this chapter is now available for listening on youtube: traveling alone
I travel with my daughter’s golden doodle on occasion. Like today, she’s at the beach with her last summer of college friends. And the boy is with me. For a few days after he’s delivered he smells like her. After a while though, it’s just us boys.
As she the boy and I approached our first summer together, she started talking about “giving him a great summer.” One of those ideas was the beach. I began asking for a weekend that I could plan and take them both to Port Aransas, where my daughter happens to be now. It was mid-May when I started asking. “Can you give me a date?”
The second week in June, the neighbors invited her and the boy down to, you guessed it, Port Aransas. It was a Thursday afternoon when she told me, “I’m going with them to the coast tomorrow.” Another wound and pounding of my chest in agony. “I can have my friends. We don’t have to share everything and everyone,” she said, allowing her temper to rise just enough to shutter my response. They loaded in the van when I was out with a tennis buddy and mentor.
“Don’t make a big deal about it now,” he said. We were sitting at the court in my apartment complex. “It’s disappointing that she made the choice she did. Pay more attention if this becomes a pattern, but I wouldn’t give it too much energy.”
It was a tough weekend. I rested. Spent a little time at my apartment. Watched the big fish in the aquarium, XXX, and tried not to think about her and them. I didn’t understand that early on how much the bitter poison cost me. Even a year later, when I was indeed paying rent, there was no change in their behavior. “Maybe this will lighten their mood a little,” she said. “Show goodwill.”
She told me a story about the early courtship of her friends. When they were dating she didn’t really like the gruff and antisocial boyfriend. She said to her friend, “He is always welcome in my house. Relationships are tough.”
As I wrestled with the control issues, I asked her, “Don’t you think she should give you and your boyfriend the same consideration?”
“It’s different.”
By late July I was tired of asking for a beach date. I don’t think I orchestrated this, it’s just how it worked out, but it was Thursday morning that I said, “I’m driving to the beach today.”
“Oh, great!”
“I would love you two to join me.”
On the drive down, I was feeling both loss and liberation. The music was good. I stopped for a second cup of coffee and bought one of those aluminum coffee mugs in bright green. Then I filled it up and continued my way to the waves. Saturday, she hitched a ride with the neighbors and was dropped off in the condo parking lot in Corpus Christi. Her best friend was going on to Port Aransas. It was a tense moment in the parking lot as I was gathering their bags. The boy had been sick along the four-hour journey, and they both looked frazzled. “I’ll take Coop and we’ll meet you in the pool,” I said, grabbing the boy’s hand and carrying her single large suitcase.
Over the years, the green coffee mug has lost its colorful covering. There are hints of green, but today it’s a cheap and shiny coffee mug that symbolizes me taking care of myself. Me standing up for what I wanted in a partnership. How I wanted to be loved. I get a moment of confidence when I think about it today.
I can do hard things. I can drive away from a loving but toxic relationship. I can make healthier choices for myself alone. It would be nearly two more years before we split up for good. She’s now back in Vermont with her drinking brother and his family of cursing motherfucker boys. Their ages bookend her son’s so it really is built in family without the hassle of lovemaking, custody, or sharing attention.
Just before things blew apart we had a Christmas together. My 85-year-old mom was struggling in the assisted living facility and she apparently had a big fall in the morning. She was frazzled but somewhat put back together by the time I picked her up. Something wasn’t right, though. She had reverted to the child. “I’m so scared of falling,” she said. “And this morning I just tipped over on the way to the bathroom. I couldn’t reach my phone I couldn’t get up. It was an hour before they came and got me up.”
“Sounds terrifying,” I said as we pulled into my sister’s driveway. It took three of us to negotiate her wheelchair across the backyard to the covid-distanced outdoor celebration. Austin weather had cooperated and the late afternoon was filled with laughter and optimism. My mom, however, didn’t really experience the joy. It seemed like she was in a cacoon of some kind. She was probably still in shock from her fall. She never really got herself to the bathroom without help after that one.
As I drove her back to the Triangle, where she lived, she repeated, “That was too much. I’m never going out again.”
“Wait, what?” I snapped off the radio. “That was a magical Christmas for your family.”
“It’s too hard. I’m afraid. I don’t know what to do.”
“But we all had a great time celebrating you,” I said. “It was very good for us.”
“I just don’t think I can go on. I can’t do it.”
I didn’t recognize at that moment how this echoed my mom’s surrender at the lawyer’s come to jesus.
“We loved having you out.”
We rode alone in silence for the next ten minutes. At the front of the facility, her favorite helper was there. He pulled her easily, like dancing, from the car into her wheelchair.
“I love you, Mom,” I said, putting my arms around her neck and smelling her anxiety. It was Mom all over again. Mom as a kid getting a divorce. Mom as a rescuer for her mentally damaged son. Mom of the disapproving frown.
Mom was in the process of disappearing.
That night I had an epiphany.
Something clicked. The new SSRI since September, the fear in my mom’s soul, and my sad existence under the weight of the stars, and now the black hole of cancer next door. I had to get out. I had to get my mom out too. Like a rush of adrenaline, my soul went en fuego. I lit up with a plan.
“She’s paying them at least $6,000 a month. I’m sure I could rent a small house and hire help for less than that. She needs to be rescued. She came and found me once or twice. Maybe this is my time to repay her.”
I think my girlfriend began to panic at this point.
“And we could all live in a different house. We’d escape the weight of next door. Start again.”
In the light of the next morning, my master plan unraveled. I knew I had to soft-sell the idea to my mom, go slowly. I texted her to call me when she woke up. “I haz idea,” I said. It was my signal for BIG IDEA COMING.
I could hear her dishevellment in her voice. “I’m putting in for assisted living,” she said. “This is too much. I can’t do it anymore.”
She was already paying extra fees for the bathroom helpers several times a day. She wanted to be swaddled but by professional staffers and not her reemergent son. I ventured a tiny sliver of my idea. “Oh no, dear! That’s really nice, but I’m not ever leaving here again.”
Truth.
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