Swing states

I thought I'd found the keys to the universe outside of a climbing cube at our neighborhood playground many years ago. This was back in the early-2000s when I was an exhausted, mid-30s mom with two small children who ALWAYS wanted me to play.

It was the first time that age didn’t seem like a number as much as an advancing collection of physical ailments rooted in lack of sleep.  

"Oh, moms don't play," said a gravelly voice from the park bench beside me. 

"Moms," the woman, who might have been my twin had she been a full foot shorter, explained "have a sworn duty to watch and referee. We don't PUL-AY!" 

Her children did not seem convinced by her theatrical pronunciations. 

They tried to pry her off her shaded perch and join them on the slide by calling her out on her obvious falsehood. 

"Last week you went on the teeter-totter and the monkey bars."

But she was planted quite firmly in her arguments.

"I know it's disappointing. The rule was just handed down yesterday by the higher-ups in Momgress.

"Section IV of Article IX of the Momstitution states quite clearly that children must learn the propulsive mechanisms for achieving variable pendular levels on playground apparatus with minimal guidance. And since the best way to learn is by doing, the most I can do is four pushes at the swing."

To be honest, I liked the idea of rigid roles. Especially in that moment when I didn't want to try and fit myself into something smaller or suffer the almost unbearable nausea that accompanied any amount of spinning whatsoever.

It also fits the dominant parenting philosophy that moms and their kids can't ever really be friends because the power structure prevents it.

Often, we think of this as a sad declaration on the state of the family as a hierarchal mentoring unit that's sole purpose is to apply wet blankets to the fire within. 

I think the thing we tend to gloss over is that "friends" like "family" aren't monoliths. But they aren't interchangeable either. Like the teeter-totter, it’s not just a balance. Without the highs and lows, there isn't a ride. 

This became clearer to me once my children grew into teenagers, one of whom drives a car and has a job and will be going off to college in just one short trip around the sun.

Mom, it turns out, isn't a job description. There's no real contract with codified rules. You don't get to retire. It's more like a never-ending TED Talk where you are mostly in the audience alternately fearing, hoping, or grousing about having to be on stage. 

Of course, your experience may vary. The keys to this universe are always getting lost in between the couch cushions of our communications. No matter how much GPS tracking we apply, these keys are often un-couched by memory or the retracing of steps. 

Sometimes the work at hand is as easy as asking point-blank if the help their asking for is with taking the lead or following it. 

Quitting time

It's after six. She's been waiting for an hour to hear the quitting-time whistle: which for her is the thud of my car door and my footsteps as I climb the side porch. 

My dear old floppy-eared dog, whose own workday follows a narrow patch of sun around the house until it slowly disappears into the dark of evening, is beyond ready to stretch her legs. She has a tough job, lying in that sunny spot all day, wherever it is, with only the briefest of respites to engage quite fully in her second job: patrolling the yard to chase visiting birds and resident marmots. 

I can hear her pacing and panting before I open the door. Walk! Walk! is the translation of her excited greeting. Nothing else matters, not even the sky with its ominous shade of gray. 

The exertion of her greeting isn’t enough, not when the neighborhood and all its mysteries await. There's good old "squirrel alley" to explore, not to mention a new "poop corridor."  There are homebound dogs who will be waiting to sound the alarm at the proximity of our temporary territorial intrusion.

Also known as our evening walk. 

It takes a minute to change and gather up supplies. The leash is in its usual place, but the waste bags are missing. She will bark at me accusingly as I try and locate a fresh roll.

She is so insistent on getting outside that she doesn’t notice the thickening air that is all around us.

But all I can see is a giant swirling mass of marbled fissures in the clouds when I look up at the sky. A low rumble off in the distance gives me pause. It could be a truck speeding over some neglected section of winter-heaved pavement. Or it could be thunder. 

The daily rain hasn't helped the situation. I run through all kinds of mental calculations before I commit to this practice of unwinding.  I consult the weather radar; I plan a route that builds in the prospect of temporary shelter should we get caught in a storm. If we are lucky we will be back before the deluge. 

The news has me worried about washouts. 

Before we leave, I remind my daughter, who is getting ready to start her workday, not to drive through standing water. 

"You can't tell if the road is still there. Better to turn around and go another way."

I wish we could all turn around and go another way. Toward a direction that examines the problems we face without trying to consumer-select a way out. There will never be a refrigerator efficient enough, nor a bottle recyclable enough, nor a straw reusable enough to mitigate this disaster our modern efficiency greed has rendered. 

The dog is whining now. I'm off on a tangent while she waits for the leash to come out of its basket. 

"Stupid human. You will NOT solve climate change, or any of the ills of consumerism, by grasping at straws. You cannot stop nature from taking revenge.  But you can stop me from these, my appointed rounds."

The astro-naught years

I knock on the door.

There is no response.

I can't tell from the hallway, but I imagine he is cuddled up in a chair with headphones on, tapping away at a keyboard and oblivious to my would-be intrusion. He is probably floating through a world of graphics and gizmos that he and all of his virtual friends are tethered to by bright blue cords, like the one that spirals from his computer, out of his room and down the stairs before it slithers into the snakes' den of wires in a closet nearby.

I turn the knob and crack open the door slightly, careful not to breach his space with anything more than my curiosity. Privacy is to a teenager what piracy was to a toddler. Something of mythic proportions.

The air stabs at me in little prickles as it spills into the hallway.

"Hello!" I venture again.

From behind the door, a strange figure leans into the light. A chair creaks under his shifting weight.

"Hello," he says in response. “I'm fine. How are yooooooou? …. And yes, I will mow the lawn today.”

I hadn't asked any of those questions. But he is aware of the boundaries of our expectations and how to stay inside of them, mostly.

Cocooned in a blanket, my son is at his desk, which is surrounded on all sides by towers of dishes in various states of uncleanliness. His clothes carpet the floor.

He has found a way to keep his room from assaulting him with the earthy smell of foot funk: Air conditioning set to a subarctic temperature.

I wonder when icicles will begin forming on the edges of surfaces.

A part of me, the part that has a sense of smell, rejoices slightly while the parts that fret about electricity bills and the costs to the environment pretend to be occupied with inspecting the flooring.

If I were his father I might be breathing fire into that room. Melting his chill with the heat of patriarchal pragmatism: "You might be wasting your time by doing nothing all this summer, but you won't be wasting my energy. I fill the tank, you don't get to crank."

But I'm not good at bringing that kind of heat.

I remember being a lethargic 14, lost in the plots of fictions of dubious merit, while the people who paid my bills were pleading with me to find something better to do with my time.

It's hard to convince a person that all nothings aren't created equal. Some nothings are everything.

So the easiest way to appease them was to disappear. Take a walk, or the bike, and find a place to be out of sight and out of mind.

It's not much different now except I'm the one expected to find something better to do with his time. Not to mention that a kid being out of sight makes parents go out of their minds.

So I try not to worry about the world opening up behind his closed door. I'll just keep knocking until he lets me in.

We came, we saw, we conquered

 The backseat of the car pinched the backs of my legs as I shifted them toward the window. The exposed flesh below my shorts had adhered to the pleather by a thin layer of perspiration. 

The pain momentarily diverted my attention from the annoyance of the wind lashing my hair around my face. I want to crank the window all the way up, but the car isn't air-conditioned. We would suffocate. 

I would have asked my parents the most pressing question of all for any under-12-year-old traveler ... but I could tell from my mother's expression in the rearview mirror that we were nowhere near there yet. 

It's been 120 hours since we left New York and I know the reason my childhood memories have come flooding back is that I've spent ALL of them in the backseat as my car-sick-prone kids take turns riding "shotgun."

The designation, however, comes with the responsibilities of navigator, which attaches some degree of skill and the near-constant hazard of failure. 

Let's just say I am content to slouch down in the back, where I can try to nap while the front seat passengers bicker between themselves about whether we are traveling north or south, and which exit is the one we should take: this one or the next?

I don't know how people do this. Go into a new place acting like it's no big deal. It seems we go from one hotel and its swimming spot to another hotel and swimming spot.

When we can't agree on things to do. The oldest wants to get dragged behind a boat as an already open parachute flings her into the air, while the youngest non-adventure seeker shames us with logic: "Who wants to go to an Adventure Park in 98-degree heat?" 

The Para-Sailing's sign seeking Experienced Help Wanted kinda puts the pandemic pause into perspective. "Maybe next year."

Instead, we will find the thing we could have done at home (movies, bowling, shopping) and do that for a few hours before we argue over where to go for dinner.

I have wondered if inconvenience is the thing that kills a vacation more completely than indecision.

"We might have gone to see Wilber and Orville's miracle ... but making a left is just so difficult there."

There is also the failure of research. 

For instance, had the roadside billboard not spelled out "APPLES AND CARROTS KILL WILD HORSES" as we sped past, my brain might not have pulled up a vague recollection of reading something somewhere about the famous Spanish Mustangs of the Corolla.

I could barely Google before I realized we were moving farther and farther away from this colonial-era wonder.

And that momentary sadness of not having seen a thing the place is known for was just as quickly replaced by the relief of knowing that at least we didn't screw up its very existence. Taking home a printed memento of the conservation's educational efforts (a lunch counter impulse purchase) was enough to reestablish my tourist's sense of fortitude via retail therapy. 

We came to the Hotels and Swim Spots, we saw the guidebooks, and we conquered the trinket shops. 

We have finally traveled.