road trip to heaven
with a colorado drive
blue sky sunset dream
The Drive
road trip to heaven
with a colorado drive
blue sky sunset dream
car
My Truths Are Their Truths
I’m angry because even a good day with the kids can end as a hard day of being a parent. Because I fight for those closest to me, I put them first, and I still feel like I am driven into hell in the process. Because I love them so fiercely that it hurts, and their tears are my tears and my truths are their truths.
I’m angry because I am a friend, a true friend. I AM the one you can call on drink number four in the airport on your way to rehab after your family’s intervention, and I will listen to every damn slurred word and offer my condolences and love you and be right damn there for you when you come back and fight for you and defend you and take fucking sides for you and build up my enemies like walls against my progress in this life. Because I am your friend.
My loyalties are fierce and my bitterness is fiercer.
I would never beg to make plans and then cancel them. Twice. I would never rearrange my entire schedule to be absentmindedly forgotten for a snooze button. I would never let my best friend go, though she hated me off and on for years, because I knew she was meant for me, and I fucking fought for her, and I got her back, and I damn well will never lose her again. I would never say I am too busy for the person I once swore I loved as much as my husband of seventeen years.
Instead, this Saturday, we play Life. It lasts too long, he rushes us through the end, and Mythili wins (OF COURSE). We go to the park, the Perk, sip tea and nibble scones, Isabella does her interminable homework with her blue-collar Bud-Light-neon-signs-in-house best friend and my mother texts me wondering why we never ask her to come to the park since they live so close now. I offer the zoo for tomorrow and after an existential pause that lasts between two doses of learning the yoga headstand from Adriene, three piano songs played alongside my baby, and reenacting our Oxford memories with a hacky sack we toss across the living room knocking over pictures and plants, she replies with, “Your father isn’t interested in the zoo.” Though they live ten blocks from it. “Is he interested in seeing his granddaughters?” I die to text back. But I’ve learned to hold my tongue. And my fingers.
I’m angry because when I put them to bed there is a flashlight fight and search and a reminder of two nights ago. And I pull the Target bag off the top shelf and dig through the bug spray, the spare brush, the sunblock, the sweat-wicking longsleeved shirt, the set-aside items for a summer camp that’s never going to happen and find the fucking flashlights because Mythili will NOT go to bed without her book.
I’m angry because he murmurs from the room about my tenacity in setting aside these items, never to be touched between June and June and the baby going to her first summer camp this year, and because my dumb semi-drunk mouth just spills it all out in front of them: “It doesn’t matter because they’re not going to camp this year anyway since we don’t have the money.”
I’m angry because my mother sends these random texts such as: “I’m just wondering about life” and tells me about her millionaire uncle dying without a will and how tracking down his thirty-three nieces and nephews will take years as most of them don’t talk to each other and I have put nothing but Love and Love and Hugs and Cuddles into the lives of my three girls and I do NOT. Do NOT. Want to put my baby to bed crying tonight because she doesn’t even get to go to camp for her first year because I don’t have the damn money and we spent it all on a fucking car and my millionaire mom is going to inherit another thirty thousand but won’t even come to the goddamn zoo even when I offer her a free ticket.
I’m angry because I try so hard to be there. To find joy in those small moments that make up a day, like spinning them on a tire swing or singing along to Taylor Swift videos or opening up the yoga book or cuddling with our books in the corner of the couch or piling on top of each other in an array of pink to red.
And I would be there for the friends who ditch me. For the colleague who won’t even eat lunch in my presence. For any task at any job anyone would ever ask me to do.
And why can’t they? Why can’t you?
Just be there. Fucking. Be. There.
Free. Time.
In the outside pocket of my backpack, under my Subway-kids-meal-bag packed lunch, I cram my sneakers. The snow will be too deep this morning to wear them, but the thought of wearing my discount-store leather boots that pinch my toes all day burdens me more than switching out shoes once I get to work.
I could drive now, having two cars for the first time in three years. But then I would miss the beauty of freshly frosted branches, of silent flakes floating out of the Colorado sky, of the words tapping into me from my latest audiobook.
I am eating my amped-up breakfast, a bagel with cream cheese, spinach, and two eggs scrambled with red peppers, to sustain me for the late start day and the late lunch day, when my colleague texts me to announce the snow day.
I don’t believe her. Denver doesn’t cancel school, not unless there’s more than a foot and blizzard-like conditions. I check three web sites who haven’t caught up with the news as quickly as her, and then the email from the superintendent pops up and my entire family receives a rare and beautiful gift that cannot be wrapped and yet we open with such joy that it warms our entire house: Free. Time.
This could be so different. We could be part of different districts, just like before, Bruce could be at work, just like a few months ago, and we wouldn’t be all together. It would be my day, mine alone, and I would be crawling up the walls by the end of it, probably using the time to work and clean the house and dig out the driveway and be the person I am for 95% of my life.
But today? I fix French toast with sliced strawberries, powdered sugar, butter, honey, the works! We read Shel Silverstein under a blanket on the couch. Bruce visits a former colleague, helps him figure out a trouble ticket (unpaid, of course), and borrows his crockpot for our Sunday pot roast dinner. I listen, for once, to the girls practice their piano songs. Riona teaches me to play chess and Mythili beats me in a game in five minutes. The girls play Wii, Bruce shovels the walks and driveway, and I ski to, around, and back from the park, capturing the utter emptiness and silence in a way that couldn’t come to me on my frenzied walk to school, where I’d be thinking about my lesson plan, my seating chart, the upcoming testing nightmare… I come home sweating from head to toe, peel off my clothes for a shower, and he waits for me in the bedroom, ready to make me sweat from head to toe all over again… Isabella and I play Sorry, the younger set drives with Bruce and I to the local coffee shop where we have gluten-free pastries and mochas and hot chocolates and play Go Fish and compost our waste and pretend, if only for an hour, we are just like the yuppies who can actually afford this neighborhood. We have freestyle dinner–each person gets to choose what they want, Bruce fries up some ham and eggs to supplement the girls’ inadequate choices, I eat his delicious teriyaki chicken leftovers, and he whips up some instant pudding when the baby requests it because, well, she’s the baby, and, why not? I finalize the girls’ sleepover plans for Saturday and in the midst of texting with the mothers I don’t really know (nothing like the good old days when the girls were young and we actually took time to get to know their friends’ parents), we’re dropped with a mini bombshell.
How dare she ruin my snow day, my gift from God (or at least my gift from the god-of-the-school-district superintendent)? How dare she flaunt something in our faces and snatch it away? But worse, how dare she draw that rift up between he and I?
It is what we don’t talk about and what we always talk about. What he hates for me to bug him about and what I hate to be the one bugging about. How dare she flaunt an easy path for some extra money and take it all away before giving us one dime, all for us to be right back where we started, which is: Can we afford to live this way?
“I’ll look for a job…” He reassures me. “I mean, I’ll look harder. But you know, you can’t have it both ways. You can’t have me work and expect all the things you have now. You know–” He sucks in his breath, flips the ham on his plate. “I’m not going to say anything else or I’ll get too upset.”
I know. If he works I wouldn’t be able to ski, or walk, or listen to audiobooks on the way to school. I won’t have neat piles of folded laundry stacked on the bed, ready for me to put away. I won’t have a chef fixing me his latest recipe, or a grocery list with everything checked off. The wood floor will be gritty when I move back the mat to do a yoga video, or I’ll be cleaning that floor instead of doing yoga. I’ll work two jobs and spend my free time transporting three kids to their schools and activities, and we’ll be able to eat out whenever we want and surely pay that hefty price for the piano lessons they so love and drive all the way to the east coast and back because we’ll have the money to pay for it… but at what cost?
The cost of silencing everyone who’s always asking me, “Why doesn’t he work? Where has he been looking? Why doesn’t he do this or try that? How do you do it? Why would you…” I won’t finish because I’ll get too upset.
The cost that would snatch the peace of a family snow day right out from under us. Of knowing that he’ll have a good job with decent hours and enough vacation time to actually enjoy our lives together, just like all those years before.
My day ends with a ping on my phone: a message from a former colleague who didn’t get a snow day, who is tired of everyone bitching about not getting a snow day, and announced it to them all today on the social media that consumes our lives and makes us not have a life. Why is he calling them out on their complaints? Because he remembers the 25 miles I used to ride my damn bicycle to and from work every day, all so we wouldn’t have to try to replace our broken-down van, so Bruce wouldn’t have to work, so we wouldn’t have the damn frenzy of a rat-race life that everyone around us has, all those parents out there who are stressing about delayed starts and snow days and having to fight the battle to bring home that extra buck.
How ironic, he points out in the end, that I was lucky enough to get a snow day today. That I wouldn’t have to ride my bike or walk or ski to work.
In the outside pocket of my backpack, leaving a space for my Subway-kids-meal-bagged lunch, my sneakers wait for tomorrow. I could drive, but why wouldn’t I walk? Why wouldn’t I enjoy the freshly fallen flakes, the peace that comes with early morning movement, where I can rethink my lesson plans, still have time to change them, and know that my husband will drive all the girls to school and fix their lunches and be there for them when the last bell rings and not have the money to take me out to dinner but will have a ten-million-times-better meal already planned?
Tomorrow, the snow will not be too deep. There will be no snow day. No Free. Time. And I will walk. And he will be home. And he will be the happiness that I am lucky enough to come home to.
Half Birthday Party
In the small inadequate car, I leave her. The door shuts before I can peek inside, and I chitchat with a mother like me, one from across town. Dented version of my car, parked on the wrong side of the street. The flakes barely fallen, we talk about cancelled plans, rushed grocery trips, piano lessons that neither of us can really afford.
Three hours pass in my tiny house, new orchid stretching for the blocked sun as the storm blows in. My two remaining girls curl up reading and bicker and settle for Wii stress relief while I attempt, and fail (motherhood steals this from you) to take a nap.
We gather our bags and respond to my mother’s text: Yes, we’re still bringing them. We have to get Riona anyway and Bruce wants to try out the new four-wheel-drive car in this crazy snow.
A man hovers on the porch as we arrive, my outfit transformed to fit the sleek style of the neighborhood. Silver lining, heated leather seats, I open the iron gate and walk up the concrete steps. He peers at me, cell phone in hand, sheepish, as if he’d heard me mutter to my husband, “Is that some kid’s dad waiting for the exact moment of the party ending before he rings the bell?”
Beside him, leaning against a column on this masterpiece of a house, is a bag full of knives small enough to fit in eight-year-olds’ hands. “I was the chef for the party,” he explains, as if I’d asked him. “I’m just waiting for my ride.”
“Yes, I understand,” I want to reply. “This three-thousand-foot home certainly isn’t large enough to accommodate your wait time.”
Instead I ring the doorbell and smile as if I make conversations like this every day.
“Thank you so much for allowing your daughter to come to Emily’s half birthday!” Her mother coos as I enter. She begins to gather homemade cupcakes, rice noodles, Rio’s coat. I peek. An entryway. Hardwood until there’s no forest left. A wingback chair at the head of the twelve-person dining table. A parlor, just like back in good old Victorian England. A stairway to heaven with a hand-carve handrail. And these beautiful cupcakes with multicolored frosting and a mother who can’t take the time to bake, handed over with a hand-colored chef’s hat and goody bag full of Nerds that will spill all over our new car.
“Are you moving?” I ask, having noticed the For Sale sign propped up in front. “Well, we’re thinking about it. We found our dream house! And you know, the market is great right now for sellers, so we’re seeing what will happen.” I have no response for this. If this is the shit-hole, I wonder what the dream house looks like?
We make our way across town. He speeds up because we’ve been driving a 1998 Hyundai Accent for far too long. I have the leather baking my thighs, and the girls are all spread out in three rows of candy-induced lethargy. On the city streets that take us from the south side to the north side, we see a bus angled into an intersection, having tried to brake on a hill, failed, and run over the curb. Its hazard blinkers allow cars like us to pass, and as we move through, evaluating the damage and probability of escape for the bus, I see the three passengers standing without shelter under the storm, not ten feet from where the bus is unable to reach them. Two without hoods, one with barely a coat at all, thinking this morning that the weatherman was wrong, as the winds and flakes now swirl about them and collect on their shoulders, hair… souls.
“Oh, the bus…” he moans, and me, “Oh, those people…” And I want to reach over and say, “We have three extra seats. Stop.” But I don’t, because I’m not seventeen, and he isn’t that boy, and I have three little girls. And my car is so warm and the world is so cold and I have just extracted my youngest from a HALF birthday party with a chef who can’t wait for his ride inside the house, and all I can think is, I am one of them. I am sitting in this luxury car bought with the blood sweat and tears of fourteen years, staring out into the snow that will not ruin my day. I am one of the privileged ones, whether I want to deny it because I can’t buy this house or hire this chef or host a half birthday party, I am still one of them.
We drop the girls at the grandparents and venture out to a mediocre dinner in a highly-rated bar in the posh neighborhood that we could never afford to live in. “What should we do now?” he asks, “Do you want another beer, should we go to another place?” It is 7:32 on a Saturday night. Our children are occupied until late tomorrow afternoon. The snow has let up and we have boots on anyway. “Let’s go home. Have the wine. Watch Friends.” (It’s on Netflix now).
We enter the tiny, entry-less house. Curl up on the 17% bonded leather sectional. Flip on the broken/borrowed/fixed entertainment system that sits atop the plywood desk, our first furniture purchase eighteen years back, in the small corner between the door and the insulation-less wall. I clap when The Rembrandts ask me to clap, we watch four episodes, Chandler proposes, Monica cries, and it is just like the old days, in the apartment with ants that bit our toes if we walked across the carpet, with cockroaches and heat that went crazy and borrowed furniture and everything that was then that is now.
I am not one of them. I am just lucky enough to not be one of them, to know the value of what lies beneath my thighs, to make my own damn cupcakes and have a real birthday party, not a HALF one.
These are the things I tell myself as he falls asleep beside me, wine gone. As I make my way into the next decade that stretches between when I bought the first car that I still have and the new car that makes me look at our lives in a different light, a different snowstorm, a different drive across town.
It’s a Saturday night. And we are just like we always were, curled up in a love that’s just good enough to make any house a home.
Pilot
a twelve-year journey
to our perfect family car
three rows of happy
The Cyclist’s Dilemma
he will not forgive
shuns me in once warm places
i will not forget
in tears, she begs me
just get them started–i can’t–
grief bursts into halls
all papers graded
i read Spanish in silence
wait for final bell
a windy walk home
trailed by one-car dilemma
my cyclist shines
headlamp, gloves ready
January? my mistress
cycle through my stress
my peace offering:
the book he wanted to read
(he puts me on stage)
humiliate me?
i crave the Spanish smiles
he doesn’t know me
a windy ride home
cold clings to my clothes with hugs
cheeks on girls’ warm cheeks
this brief moment here
is all i’ve seen them today
my cycle spins on
My Oldest
i give her the news
silent tears fall down her cheeks
worse than a tantrum
eleven years old
burden of being oldest
heavy on three girls
she carries their weight
lab rat for parental tests
what should we do next?
we drive the wrong way
arrive before she knows it
i favor her now
it is not too late
to undo this, to change schools
my peace offering
again, silent tears
on her face, trapped in my throat
i can deal with it
but should you have to?
the question that i don’t ask
(but i ask myself)
i’m going to stay
i don’t want to lose my friends
and there is my proof
hours of homework
detention for lost pencils
don’t compare to friends
i drop her off, drive
dawn’s light skids across the lake
as golden leaves fall
a sight so perfect
i want to drive back, tell her
take away her tears
mine are falling now
and i must let her decide
she leads, my oldest
Bytes of My Day
two chances to prove
that i deserve to be here
fall, winter, fierce fear
two chances plagued twice
year before? a standard test
today? dead Internet
set up my failure
as Google Classroom crashes
tearing me to bytes
i wish she loved them
as fully as i love them
instead? i strike out
after school, i walk
to get six-day car hostage
and then i see them:
top down, sun shining
classic MG sports car grins
this October day
yes, my mechanics
can charge whatever they want
cruise streets in fixed cars
we’ll be right over
hood open, my car broken
and i’m the failure?
daughter calls: tire flat.
sun, why dost thou forsake me
shining so damn bright?
my car stays hostage
we’ll walk into tomorrow
blindsided by fall
(i’ll dream of driving
of summers off, beach tours
of all that bytes me)
Sixteen Years Later
only a kind heart
could compliment this lemon
alas, it still drives
Colorado Dipped
mountain riverbed
gold against blue aspen fire
drive dipped in heaven
waterfall delights
imaginative girls’ eyes
a doll’s paradise
toes dipped in ice falls
while leaves leave us dipped in gold
summer dipped in fall
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