Last month I told you about the beach in my article, Is It You, or Is It Me? How I pulled up my bathing suit bottoms and told the kids to be quieter and tried to make us acceptable before anyone said we weren’t. The part that keeps bugging me isn’t the tidying. It’s the timing. If the judgment is mine, I can get to it early, in the car, before I ever walk in.

So, in a perfect world, these are the five things I would do before heading into any scenario where I know I’m going to feel instantly criticized, or like I need to tidy up. Anywhere I might not be doing enough. Anywhere someone might be counting. A beach full of strangers. Anywhere I’m sure I’ll be seen as the selfish one, the tired one, or the mom who’s doing it wrong.

Nobody’s said any of this but I bring it with me.

1. Read my true words.

I have a page in a journal from a women’s retreat in 2018 with a section I titled True Words. It’s a list of things that are true no matter what I’m feeling in the moment, most of them rooted in scripture, all of them things I can believe instead of whatever my head is serving that day.

I have nothing to prove.

I have nothing to hide.

I have nothing to lose.

What God says about me is more true than what anyone else says about me.

I’ve been reading that page for eight years. (How to make your own list is a whole other post, and it’s coming.)

2. Practice benevolent detachment.

This one I learned from John Eldredge. It’s a practice that can be done out loud or on paper, and it’s short:

Jesus, I give everyone and everything to you. I give everyone and everything to you. Every person behind that door, every outcome, every version of the evening I’ve already imagined going badly. I hand it over to you before I even get out of the car.

In a perfect world I not only recite this every morning before my feet hit the floor, but also write down each thing I am surrendering. I start with writing “Jesus, I give everyone and everything to you” and then list each thing that comes to mind, such as my day, my productivity, my relationships, my parenting, my kids, my appearance, the judgments of others. I also find myself reciting this throughout the day, especially in times where I feel out of control, like when I watched my sixteen-year-old daughter drive off into the sunset with her little sister for the first time!

If the Jesus part makes you twitchy, I understand. I'm not assigning homework, this is just what I say in my own car. The surrender part works no matter who you hand things to.

3. Remember two of the Four Agreements.

The Four Agreements is a book by Don Miguel Ruiz, and I only ever seem to need two of them in the driveway.

Don’t take anything personally: whatever the people inside think of me is about their story, filtered through their own stuff, and it was never mine to carry.

Don’t make assumptions: half the judgment I’m bracing for is judgment I invented in the car. I wrote a whole essay about that.

4. Get grateful about somebody in there.

Find one thing to be thankful for about someone on the other side of that door. Not the situation. A person. One of my best friends, who also happens to be an amazingly talented counselor, taught me to take it one step further and actually thank the person I'm worried is criticizing me. Thank them?! Why on earth would I do that? Because they just showed me exactly where I'm still struggling. If one look from them can knock me over, they've pointed straight at something in me that needs attention. People pay counselors good money for that. This person did it for free, without even knowing. It’s hard to brace against someone and be grateful for them at the same time, and I’ve never managed to do both at once. Gratitude doesn’t make me bulletproof. It just walks me in looking for the best in them instead of watching myself.

5. Say a prayer, and be specific.

Tell God exactly what you want to happen in there, even knowing you can’t control a single person on the other side of the door. What I can control is me, so that’s what I ask for: help with my attitude, help being myself, help shining my light no matter who might be grading me. Sometimes the prayer gets answered inside the house. Sometimes it just gets answered in the driveway.

Because here’s the thing I keep learning. The people inside never change. I do. That’s the whole point of the pep talk. It was never about making them kinder or the room safer. It’s about which version of me opens the door.

And no, it’s not innate yet. Eight years with that journal page and I still sit in plenty of driveways believing lies that are made up in my head. But the more I say true things to myself, the more I believe them. And every once in a while, I catch myself walking in without the speech.

That's the goal, I think. A pep talk I eventually don't need.

Where does that not-good-enough feeling tend to wait for you? Tell us in the comments!

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They drove down to Cape Charles a night ahead of us, picked up the cart, and by the time my phone rang I was white-knuckling my way over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge with a car full of kids. Two run-ins with the police in sixty minutes. $450 to get the cart back. Nobody had touched the water yet.

So this is the post I went looking for before our trip and could not find. The town posts the regulations, somebody hands you a cart, and somewhere between the two is a $450 gap. Let me close it for you.

(The full story of our five days in town, including where to eat and why you should give the place four days, is in Would Go Back Tomorrow: Cape Charles.)

A Golf Cart in Cape Charles Is Legally a Car

Everybody calls Cape Charles a golf cart town, and it is, but that phrase gives you the wrong idea. You picture something loose and vacation-y, a grown-up toy you putter around in with a drink in the cupholder.

No. In Cape Charles, a golf cart on a public road is legally a motor vehicle. A car. With everything that word drags behind it.

The police are not charmed by you. This is not a personality-based system. They enforce the rules the same way they would if you were driving a Buick, because as far as Virginia law is concerned, you are.

Once that clicked for us, the rest of the week went fine. It just clicked $450 too late.

The Rules, All in One Place

As of July 2026, here’s what we learned, lived, and looked up. Check capecharles.org for the current version, because the town has tightened enforcement in recent years:

• You need a valid driver’s license to drive one. Not a permit, not a confident 15-year-old. A license.

• All traffic laws apply. Including the ones about alcohol. Open container laws do not take a beach vacation.

• Stay off roads with speed limits over 25 mph. There are designated routes for getting across the bigger roads. Learn them before you need them.

• No sidewalks. No Central Park. The park is for people, not carts.

• No driving after sunset without proper lights. If your rental doesn’t have working headlights and taillights, it parks when the sun does.

• The cart itself needs paperwork: a town license, a yearly inspection, and proof of insurance. That’s the owner’s job, whether it’s a rental company or the house you’re staying in, but you’re the one driving it, so ask.

• Little kids need car seats. Virginia’s child restraint law applies to golf carts on public roads the same as it does to cars. If you’re bringing a child under eight, plan for it.

Read that list again and notice what it actually is. It’s the DMV. On a beach vacation. Now you know.

What Actually Gets Carts Towed

Here’s what happened to ours.

My parents picked up the cart at our rental house, got the rundown on how to start it, where to park it, and how to keep it charged, and off they went. What nobody mentioned, because nobody knew, was the binder upstairs with the town’s golf cart rules and route maps in it. The owners had no idea their guests were setting out blind, and to their credit, they’ve since asked us for suggestions and are planning to keep the handbook in the cart itself, so the next over-eager guests see the rules and the maps before setting out into the sun.

The first stop (yes, first of two) came on a road with a 35 mph speed limit. Golf carts are only allowed on roads posted 25 mph or less. That officer gave them a warning and pointed them back toward the legal routes, which is about as kind as a traffic stop gets.

Not five minutes later, they wandered onto a forbidden trail and a second officer stopped them. This one showed no grace at all. He ordered them off the cart and made them call a tow company on the spot. The tow bill came to $450, for a trip of about two miles, because the driver was kind enough to take the cart back to our rental house instead of an impound lot. That’s the closest thing to a bright spot in this story.

My parents are careful drivers. They were not joyriding. They were doing what seemed fine because nobody had told them otherwise. The rules existed. They were in a binder, upstairs, in a house they’d been in for an hour.

What I can tell you is how it felt: like being pulled over in a town you drove five hours to relax in, before you’d unpacked a single bag. My parents are careful people. They were not joyriding. They were doing what the brochure seemed to say was fine, and the brochure and the law turned out to be two different documents.

Ask Your Rental Company These Questions Before You Turn the Key

Five minutes at pickup would have saved us $450. Ask:

1. Can I get the town’s golf cart rules in writing? If they can’t produce them, that tells you something.

2. Is the cart’s town license current? The inspection? The insurance? Make them show you, not tell you.

3. If the cart gets towed or ticketed, who pays? Get the answer before it’s hypothetical.

4. Does it have lights for after dark, and am I allowed to use them? Sunset in July is after dinner. You will want to drive after dinner.

5. What’s the route from my rental to the beach that keeps me off the big roads? Make them trace it on a map while you stand there. Do not attempt to figure this out later on your phone, in the heat, in a bathing suit, with a cart full of teenagers. I have tested this method. It ends in yelling.

Would We Rent One Again?

Yes. And that might be the strangest part.

Once we knew the rules, the cart was the best thing about the trip. It’s how you learn the town, how you end up at Brown Dog twice in one night, how the kids got a little independence and we got a little quiet. Cape Charles really is a golf cart town. It’s just also a town with laws, and it would like you to know the difference before the tow truck explains it to you.

Go, rent the cart, and ask the five questions first. Consider your tuition paid.

I write about the trips, the mess ups, and the stuff nobody tells you until it’s expensive. If that’s your kind of porch, subscribe and pull up a chair.

By our fourth day of vacation, we were all short with each other. Hot, tired, sunburned, and annoyed, we had packed up the entire beach after a fight. A bad one that you could say made a scene. Everyone was on edge, and I had spent all four days feeling judged by people who may not have been watching us at all.

We got back to the house, and my sister climbed onto the golf cart, saying that if we were headed to the pool to cool off, she wanted to join.

She sat there slumped over, looking up at me with the face of a child, and said, “Are you embarrassed of me?” through big, sloppy tears.

The truth was, I didn’t know who to be embarrassed of. Her, myself, all of us?

I stood there and took inventory. My daughters were biting everyone’s heads off, their voices full of disgust. My son was complaining. Their friends sat in silence, maybe unsure of what to say. We had become a family that could not get through one day at the beach without a fight. And to top it off, a new family had moved in beside us at that exact moment, with the garage doors open, as if waiting to hear my answer.

So, I snapped.

“Yes, I’m embarrassed. I’m embarrassed by all of you, and I’m not going!” I shouted as I jumped out of the golf cart, went into the house, and stood in the shower until the hot water ran out, doing the only thing I knew how to do, which was to pretend everything was fine.

What I really wanted was for all of us to tidy up. Including me. I wanted everyone to stop drawing attention, stop being so loud, stop making scenes. To stop being those people. I wanted to believe I was above breaking down like that.

But minutes later, there I was breaking down too.

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A note before you read: this post touches on depression and suicidal thoughts. If you’re struggling, please reach out to someone you trust or call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.

“…accidentally, I’d let my life subtly turn into a performance.” —Jennie Allen, Nothing to Prove

In light of the …

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We spent five days in Cape Charles, Virginia, a little golf cart town on the Eastern Shore, and I have thoughts. We drove down on a Monday, because the July 4th holiday was Saturday and Sunday was for recovering, which is a generous word for what I actually did on Sunday, which was iron sweatshirts. I have a photo. It was July, we were going to the beach, and instead of packing I stood at an ironing board and pressed the wrinkles out of a sweatshirt (that I never wore) like a woman with ADHD and a plan.

And I did have a plan. I had planned everything from where we’d get the best photos (by the LOVE sign, which never happened), to where we’d eat (like the Oyster Farm, which also never happened).

My phone rang while we were going over the daunting Chesapeake Bay Bridge and I was already fighting a panic attack. My parents had gone down the night before, they’d had the golf cart about an hour, and it had already been towed. Two run-ins with the police in sixty minutes. $450 to get it back, which is a lot of money to spend before anyone has even looked at the water.

So let me save you the tuition. Everybody says Cape Charles is a golf cart town, which gives you the wrong idea about what a golf cart is here. It’s a car. Legally, actually a car.

• Valid driver’s license required

• All traffic laws apply, including the ones about alcohol

• No sidewalks, no Central Park, no roads with over 25 mph speed limits

• No driving after sunset without proper lights

• The cart needs a town license, a yearly inspection, and proof of insurance

The police are not charmed by you. This is not a personality-based system.

We rolled in at lunch, changed into bathing suits before we unpacked a single bag, and set off on the freshly liberated cart toward the private beach that came with our Bay Creek rental. That’s where it fell apart. My husband, the only person in our family with a functioning sense of direction, had to get some work done, which left the women, and we got lost. Not turned-around lost. Genuinely lost, in a neighborhood, on a golf cart, in bathing suits, in the heat, with some yelling and some language I won’t reproduce. At one point a man in another cart went around us and over a curb to get away from us, in the fancy neighborhood, and I want you to sit with that. We were finally rescued by a group of teenage boys who gave us directions and left very, very quickly, despite the four extremely cute teenage girls in our back seat. They took one look at the operation and decided we weren’t worth the risk. Honestly, fair.

We found the beach. It was packed, and the only patch of sand left for us was thick with seaweed, and I started quietly wondering if we’d been assigned it. Nobody said hello. That turned out to be the pattern all week: the people who lived and worked there were mostly very kind, and the people visiting didn’t exactly seem like our people (or maybe it was the other way around).

Dinner: The Shanty. Long wait, but the wait is the good part.

• Outdoor bar, cornhole, the whole marina behind you

• Crab dip: good

• Hushpuppies: fine, and I’m difficult about hushpuppies, because Waterman’s in Virginia Beach ruined me

• Shrimp tacos: I didn’t finish them

Go for the bar and the view. Eat while you’re there.

Day Two: Cape Charles Public Beach and AJ's Bar and Grill

We rolled up to the public beach at 12:30 and every first-row spot was gone. Started feeling a bit like outsiders again, but that was to be expected with such a late arrival.

The kids didn’t care even a little. There were more people their age, and that was the entire review.

Then my mom got in the water for the first time in five or ten years. The bay was calm and easy and she stayed in, and even threw the football with my dad and my son in the water for a long time, and, honestly, that made the whole trip for me! I watched that happen and felt something loosen in my chest.

This was the day we settled in. Floating around the bay with drinks in our hands, which, ooops, is technically not allowed, because there’s no alcohol allowed on the beach. We used Brumates all week. Draw your own conclusions.

Dinner: AJ’s Bar and Grill, after the kids got mac and cheese at home and the older ones got dropped back at the beach for sunset paddle boarding.

• Bayside nachos: shrimp, scallops, cheese sauce, lettuce, pico, zesty asian sauce

• Sweet potato fries with cinnamon cream cheese, which I did not expect to think about again and have now thought about roughly forty times

• Chicken salad, my sister’s, and she was thrilled

• A cosmo for me, an espresso martini for her

• Key lime pie, which my father, a man who has been eating homemade pies for many years and does not hand out superlatives, declared the best he’d ever had

Ice cream, all week, repeatedly: Brown Dog and Cowlick’s Creamery. The kids preferred Brown Dog. The line at Brown Dog was always longer. Notice that those two facts are related.

The town at night is worth a walk, and then the town at night simply ends. Most places closed by nine. We rode home in a little storm. We managed.

Day Three: Shopping on Mason Avenue, Deadrise Pizza on the Sand

Cloudy morning, so we shopped, and found far more than we expected.

• Peach Street Books is adorable. I got an iced tea with lavender and honey that I have not stopped thinking about. They close at 3.

• Moonrise Jewelry, where I found two one-of-a-kind pieces I loved and did not buy, and I’m still annoyed with myself, and I’m choosing to believe they ship.

• Table and Tonic for Bloody Mary mix and vintage-looking cards and some vintage items sprinkled in.

• Chuckletown Productions for a postcard and a blown-glass crab ornament. I have a rule: an ornament for every trip and every December I get the whole memory back.

• Voiajer, the fair trade shop, where we all lost our minds on the beautiful overload of Kantha and nobody was sorry.

The sun broke through midafternoon, so we headed to the beach late, and by late I mean we arrived and realized it was dinnertime. Eeek. So we said what if it all works out, and ordered pizza and wings and the fried mozzarella from Deadrise Italian Kitchen and ate the whole thing sitting on the sand. That was our second takeout order from Deadrise and we surprisingly liked the fried mozzarella and wings even more than the pizza!

That turned out to be my favorite night of the trip. The sunset did something surreal, the water was perfect and the pictures from that evening are the true keepers. The best night of the week happened on the night we ran out of a plan. I don’t think that’s a coincidence and I’m not sure yet what to do with it.

Day Four: Coastal Baking Co. and Paddle Boarding the Bay

Up early for Coastal Baking Co., and another rule learned the hard way, which is the theme of this entire town and honestly the reason I’m writing any of this down.

• One in, one out, so don’t panic at the line outside the door

• Order at the counter, then wait in the little side shop with the good teas and the merch

• Biscuits and gravy: yes. Chicken sandwich with pimento cheese: oh, yes.

• Open Thursday through Sunday, 8 to 3. Closed Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. And they sell out.

Back to the beach by lunch, where we learned to paddle board. Our rental came with two boards. They were great but a little difficult to haul on a golf cart. If I were buying, I’d get the inflatable kind.

That night we planned a late dinner at El Soul, the Mexican place on Mason, which I’d been told served until eleven. We showed up a little after nine and it was closed. So was the kitchen at E&O Pub, though they were kind enough to still be pouring. Ooops. We went home and made grilled cheese at midnight, which was fine, and somewhere around the cookies we also made it was better than fine.

One more thing about E&O, and it belongs to my parents, not to me. They went back on their own for lunch later in the week. Second attempt. The first time they walked in, they turned right back around and left, and I’ll leave it at that. But they gave it another shot, and my mom says the chicken salad sandwich was the best she’s ever had, and she does not say things like that often!

Day Five: Peach Beach Shave Ice and Cape Charles Brewing Company

Our last full day, spent the way we should have spent all of them: public beach, more paddle boarding, and a shave ice from Peach Beach Shave Ice on Peach Street. Get the dragon’s blood with blue raspberry. I’m not going to argue about it.

It was blazing, so we stayed in the water until three and then stopped at the smaller Bay Creek pool to cool off, where once again we kind of felt like we did not fit., haha. Everyone was older, everyone knew each other, and nobody was glad to see us and our 5 kiddos walk through the gate. We cooled off and we left.

Last dinner: Cape Charles Brewing Company. We’d thought about the Oyster Farm for the sunset, but the menu wasn’t a good bet with kids, and the brewery had live music.

• You wait in line to order, then wait again for the food, so send someone out to grab a table

• Outside is where they keep the cornhole, the yard games, the fire pit, and an old railroad car that makes a very good picture

• Steamed shrimp: the winner

And in five days of driving up and down Mason Avenue, we never once stopped long enough to get a photo in front of the LOVE sign. Not once.

*I rented my dress in my July Nuuly and got tons of compliments! Get $30 off your first month with my link!

So, Would I Go Back to Cape Charles?

Cape Charles doesn’t read as a beach town at all. It reads as an old Southern town that happens to have a beach attached, historic houses with porches on nearly every one of them, a little Pleasantville-Truman Show, and I loved that. If what you want is a beach-house vibe and an ocean, this is not it.

There are no waves, and I hate waves, so I was thrilled. I have not spent that much time in the water since I was a child, and I could let my kids swim without scanning for a riptide the whole time, which turned out to be a kind of rest I didn’t know I’d been missing.

My kids are 16, almost 14, and 9. I wish we’d gone when they were small, because that’s who this town is really for, young families and people well past that stage. I’d go back in a heartbeat for a girls’ weekend, or with my husband, and do nothing but float and eat and go from one bar to the next.

Bay Creek is quiet. We loved our rental and the hosts were wonderful to work with, and I want to be clear that the place did nothing wrong. We're just people who like to be in the mix, and Bay Creek is for people who want to be out of it. If we came back with the whole crew, we'd stay in town, close to the beach, and walk.

Which brings me to my one real complaint, and it isn’t about the town.

It’s about the information.

Cape Charles runs on things everybody already knows. The bakery is closed three days a week and sells out anyway. The Mexican place closes at nine no matter what you heard. A golf cart is legally a car and the police are not charmed by you. The beach you paid for is not the beach you’re going to want (if you’re a bit rowdy and/or have teens who want more socializing than relaxing). None of that is written down anywhere, so you either learn it by being there or you learn it by being from there. There’s a certain kind of place that treats you as slightly crazy for missing out on the special donuts instead of just making more donuts, and Cape Charles has a little of that in it.

It took us four days to stop feeling like we’d wandered into somebody else’s house. And then we loved it. Which is the whole problem with a five-day trip.

So here’s the inside information. It’s the only reason I wrote any of this down.

What I Wish Someone Had Told Me About Cape Charles

• The golf cart is a car. Ask your rental company for the rules in writing before you turn the key. Ours cost $450 to learn.

• Learn the route to the beach before you need it. Not on your phone, in a golf cart, in a bathing suit, in the heat with a load of teenagers.

• Coastal Baking Co. is closed Monday through Wednesday, open Thursday through Sunday, 8 to 3, and they sell out. Go early.

• Peach Street Books closes at 3. So does the coffee.

• The town closes around nine. If you want a late dinner, don’t. Eat at seven and get ice cream after.

• Bring Brumates/Coozies or Cups. There’s no alcohol on the beach. I’m not telling you what to do with that information.

• Go to the public beach. We had a private one and used it once. The public beach is where the people are and we felt more at home there.

• Get there before noon if you want a first-row spot. All gone by 12:30.

• If your paddle boards don’t inflate, you’re carrying them.

• Pack sandwiches. I don’t know why they taste like that on a beach. They do.

• Order the dragon’s blood with blue raspberry, the sweet potato fries with the house cream cheese sauce, and Deadrise to go, eaten on the sand at sunset.

• Stop and get the picture at the LOVE sign. We drove past it eleven times.

• And give it four days. That’s the real one. Whatever you’re feeling on day two, it isn’t the town, and it isn’t you. You just don’t know anything yet.

Would go back tomorrow.

Next week: a deeper dive on why I felt the immediate urge to "tidy up" when we arrived and why that matters…or doesn't.

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Every small town has two kinds of porches.

The front porch is for the neighbors. It’s swept. The ferns are alive, or the dead one got relocated before company came. You sit out front and wave at cars and say “we’re hanging in there!” in the voice that means don’t ask. The front porch is where you perform.

The back porch is where you actually live. The cushions don’t match. There’s a coffee cup from yesterday, a McDonald’s tea cup nobody’s claiming, and a cigarette butt or two. When somebody drops into the chair next to you back there, you don’t say you’re hanging in there. You say the true thing. You say it slow, and there’s probably a bad word mixed in, because nobody out back is grading you.

I got my back porch education early. The original was at Granny’s, where Grandpa Ernest kept to the front porch, whittling or picking beans, and Granny paid me a dollar on more than one occasion not to tell him she’d snuck a cigarette out back. Granny’s daughter, my grandma, was thirty-four when I was born and nowhere near ready to be called grandma, so she told me to call her Phoebe. I did. I still do, while the twenty-some grandkids and now great-grandkids who came after me landed on more suitable things like Nana. Between Granny and Phoebe, I learned what a back porch is for.

I spent most of my life on the front porch.

I did all the right things. Raised my hand. Led the group. Read the books, then researched the books, because I have ADHD and a premium Audible account and that combination has taken me everywhere from micro-dosing studies to the enneagram to why I still cannot stick to a budget. I got very good at fine. Fine is a full-time job, by the way. No benefits, no days off, and the performance review never ends. The pay is terrible too. Mine ran me thousands of dollars in therapy just to find out who was under there.

And somewhere in the middle of all that performing, I started to believe that free actually means free. Not tidier. Not more impressive. Not fine with better lighting. Free.

So this is my back porch.

Upgrade to Paid

Full disclosure: I don’t have a real one. At my house we have to sit out front (for now). The closest thing we’ve got out back is what we generously call the garage, rickety, stuffed with antiques and collected junk, and I’m honestly afraid it’ll pick the day I actually decide to clean it to come down. Even the hitchhikers going down our road are probably embarrassed of it. It’s also where the real sneaky stuff goes down. Granny would understand. So I built a back porch here instead.

Around here, there’s a name for what happens on a back porch with your people. It’s called porch sh*t. Honesty. Venting. Storytelling. Deep thoughts, dumb thoughts, occasional chaos, the real conversations that make you feel less alone. That’s what this publication is. Notes from a woman in the middle of her life who is done auditioning for it.

What you won’t find: the polished version. Gatekeeping. Me pretending I’ve arrived somewhere I haven’t.

What you will find: what I’ve researched so you don’t have to, what I’m actually walking through, and the one question I can’t put down: is this making me more free, or less? Because most of what’s wearing us out isn’t our lives. It’s the pretending everything’s okay, and the second job of getting everybody else to believe it.

The front porch is fine, if fine is all you want. But you didn’t come around back for fine.

Want a taste of the porch first? Start with the Cape Charles trip, where the golf cart got towed before we even arrived.