The practice of leaving

Move, 1994.

I ran away, once. Got as far as Greenwood Market before indecision slowed me and I pulled into the parking lot. Out of habit I brought up a mental image of the fridge and opened it: We were out of milk, so I should go inside. Then I cursed myself for the dutifulness of thinking to replenish my family's staples even as I ran away from it.

I put my head down on the steering wheel and listened to the soft rain shush against the windshield. Outside, the parking lot was dark but for the rain puddles that reflected neon, a stray shopping cart and now my car under a street lamp. Inside, shadows lapped at a water bottle while dingy yellow light lent unexplainable import to a crumpled paper airplane. The anger that drove me out the door and disrupted the night's routine had evaporated, leaving me tired, so tired. I climbed into the back seat and settled onto the bench.

I can't run away, not for good anyway, because I'm needed, valued, worth a life insurance policy, but I can run far if they'll let the line run slack. Will you come back? they ask. Yes, but you need to let me go so I can come back. They hug me. The youngest cries because he doesn't understand why he's not going, why they're all not going. My husband ignores the histrionics, so routine by now. I bent down for a final kiss, then pushed past them and opened the door. I hope you feel better, Mom.

I'm gone.

For the rest of the story, please visit my new blog.

Malapert or navigating foreign terrain

mal-uh-purt
adjective

Chaja and the Colorado River.

1. impudently bold in speech or manner.

My daughter and I traveled to Las Vegas to visit my college friend and her godmother. It was needed. The desert sun warmed us, and the time alone helped a relationship that grows tenuous as she nears 13. This child once nestled against me, but no longer fits there. She's lankier, stiffer, awkward in herself and rigid when I hug so I try to hold her long enough for her to remember these old, soft places and flow into them again.

But the trip was still only a trip. I remained her mother, and therefore continued to nag and embarrass, while she was the malapert child, slow when I needed her to hurry, preferred airline food over Wolfgang Puck's, contradicted, rolled her eyes, grumbled. Her saucy impertinence washed over me because my reservoir of patience, although not as great as Lake Mead, ran deeper without the distraction of her brothers.

The Springs Preserves, Las Vegas.

Oddly, it was water or more precisely the illusion of water that I brought home with me and not images of sunshine and saguaros. We saw the Cirque du Soleil show "Ka" and one scene kept replaying in my mind so I grabbed my notebook and wrote about it.

The audience watched as the boat rocked violently and began to sink, leaving an empty hole where once was a stage. Silence seeped into the theater, choking the screams. From the top of the stage a woman fell. Seconds passed. Bubbles trailed behind her. I was witnessing a drowning. Then a girl cut through the black air, dove into the dark water and swam down, down, down, following the sinking woman until all disappeared but for a slip of bubbles. I held my breath. The girl swam back into view, dragging the heavy body of the woman. Bubbles swirled about them as they rose to the surface. I breathed.

When I returned to my notebook later and read this, I noticed what I had failed to see before. Instead of action, this time I saw the characters, a mother and daughter. Perhaps it wasn't about water, after all.

Hoover Dam.

Morning with a young philosopher

The day begins with a debate over time's relativity.

It's time to get dressed.

No.

We're leaving.

I don't want to. I put clothes on on Thursday, that was last year.

Connecting dots where there are none

Preparing apples that will be sauteed with butter, brown sugar and rum.

1

At a round wooden cafe table sit eleven women and two men, all past 60, all with short hair, all wearing fleece, rain pants and sensible shoes. The women talk and drink coffee. Two brought their husbands, who both order something sweet at the counter and now sit, silent, waiting because there is nothing else to do, their plates clean and their interest in each other nonexistent. Eventually the cups are drained, the catching up is accomplished and everyone moves to leave. There's a slow deliberateness to the way they pull on jackets, adjust hats. Their nylon pants making soft sifting sounds as they shuffle out the door.

2

A brisk walk from the cafe is a gathering of abandoned couches. Three to be exact, plus a stuffed chair and a heavy, boxy television set tipped on its face. I make a point of taking that street so I can keep an eye on the insurrection. (Down with the dump! Free the furniture!)

3

Another cafe, another table of women, this time young mothers with babies tucked under their chins like bibs. They sit at a series of small tables lined up like dominoes. Their hair shines. Their faces shine. In front of each is a cupcake with a thick swirl of frosting. No one drinks coffee because they agree caffeine disrupts the babies' sleep schedules. I wonder how they manage to glow.

4

Perhaps because I and my small companion wander Seattle alone, I am keenly aware of people's tribalness, the things that link them, their dress and mannerism and vocabulary. When I first moved I kept seeing the same people throughout the city, though I knew it wasn't possible, that my eyes were seeing sameness in strangers and not the same strangers. Nine months later I still notice these small tribes as we sit in cafes, parks, the library, and as we walk down the street. Where I find similarities, my companion insists on differences because I am his mother and am bigger and have brown eyes, while he is a boy with blue eyes who likes to rest his tired feet on stray couches and tell strangers we encounter that he is two, although, in actuality, he is three.

Evanescence or shedding the weight of self-awareness

ev-un-nes-ens
noun

Courtesy of Luca Rossato.

1. A gradual disappearance.
2. The state of becoming imperceptible.

I was naked and this was not a dream.

The bath house was quietly busy as women shed clothes and stepped into the pools, their bodies melting into the hot water, or tensing as they pushed themselves down into the cold. I took off the robe I'd been issued and tucked it into the assigned cubby, walked awkwardly across the wet floor and sunk into the first pool I reached, seeking the water's warmth and evanescence.

I smelled chlorine, glanced at the women, then studied the room. There were four pools of differing temperatures. There was a trough filled with mugwort tea and bowls to scoop up the tea and pour it over my body. There were screens of maybe bamboo or reed that led to beds were women were scrubbed, massaged, wrapped. There were two doors.

I opened the first door and stepped into a hissing, hot cloud of steam. I paused for my eyes to dilate in the darkness and found space on the bench. Each hot breath burned the edges of my nostrils. I opened the second door and walked into an oven of dry, crackly heat that smelled of wood and herbs. The air vibrated with anticipation and I breathed cautiously, imagining air molecules igniting inside my lungs. I breathed out fire.

I returned to the pools, this time studying the women sharing the water, looking into their old and young eyes, eyes that were mirrors reflecting my weariness, my need, my anticipation. In a room filled with rumpled, bony, saggy, wrinkled, smooth, full, round, angled selves, I existed. Unobserved.

Bad words and a butt-load of bitchiness over bringing home the bacon

A fist of nerves in my neck is pounding my brain to bloody pulp because I'm polite. Too polite to tell someone to fuck off, that I don't live for her or feminism or whatever caused her tactlessness during the following conversation:

So, Rachael, when are you going back to work?

I'm not planning to get a job, just increase the amount of writing I'll be doing. 

Why don't you write a blog.

I do.

I mean, why don't you write a blog people will read?

How does one respond to a question that has no polite answer?

One woman who started blogging about things like baby poop, depression, love and the laundry has made millions, while a million other writers blogging about the very same things have made zip. Where does value come from? Why is it elusive? And most importantly, why do I allow someone else to determine the value of what I do?

All women work, and all (minus the aforementioned lucky one) are underpaid for the work we do.

In The Netherlands, the salary gap between men and women is as deep and wide as the ache that's cracked my head in two, yet that fissure isn't fuel for gender wars, but something they desire. In a Slate article about the book "Dutch Women Don't Get Depressed" by psychologist Ellen de Bruin, the Dutch woman's happiness isn't because her man comes bearing tulips while wearing wooden shoes, but because she has personal freedom and a good work-life balance, aka time and flexibility.

"The problem for American women isn't just the amount of time we spend working; it is the notion that we need to be perfect at everything we do," according to the Slate article. "TV shows, advertisements, and articles from women's magazines have formed this composite of a perfect woman who is successful at work, nurturing at home, always optimistic, and impeccably dressed. She dominates the boardroom and rushes in her pencil skirt to collect her well-groomed toddler. The ideal American woman doesn't just putter around in the kitchen or dabble in knitting [insert: or write a teeny-tiny blog]. She opens a cake shop and knits scarves for fashion shows [insert: and writes a blog that supports her family]." 

I've got a friend who can't find work despite squeezing and pushing and pounding and smashing herself to fit the job description. She doesn't have a Dutch husband, but she's got the financial flexibility to take this advice: Stop looking.

Create your job, instead. Determine what you love to do and then figure out a way to make money doing it. Turning passion into product is one of the accomplishments I admire most in my mom, who converted a love of education and the environment into a paycheck. And it's how Heather Armstrong, dubbed queen of mommy bloggers by the New York Times, makes an estimated $30,000 to $50,000 a month off her site, Dooce.

I'm rewinding that conversation I had and answering it this way:

So, Rachael, when are you going back to work?

I am working.

Oh, I thought you were staying home with your kids. What are you doing?

I write.

About what?

Fuck-heads like you.