys deserve a honeymoon,” before we left. I’ve been waiting on a certain job to come through for months. There’s been a number of obstacles in the way, but we’re finally at that place where we can say with confidence, I really should be getting that phone call any day now–the one that says everything is finally a go and we can start packing our bags. So I know if we don’t use the free tickets that I got when I signed up for a certain credit card (did I mention I’m a credit card queen?), they will likely expire right around the time that I’m starting my new job. But free tickets aside, we don’t really have the cash on hand for the rest of our trip, so we will have to charge the major expenses like the hotel. All this while we’re still living in my parents’ house. I’m having some cognitive dissonance here.

And then of course there’s the guilt of leaving the baby, who my sister who has so graciously offered to watch while we’re gone, but that’s a whole other entry I’ll save for another time. The point I’m focussing on here is that some part of me feels like we don’t deserve something as luxurious as a honeymoon right now. But then another much stronger voice inside me knows we need this–our marriage needs this. I know that sounds spoiled–my marriage needs a honeymoon? What? Really? But the thing is, we kinda skipped a huge step.

My husband and I met on a patrol base in Iraq. Our first date was a refit. A refit is when the team convoys up the highway to the main base to drop off laundry, restock on supplies, get a decent meal in a real chow haul (as opposed to the field chow you eat out on the PB), and take the night off of missions and work in general. Since I was the only female on the PB, there were generally no separate accommodations made for “females” on such occasions. So my husband and his battle buddy offered up a cot in their tent for me to sleep on while we were on refit (him and every other guy on the PB!) We sat tight next to each other on an Army cot while we watched DVD’s on a laptop, and then we went to bed. Shortly after that, we became official. He never saw me with makeup on. We had no idea what each other looked like in plain clothes, or what each other’s style was for that matter. We had no idea how each other acted with a couple drinks in us, or if we had moves out on the dance floor. He didn’t know that I’m a pretty decent cook, and I didn’t realize he doesn’t eat anything that doesn’t come out of a box. In short, we missed a lot of those initial moments couples have together while they get to know each other–those things most people take for granted because it’s difficult to imagine it happening any other way.

We spent the next few months talking about all the things we couldn’t wait to do when we were finally safely home together. We couldn’t take each other to our favorite places to eat, but we tried to figure out if we liked the same kind of food without being able to share our favorite meals. It turned out he modified his answers a little. We don’t like any of the same food. (I almost called the engagement off when we got home and he refused to try the marinara sauce I made for him because he doesn’t like tomatoes. This is a huge problem for a Sicilian woman.). We spent our time talking about more important things, like how we would like to raise our children and what values we think are important in that process. We dreamed of what it would be like to wake up and have breakfast in our P.J.’s together, sitting on a comfy clean couch in front of the T.V.

In this way, my husband and I were very blessed to have an unconventional beginning. We didn’t fall in love with each other’s taste in music. We fell in love with with each other because we got the opportunity to see who the other person was under the most terrible of circumstances. I had the opportunity to see my husband’s compassion towards his fellow soldiers and the sick and injured Iraqis who came to him for medical treatment. He saw me put my rank on the line when I told a Captain he was going to get my team killed if he didn’t get out of my way and let me do my job. These are the experiences you will hear us talk about when someone asks us how we met, how we fell in love. But we never knew how it felt to just be with each other, to just enjoy each other without having half our focus on our weapon and the mission.

I made it home about five days before my husband did. The first time he saw me in civilian attire was when I met him on the parade field in a sundress and high heels I barely remembered how to walk in. The poor guy had to meet my parents in that same moment. After a week of readjustment back into our units, we got to go on leave together. Our plan was to drive to his family in Iowa, over to my family in New York, and back down to Georgia where we were stationed. We started it off on a sad note. My 11 year old black lab, who had been cared for by various family members while I was away, was dying. No one wanted to tell me while I was gone, but when I came home, I found out his spine was deteriorating and he could barely walk anymore. That dog had been across the country with me and back more times than I could count. From New Mexico to New York City, he had been loyally and faithfully by my side. The thought of loosing him so soon after I came home was devastating. My husband said we could take him with us to his home in Iowa, and that was mine and Cody’s final road trip together. He made it as far as Iowa, but only his ashes came home to New York.

After mourning the passing of Cody, my husband and I had what felt like an ever so brief moment of being carefree together. We went on a camping trip (with his parents) in the Black Hills to visit Mount Rushmore and catch a glimpse of the infamous Sturgis Motorcycle Rally. And on a little campsite somewhere between the roar of Harley Davidsons and the somber glow of an American monument, our little hell raising angel came to be. Pregnancies are not smooth and graceful for the women of my family. I immediately gained 10lbs in water weight almost the second he was conceived and entered a constant state of wanting to do nothing but lay down and sleep. I realized I was pregnant about a week after we hit New York, and that was pretty much the end of my leave as I had anticipated it. Morning sickness set in about a week or two after we got back to Georgia, and anyone with kids pretty much knows what the rest of the story looks like from here.

Once again the story of my husband and I unfolds in an unconventional manner that gives us the opportunity to come to love and appreciate each other on far deeper levels than if we had done things in the more traditional order. My husband and I know and love each other for the parents and spouses we have come to be. Our love grows out of a respect that comes after you have had no choice but to surrender and depend on someone when you finally realize some things you simply cannot manage alone, when you realize your partner has a choice in whether they are a reliable or a selfish one, and they choose to be the former kind. This is precious and priceless, but it never changed the fact that while we may be relatively healthy and whole individuals, there has always seemed to be a piece missing to us. It’s that piece that most civilian couples get in those first few encounters, no matter how brief or few they are, when they can be completely self-absorbed and wrapped up in each other all at the same time. Those encounters where conspicuously absent are M-4′s and the ever lingering threat of incoming rockets and mortars. Those moments that aren’t clouded by the occasional onset of panic or anxiety that washes over you when you step out of that world and try to impersonate a regular person for the first time in 15 months. It is this piece of our puzzle that is whispering to me, “You guys need a honeymoon.” So I hope that part of me that feels like this vacation is a luxury we cannot afford (and therefor do not deserve) can forgive the other part of me that says this is one extravagance we need to engulf ourselves in.