Maternal Dementia

At dinner that night I glanced down at my watch to see that it was nearly half-eight. That’s 8:30 in the morning home in Paris. I’d meant to call the girls during their breakfast, to catch up in general but especially to wish Short-pants well for her viola recital that evening. I leapt up from the dinner table and rushed to the meeting room, where I’d left my computer. I punched the phone number into Skype, counting each hollow ring, one after the other, until our message machine picked up. I tried the babysitter’s number, too, her phone providing the same lonely sound with no answer either. She was probably already walking them to school.

So many times had I said out loud to my colleagues I must call the girls tonight so I reach them at breakfast. How hard can it be to remember one simple promise to myself? Pretty hard, apparently, as the dinner conversation with colleagues and clients – accompanied by a glass of wine – distracted me enough to miss the thin window of opportunity to talk with them. Another example in my list of failed parenting moments.

Except it was about to be Thursday for me, Wednesday for them, the day they get out of school at noon. So I figured I had still had a chance to wish Short-pants luck before her recital if I could just stay up until half-past midnight to call and reach them at lunchtime in Paris. But my eyes were drooping shut by eleven o’clock, I surrendered to sleep fast and heavy – as one does within the wake of jet-lag – but at least I’d set my alarm, which went off shortly before 1 am.

“Mama!” Buddy-roo’s enthusiasm at hearing my voice, instant reassurance that they hadn’t forgotten me.

“Hey,” I said, yawning and groggy. “How are you sweetie?”

“Mama, when are the Fisher Price toys going to get here?”

These old toys of mine were sent with the other things from my mother’s house, a shipment that left the states in October and has not yet cleared European customs. I assured her that I’d filled out all the paperwork and I was just waiting to be given a delivery date.

Her enthusiasm disappeared for the rest of the conversation: How are you doing? Fine. How was school? Good. Did you have fun at the birthday party last weekend? Yes. I opted not to ask about homework, as much of a chore this year as last. We dog her enough about it, that there’s nothing I can do from so far away to move things along. Best not to touch upon a sore subject.

“Can I talk to your sister?”

I heard the phone clunk down on the counter and the footsteps the followed as she ran off to get her sister. I desperately wanted to speak to Short-pants before her concert to let her know I was thinking about her, so that she’d tune her viola knowing that, even from far away, I was rooting for her. Mostly that she’d know she wasn’t forgotten. It’s hard enough, I think, to have an event like this that your parents cannot attend. Worse if it goes by without a crystal clear message that being absent doesn’t mean uninterested.

Short-pants came on the phone.

“Are you ready?”

“Yes, Mama,” she said, “I’ve practiced every night. I know it by heart.”

This conversation an echo of so many exchanges from my childhood. Within it I heard my father’s carefully chosen words to acknowledge preparedness over perfection. And her response, like mine probably was, couched with the intent to please. Add this moment to all the rest – good and bad – where you catch yourself parenting as you were parented.

As a young violist, just about Shortpants’ age, I remember my father once complimented me after an orchestra concert and I told him, with some embarrassment, that I’d actually lost my place during one of the pieces.

“What did you do?” he’d asked.

I told him how I’d faked it until I could find my place in the music and rejoin the rest of the orchestra. I remember his long fingers, pushing his glasses up on the bridge of his nose to adjust them as he summoned his thoughtful response.

“It’s not the fall,” he said, nodding, “it’s the recovery.”

This advice I’ve passed on to others, but I seem to forget to apply to myself.

Despite all the self-talk about how the kids are fine, they’re better adjusted because we’re not hovering over them all the time, how seeing us go away and return is good for their self-esteem, how they’ll be more independent as a result, the truth is I feel like shit about missing this recital. It was her first one ever, and I wasn’t there. I wish I could have beamed myself home, and that it wasn’t the babysitter and her family who’d be there clapping in the audience, but me and De-facto amongst the other proud parents.

I could hear Buddy-roo crying in the background, asking to have the phone back. I reminded Short-pants how much I love her and told her to break a leg, an odd turn of phrase to use, given that her broken leg at age four had its own complications. But she knew what I meant.

“Why do you have to be gone so long?” Buddy-roo asked, through tears. I told her it was because I had to go so far away. It was hard to console her, knowing I had still another full week before I could even say I’ll be home soon.

“When you get back home,” she said, “then will the Fisher Price toys come?”

I assured her they would.

“Okay,” she said, composing herself. I may have fallen from her good graces for being gone so long, but I think I know just how to make a full recovery.

It wasn’t as bad as usual, this time. I even spent a few hours, the day before leaving, no less, wandering through the brocante on the rue de Bretagne with De-facto and the girls. We combed through the stalls of faux-antiques, furniture and junk in search of bookshelves and a dresser for the girls’ bedrooms, stopping midway for a chocolate chaud before hunting some more and heading home without a bookshelf or a chest-of-drawers, but instead with a desk for Buddy-roo that we hope will inspire her to do her homework.

Such a leisurely, familial break could have set me back, but it didn’t. I managed, somehow, to be packed and in bed with the (most of) the list checked-off by midnight. This is highly unusual. There were also fewer incidents of dragging my hands through my hair with the exasperated how will I ever get it all done? that too often accompanies my preparations for a journey. I’m a chronic sufferer of departure stress, but for this trip it was less torturous than usual.

Not that there was a total absence of angst. I lamented out loud, more than once, what was I thinking? I must have lost my sanity to agree to these projects that would take me away from Paris for such an extended period of time, and just before Christmas. I’ve been traveling too much, I moaned to De-facto, I can’t do it like this anymore.

Which is a load of crap, because I love to travel, it’s my drug of choice. I like to be on the road. I am most invigorated standing on a train platform with my valise beside me, or dragging my suitcase through a long airport corridor. Standing in a long queue at passport control can indeed be frustrating, but it can also breed a fierce anticipation of the adventures ahead. It’s all how you look at it. This trait I inherited from my mother, who in turn learned it from hers.

The problem is my obsession to put things doubly in order (also inherited). There’s the preparation to go away: packing, assembling supplies and the fairly mindless yet remarkably time-consuming task of booking tickets and checking-in on line. Then there’s the preparation to be gone for such a long time: paying bills, leaving notes and cash for the cleaner, anticipating babysitter coverage for the complicated moments in the girls’ schedules. It doesn’t help that De-facto has his own week-long trip during my three week absence, so a detailed calendar is required for the two babysitters who manage the girls days and nights when we’re both gone, including pick-up from two different birthday parties and dropping Buddy-roo with one of her friends while Short-pants goes to her music lesson. This is not just organization; it’s choreography.

I catch myself whinging about it and I think of the longing moments I spent on my back porch, growing up, dreaming of traveling in the manner that I do now, and I want to slap myself across the face and shout snap out of it! Because once I’m on the plane – or even before, once I’ve cleared security and I’m in duty-free land – and there’s nothing else to attend to and only the voyage ahead, I’m in a state of bliss. Two long-haul flights to get to New Zealand? No problem. That’s a full day of absolutely uninterruptable time, which can also be described as several movies, two New Yorkers, a novel and still plenty of sleep. I’ll wake up as the plane landed in a far-away place with the familiar tickle: who knows what adventures are ahead?

Guilt is part of it. Even though De-facto is super about taking on the kids and never once complained (to me) about the duration of this trip, I know what it’s like to be the sole parent at home – I do it for him when he travels. The girls don’t like it when I’m gone; their sweet pleading voices tug at me. Worse, I’m missing several important events-of-the-season: the school marché de Noël, the Christmas carol concert and Short-pants’ first viola recital. I know how it meant so much to me that my parents sat through all my orchestra and chorus performances. I feel a bit guilty to be missing theirs.

But guilt is part of parenting. A constant stream of media and societal messages harp on us about how to parent; it’s easy to get caught up in it. I’m always unwinding myself from this tangle, remembering that I don’t have to be the perfect parent, I just have to be a good one. Being true to myself is part of that recipe; mothering by example.

Now I am halfway around the world after 24 tranquil flight-hours of travel that followed 24 hours of frenzied preparation. I do miss my family, but without drama. I also know that this is an important part of me: to be on a trip with a grip, and I can’t deny it. Traveling may seem like a hassle when managing a life around kids, but if I didn’t get to do it at all, I’d shrivel up.

So I endure the pain of preparing to go away, and I find a reasonably sized receptacle in which to place my guilt about being gone. I focus not on the morning cuddles that I’m missing, but on those that will be all the more succulent when I return. And I hope that when it’s time for Short-pants and Buddy-roo to go out and grab the world, they’ll know just how to do it: without stress, without guilt, instead with a wide-angle view on the horizon, and all it has to offer.

It’s never easy. The last days before leaving for a trip always get ugly. No matter how I try to plan ahead, think ahead, and even pack ahead, there is no avoiding the inevitable frenzy and departure stress. Finishing up work projects so the hanging threads are at least minimized. Getting De-facto and the girls packed in the car and on their way to the country house. Setting in order the details of the household: bills paid, last minute errands, picking up dry cleaning, running by the post to drop some birthday cards in the mail, baskets of white clothes to be washed and ironed, suitcase packed. Get that last invoice out, answer those emails sulking in the bottom of the inbox. Stop by the bank to get cash for the trip, find a moment to shop for a new pair of cheap shoes for trudging through the gray silt of the upcoming Pamplona party. The list would not end, and the series of bullet-pointed colored Post-it notes plastered over the kitchen island seemed to multiply despite the fact that I plowed through the list industriously, barely stopping to eat or sleep, let alone to put my feet up.

There was a pedicure – a must before any summer trip and of course the visit to the beauty nurse to deal with the hair you don’t want, but then to the coiffeur to deal with the hair you do want. If only there’d been time for a facial. De-facto laughs at me when I run around at pre-voyage pace, stressed about my to-do list, on which a third of the items are beauty treatments, which he considers lavish. But I’m telling you this not a luxury; at my age, it’s called maintenance.

My usual start-of-summer departure stress was compounded this year by the necessary packing or purging of all bottles, boxes, tubes and personal toiletry items on every shelf of our bathroom and our w.c. We have arranged for both to be gutted and renovated during our absence, which meant a last-minute consultation with the contractor, some dashing about to pick up the new shower fixture and special-order lamps which meant I completely spaced out about a conference call I was supposed to join.

I’d turned the corner from frenzied to flakey.

But wait, there’s more: I knew this was not the ideal moment to wipe out my hard-drive and upgrade to a new operating system, however my recently-sluggish computer decided to freeze, upgrading this task from would-be-nice-if-you-get-to-it to the must-do-it-now status. The installation was more complicated than it should have been, requiring a manual reassembly of my document files, photos, browser preferences and email accounts. The good news is I had a fresh backup from which to work. The bad news: it still took hours. I was up restructuring my library files until three a.m.

It would help if I wasn’t so hell-bent on leaving home with everything in order. I cannot leave the house with perishable food in the fridge. The laundry needs to be put away and the tables cleared and chairs pushed in, the dishwasher emptied. I want beds made and the shoes put away, papers and books and things put away and out of sight. I like to leave the house in such a way that it’s a relief to come home. This adds a number of possibly superfluous tasks to my cluster of Post-it notes, but it does pay off. The return home is always smoother for this painful frenzy of preparation.

Keep your eye on the prize. This is the mantra I kept repeating to myself all week. Soon I’d be in the green of the hills of the Basque country at a favorite little hotel, sipping rosé and eating asparagus de Navarra. Just a few days later, I’ll be clinking champagne flutes in a room full of friends dressed in white (with a splash of red) in the middle of an entire city full of people dressed in white (with a splash of red) where for exactly one week I will be lost in the revelry and reverie that is the fiesta of San Fermín. The days ahead are days I dream of all year long: when I am beholden to nobody, when there is no end-of-day-deadline because I have to pick up the kids, no promises to keep, no paperwork to submit, no phone call to forget. These are the days spent wandering with purposeful abandon in an non-stop-impromptu parade with a posse of good friends, days where I am free to float, un-tethered and in the moment, subject only to my own whim of iron. These are the days I’ve been waiting for all year, and oh yes, they’re just ahead – if I can just get out of town.

After sprinting down the stairs and turning the corner, Short-pants stubbed her toe on the step into the living room and exploded into screeching tears. I was careful not to run to her too swiftly – I hate to fuel the crisis with more panic – but still, a young girl’s throbbing toe deserves a little sympathy. I kissed her dirty toenail (only a mother would do this) and offered the standard, reassuring words before turning back to finish unpacking the suitcase from our weekend trip.

“No, there’s something else.” Tears were dripping down her cheeks like open faucets. “It’s Mother’s Day. I just saw it on my calendar. And we didn’t do anything for you!”

Of course this was not news to me. I’d deleted scores of Mother’s Day promotional emails that fell into my inbox because of the various mom-blog newsletters I read. But since we don’t consume a lot of media in our home, let alone American media, the over-marketed Mother’s Day messaging somehow didn’t reach anyone else in my family. I am perfectly capable of hinting at it, “You know what I’d like to do for Mother’s Day is…” and in the past I have. But sometimes it just feels akward to be pointing it out.

I’d pretty much put it aside. Who wants to be held emotional hostage by a Hallmark holiday? Though if anybody deserves an extra day of appreciation – even if it is the commercial idea of a greedy greeting card company – it surely is your mother, often the most taken-for-granted person in the family.

My brother did call to wish me a happy Mother’s Day, inquiring if I’d been celebrated sufficiently. “Look at it this way,” he said, “you didn’t have to pretend to enjoy that burnt-toast breakfast and wax enthusiastically about the handmade cards.” He had a point.

~ ~ ~

De-facto had reason to be in the UK last week, and another project scheduled there again early this week, so instead of him doing a back-and-forth, we decided I’d bring the Short-pants and Buddy-roo across the channel and we’d play London tourists for a weekend. We have some new colleagues-turned-friends who generously offered us accommodation, tackling the hardest part of being a tourist in London: the cost of hotels. With a little bit of juggling schedules, training in and out of the city and making use of the left-luggage service at the station, we choreographed a busy weekend: the London Eye, the British Museum, Westminster Abbey, and a matinee show of Wicked, the story of the Wizard of Oz before and after Dorothy lands in Munchkinland. Both De-Facto and I had seen it on a kid-free London theatre weekend a few years ago, so we labored a bit over the decision. Both of us wanted to see something that we’d not been to before, but in the end I pressed for Wicked knowing the girls would love it. Besides, they’re both stars in the Wizard of Oz school play, so this was relevant backstory. (Shouldn’t “parenting travel” be tax-deductable?)

One of the cool parts about being a mom (or a parent, for that matter) is introducing your children to culture. It’s not the first time we’ve taken them to the theatre, they’ve seen stage performances of On the Town, Les Misérables and The Sound of Music in Paris at the Chatelet Theatre, which is pretty special. But nobody does theatre like the West End. And we had brilliant seats that were just-the-right-amount close to the stage. I spent as much time admiring my children’s open-jawed, concentrated-awe as I did watching the actors performing their story.
My favorite moment: at a climatic point in which Elphaba, who was good-hearted and thoughtful before becoming the Wicked Witch of the West, stood on stage with Glinda, who’d been vain and self-centered before growing into the more gentle-hearted Witch of the North, and they sang to each other about the important exchange their friendship had yielded. In one song, an ambiguous complexity of life expressed: how circumstances can turn someone good into someone wicked, and inspire someone wicked to do something good. Short-pants moved her hand on top of mine, and I turned to see a tear sliding slowly down her cheek.

“It’s sad,” she said, “but it’s also happy.”

Much like the sappy scene in Pretty Woman when Julia Roberts’ character goes to the opera and gets it, not only did Short-pants love the staging and the magic of the performance, she also understood the poignancy of this moment in the play. To witness how this moved her, well, I suppose that’s right up there with the coolest Mother’s Day presents you can get.

~ ~ ~

She sobbed in my arms. I’m sorry maman, we should have done something for you today. I didn’t even make you a card.”

Here’s what you’re supposed to read next: “and in that moment, I realized this was the joy of motherhood, and the only acknowledgment I needed.” But I’d be lying if I reported to you that in an instant I relinquished any residual, though mild, disappointment I’d been harboring.

I’m a little more wicked than that. It took me a few more breaths, a couple of my own tears at being forgotten (except of course I know I’m not) and a short visit to the memory bank. I’d spent a fair amount of time, on this Mother’s Day, thinking about (and missing) my own mother, whom I took entirely for granted as a child, and whom I treated with the typical disdain of a teenager. I grew to admire her, and then (especially) to appreciate her after becoming a mother myself, when I began to understand what kind of a sacrifice is required to be a mom, and how she’d done it so elegantly. I never knew if it had been hard for her or not.

Then, okay, I could get there, to see the message in this beautiful expression, this whole-bodied apology – how my little girl’s heart was breaking because she was afraid she’d broken mine. So when I said that “this hug is the best gift you could give me for Mother’s Day,” I really meant it.

We embraced for a long time. Buddy-roo even came over and put her arms around the two of us and joined the love-in.

“But wait,” Short-pants said, lifting her head, “we still have French Mother’s Day to celebrate.” Her eyes lit up with an idea. “I’ll make you breakfast in bed!”

I never imagined that they would turn out to be so lovely. When I watch them from a distance – not when they’re crowded around me and clinging, demanding my attention, but from afar, as they interact with others – I am a little bit amazed. I knew I would love my children, but I didn’t consider how much I might admire them. Or at least that this feeling of admiration would happen while they were still so young. Both Short-pants and Buddy-roo have poise and a thoughtful exuberance, and in certain settings they rise to the occasion in remarkable ways. They have become such big, little girls.

Last week, our annual voyage to Sestri Levante, Italy, for the CREA conference. We go every year to see friends and reconnect with colleagues. We go to sharpen our saws as facilitators and practitioners of creative process. We go to experience our own creativity in new ways. We go to be in service – we are volunteers – to give back to this community because it has given us so much, including our current careers. I realize now there’s another reason we go: for our children.

The girls weave in and out of the sea of adults attending the conference with ease and enthusiasm. It doesn’t hurt that the kind of people who attend a conference on creativity have a special knack for appreciating the wisdom of children and recognize well that we all could be childlike in adult bodies if we’d only let it happen. When I am at CREA I feel an enormous gratitude toward this community for being so open to my children, and for giving them a chance to interact with adults who truly respect them and engage them in very attentive way.

This has a huge impact. Short-pants and Buddy-roo are the kind of kids that can look people in the eye and can carry on conversations with people of any age. Because they are not merely seen, but heard as well, they believe in their own voices and they know how to articulate their thoughts and feelings. They share themselves with others. Occasionally I do have to remind them not to interrupt, but they heed this reminder because they know that when they are in a conversation, I will wait until they are finished, too.

At CREA, they are free-range kids. It’s a safe environment. There’s a bit of parenting-as-community; friends volunteer to take the girls out for a walk or to get a gelato. The CREA kids program is very ad hoc, friendly colleagues volunteer to devise creative 90-minute activities for the children of all the parents attending the conference. A rat-pack of creative kids runs around, often without serious supervision. But the rules are clear: don’t leave the hotel grounds, don’t cross the street, don’t go near the pool. Otherwise, they run freely. My kids live independently at CREA.

There are, of course, exceptions. For example, each morning I’d enter the dining room, looking to touch base with the girls, who’d get up and dress themselves and make their own way through the grand hotel foyer to the dining room. They’d find a table of adults, always delighted for their young company. They’d pick up plates and bowls and select fruit and cereal and a slice of sweet cake or focaccia from the buffet table and settle in for breakfast.

Of course we’d preview this the night before in very deliberate, repetitive conversation about how in the morning Mama had to run an early writing workshop and Papa wanted to go to an early yoga session and how they should get dressed and leave the key at the desk and how we’d join them in the dining room when we were done with our programs.

“Yes, mama,” Buddy-roo would say, full of disdain for our apparent over-parenting, “I know what to do. I’m a big girl, after all.”

She seemed to relish – at least in the evenings – the idea of this grown up activity, managing the morning all on her own. But every morning in the dining room, Buddy-roo would give me the cold shoulder: a dramatic toss of the head to look away from me, the 2-inch long pout and the narrowing of her eyes as she’d bite into her long slice of foccacia.

“Are you angry?” I’d say.
No verbal response, only the folding of her arms.
“It looks like you’re feeling a bit mad at something.”
Then she’d let loose the angry tears.
“You left me alone! There was nobody there when I woke up!”

At the age of 7 and 9, I suppose, meltdowns occur. (At my age, too.) Short-pants, who has no problem making her own way to breakfast, leaving Buddy-roo to wake up alone in the room, is an extroverted introvert and loves the chaos of crazy, creative people – up to a point. She, too, had her grumpy moments, storming away in tired tears because of the overload of noise and energy.

But if you take the long view over the full week of the CREA conference, a week when both their mother and father are often distracted and delighted by others things and not always paying full attention to the parenting part, our girls do just fine. In fact, they are growing into interesting people because they get to fend for themselves a little bit. CREA is a good and safe place to do that, and coming back each year is like periodically measuring their height and marking it on the wall; we really see how they’ve changed, and how they’ve grown. We see them for who they are in the company of others, learning to express themselves, to convey their own creativity. We see who they’re becoming, in and of their own right. And I couldn’t have imagined – nor could I be more pleased – to be the mother of such lovely, big, little girls.

When I phoned to make my reservation, I braced myself. “It’s a magical morning here at the Disneyworld Yacht Club resort! Thanks for calling! How can I help you today?” It must have been a gag reflex that induced my coughing fit, the agent had to wait for me to recover before collecting information for my reservation. He chirped right along and I answered, wondering what he was like during off-hours. Did he get mad at his kids? Did he shout profanities at his wife? I shouldn’t complain: it was an effortless procedure to reserve my room, and any extra questions I had about my arrival in Orlando were answered in the most upbeat but efficient way. A final, effusive moment of customer service as he closed the call: “Ma’am, I do appreciate you making your reservation with us today, is there anything else I can do for you?’

“Well, yes, in fact,” I answered him, “You could be a little less cheerful.” He laughed. “Okay, ma’am, I’ll try.”

Perhaps I’ve been immersed in the French pessimism for too long – it’s not that I don’t wish I could get this kind of delighted-to-help you attention at home in Paris – but something about the happy-on-steroids tone of everything Disney provokes my sarcastic evil twin sister. Arriving at the Orlando airport, every wider-than-necessary smile and über-friendly remark as I made my way to the Magical Express transfer bus grated on me. On the magic bus, a TV commercial the length of the ride from the airport to the hotel offered up a numbing combination of deep, enthusiastic voices and flashing lights and colors. Then the exuberant welcome from every staff member as I entered the hotel lobby. I kind of wanted to scream. It was as if my heart couldn’t handle so much hospitality. Or hype.

The purpose of my trip was professional; that’s why I found myself in the world’s most famous family resort without my own. The participants of the training I was running hailed from many different organizations, but a handful were cast members, ergo the invitation to hold the workshop at Disney. We were hosted in a large meeting space at the far end of EPCOT, on the second floor of a pavilion that is no longer used. This meant each morning we strolled through the park to get to our meeting room, and the gate we were escorted through was just beside England and Canada. By the end of the week I knew by heart the music tracks that accompanied each country’s faux-setting. Further along in the park, near the iconic geodesic dome a sound track of futuristic schmaltz attempted (I think) to conjure up a feeling of the wonder of technological efficiency. Funny how the sterile technology we imagined years ago, when EPCOT was first designed, looks much different from the real technology we know today, which rather than simplifying and minimalizing seems to be sloppier, and more complicated and distracting.

Midweek one of the cast members participating in our program made a special announcement: everyone at the training was invited to a press event at the Magic Kingdom. This entailed V.I.P. passes to a private party in the evening when the park would otherwise be closed. My enthusiasm wasn’t entirely feigned; I appreciated the generous gesture. But did I want to immerse myself further into this cheerful, hand-waving, ever-smiling world? Later, when announcing the details about where and when the bus would collect us, I asked – as if it was to benefit the participants who might be worried – how we might leave the event mid-way if we didn’t want to stay. It wasn’t impossible, we were told, but it wasn’t easy to do. I wondered if I’d be better off staying in my hotel for a quiet night.

Opportunity is not something lost on me, however, and although I was reticent to commit to the event, I remembered some 20+ years ago when I worked in the media and I was flown to Disney to attend a promotional weekend. It was fun. We’d had easy access to every ride, attraction and Disney character roaming the park without ever waiting in line. It had, of course, ruined all subsequent visits to Disney where the snaking lines, though creatively managed, meant spending the same amount of time standing and waiting as playing and riding. It’s not every day you get invited to a V.I.P event, I reminded myself; probably a good idea to take advantage of it.

The coach circled around to the side of the park and we were driven through parts of the behind-the-scenes space that looks remarkably plain, ordinary. It was about as back-stage as you can get, but as soon as we walked through the hidden gate into Frontierland, a row of lively cast members lined the walkway with trays of drinks and snacks and high-spirited greetings. Throughout the park, rides were open and running, and line-less, so we stepped immediately into the elevator of the haunted mansion and without any delay into the carriages that meander through the caves of Pirates of the Caribbean. Our Disney colleagues who’d arranged our entry didn’t just dump us in the park and go off to do their own thing. They took us around, optimizing our time in the park and illuminating little details that we’d otherwise never notice. The restaurants that usually offer the typical fast-food fare of American families were instead set up with buffet tables holding a more sophisticated spread of food and drink. After we dined, we were prompted toward Main Street, USA where dessert and coffee accompanied the special light show and fireworks.

Of course I had a photo opp with the famous Mickey and Minnie, and though I couldn’t resist making an aside about the sexual advances I endured during Mickey’s embrace, it was my only snarky comment of the night. That’s because before I could stop myself I started to have a blast. As the night sped by, I let go of the suspicious energy I’d been carrying all week, and I immersed myself in the full Disney experience. I ran through the park, jumping on my tip-toes, laughing, shouting out “look, it’s Donald!” I could feel the smile permanently pasted on my face the entire time, and looking around at all the (mostly) adults there, I wasn’t the only one. At every turn another delight was proffered – a just-baked chocolate chip cookie, cheesecake served in a creative plastic dispenser (my editor was off, “It’s a cheesecake tampon!” I shouted, causing even the Disney server to laugh.) An amazing projection show that dressed the Magic Kingdom’s castle in forty different costumes and colors, sent stars and photographs tumbling out its windows, an animated performance that dropped everyone’s jaw to the ground. And if that wasn’t stunning enough, the finale of fireworks left everyone buzzing.

This is what Walt Disney had in mind, I suppose. Certainly his world was designed to delight children, but he must have known how it would be just as important – and a much harder a task – to delight their parents and any other adults who found themselves, sometimes begrudgingly, in his park. At Disney last week I relearned something I purported to know: how to play. Not just going through the motions and being a little bit playful, but giving into the magic and surrendering willingly to the child inside.

I hadn’t mentioned to Short-pants and Buddy-roo that I was going to Disney. It felt wrong to boast about such a treat to them, and you may recall I wasn’t that enthusiastic about going. But now I’m thinking a visit to Disneyland Paris is imminent. I’m even dreaming of a Disney cruise as a future vacation. (They christened a new boat this week, too.) Who knew I could come around to being so enthusiastic? Maybe that extra little hug from Mickey was all it took to be seduced by the Disney magic.

Traveling is my drug of choice. I love to be en route, suitcase at my side, tickets in hand. I’m happy to travel short or long distances, with friends or family or all by myself. It doesn’t matter, I just like to be in the midst of a voyage. Ramping up for the trip is another story – De-facto will attest to the fact that I am a complete grump while in preparation. But once I’ve locked the door behind me, and the adventure is ahead, I’m a happy traveler.

I remember as a child, we’d get dressed up to go on a trip. Our annual spring visits to Florida to see my grandparents meant putting on our best clothes. It was a big deal, a very sophisticated thing, to be at an airport about to board a plane. This is why I have never worn a track-suit on an airplane, and never will.

I once had a dream-job that permitted me to travel to just about every European capital. I flew business class and stayed in comfortable hotels. Locals on the ground, intent to impress, treated me well. I wasn’t a tourist, but I wasn’t a regular in-and-out-of-town business traveler. I was something in between and it suited me perfectly.

Flying was nearly effortless then, in the days before security measures force us to remove belts and shoes and experience intimate strip searches. I’ve always been partial to train travel anyway, and I choose this whenever the option exists. Put me on a train, speeding through country landscapes and swaying in the backdoor of every city en route, this is my state of bliss.

De-facto loves traveling as much as I do. When he was in his late twenties, he quit his job and took a year to travel around the world. I was living in Hong Kong at the time and his mother, who I knew first, told him to look me up. He took down my name and number, but never called. I wasn’t in a very good state-of-mind at the time, so it’s just as well. Years later, the night we met, when he heard my name he said, “Oh that’s you? Your name is in my journal.” This was enough to start falling in love with him: He kept a journal and my name was already in it. (And he loved to travel.)

The girls travel like fish in water. Short-pants took her first steps – not just the stumbling ones, but the six or seven or eight steps in succession that constitute walking – in the Charles de Gaulle airport while we waited to board a plane to Johannesburg. Buddy-roo has traveled to South Africa as well, and she was conceived in Mexico while her sister took a nap in that ever-so-portable pack-n-play. They’ve both traveled to Cambodia and to other less exotic but equally interesting destinations in Europe and the United States. They obtained their passports at the age of one month; already they’ve had to renew.

I think if we’ve done anything right by these girls, it’s giving them a second fluent language and then making sure they aren’t at all afraid to get on a train or plane and go somewhere new. It’s in their blood now, too.

But like any drug, too much can be toxic. I might have overdosed on travel in 2010. I flew over the Atlantic twelve times, half of those flights to the west coast. I went the other direction, too, a long haul to India and while there enjoyed (if you can say that) a few harrowing automobile rides that equal any of my crazier youthful travel adventures. I trained and planed around Europe and through the Chunnel. I traveled somewhere every month, and often twice in a month. I wore out two suitcases and counted a lot of miles. But I depleted my stamina for travel. The last trip was a rough one, I just wanted to stay home. This is unusual for me.

That would explain why De-facto and I have failed to organize any kind of a trip for this upcoming holiday. Our dream of several days trolling tapas bars in San Sebastian is still alive, but neither one of us has succeeded in executing any of the details to make it happen. A friend sends SMS messages about snow and skiing and a place to stay in Switzerland, enticing us to get some winter exercise. We haven’t said no, we just haven’t booked a ticket. I don’t want to stay at home in Paris next week, too many consecutive days of the girls on top of each other with nothing to do is a brutal thought. But I’m too fatigued by the travel of the last year to do anything about it. My own pillow feels like too much like a luxury.

Deep inhale. This is certainly temporary. I know if I’m stationary too long the feet get itchy. I need to move and be on the move, it’s hereditary. My mother and her mother were fantastic travelers. Their motto: Have grip will travel. That looks to be my mantra again in 2011. Already I’m scheduled to be in Florida in January, and – get this – in New Zealand in March. That’s going to be a long haul trip, the number of hours in flight dehydrates me just thinking about it. But you can count on this: I don’t care how long it is, I won’t be wearing a track suit.

I’m participating in Reverb10, and this post is in response to a prompt from author Tara Hunt: Prompt: Travel. How did you travel in 2010? How and/or where would you like to travel next year?

Day-to-day, small details are so easily forgotten. Even those scribbled on a Post-it, logged in an on-line to-do list or occasionally even emailed to myself. Before I had children, my mind worked nimbly. Now it’s like a sieve. Yet all I had to do was set foot on Danish soil and so began a flood of memories. Driving through the elephant gates of the Carlsberg complex, faces of friends who drank that local beer with me, more than twenty-five years ago, return with precise detail. Deposited in front of Tivoli Gardens for a dinner with clients, I glanced down the street at the lights of Copenhagen’s town hall square, and the memory of the daily crossing of the Rådhuspladsen came rushing at me like a mad parade.

Not just the images, I remember a whole chorus of feelings: how I nearly skipped across the square, jubilant and alive for the sheer adventure of living in a foreign country, or other days plodding across its weathered stones, unbelieving that I could ever construct a life that would meet my expectations, or simply because I felt sad, lonely and far away from home.

(How I long to be lonely now! There is always someone in shouting distance, interrupting or needing my attention. What a luxury, those angst-filled lonely days!)

An extra day in Copenhagen was designated for a tour of that distant chapter of my life. It started with a local train to the central station, where the sight of my feet upon the tiles with their black on terra-cotta design recalled side-trips to other European capitals that returned me home to this station with a backpack full of dirty laundry and dozens of stories to tell. If you had asked me, last week, to describe these tiles I would have drawn a blank. Seeing them triggered memories of people and places I didn’t even know were still stored in the back corners of my brain.

When I was a student in Copenhagen, I spent a lot of time just walking and wondering. Now, so many years later I was doing the same, but this time desperately trying to remember where was the doorway I used daily, to enter my school. Or that balcony I used to lean over, outside the architecture studio, or a hidden passage that was my favorite shortcut. I found most of these things – with only minor effort – but searched in vain for my favorite Café Peder Huitfeldt. I managed to find at least three little squares that could have been the cozy, out of the way square where (I think) it stood. Did it close after all these years or did I just forget how to get to that hidden place?

The night before, sitting around the dinner table with the family that I lived with as a student – everyone had congregated to greet me – I was struck by how we all blended together in exactly the same way as we did all those years ago. We are grayer and thicker, apparently wiser, unquestionably older. It occurred to me that my when they hosted me, my Danish parents were several years younger than I am now. They remember things I do not, regaling me with stories of my former foolishness. What I do remember – exactly – is the floor plan of the house they lived in then, the curves of their leather chairs, the design of my bed, the color of the sheets upon it, the way we sat together at the dinner table, even the weave of the tablecloth.

How do I remember certain things and not others? I cannot remember his name, that older man working on the film about the Danish resistance, who spun me into turmoil by inviting me to stay and work on it. My sister, heeding my father’s request, wrote me a carefully crafted letter urging me to come home and finish college. I do not regret that I conformed to their wishes, it was right to graduate with the classmates I’d started with, and a small Danish film credit would not have made such an impact on my career. Now I remember very little of that man, of our exchanges, his offer. Did it really happen? I can feel all the feelings of that wrenching decision, as if they were last week’s crisis. But the names, details, geography – it all comes in spurts and usually with a surprise, like seeing a movie you haven’t watched in ages. What makes me remember some places exactly and others not at all? What brings some experiences to the surface viscerally intact, and others are foggy images that dissipate if I try to focus on them – if they’re even accessible to me at all.

I speak the middle-aged language my parents spoke, spaced with lengthy pauses as I try to recapture what I started to say but forgot mid-sentence. I call Short-pants by Buddy-roo’s name, and vice versa. I beckon the children to the table for lunch when I mean to say dinner. I can’t remember numbers I’ve just added in my head. I forget almost all things that are not written down. I attribute this benign aphasia to the natural forces of maternal dementia, but it’s not consistent. Sometimes my memory has perfect pitch, with every detail in place. How does my mind decide what should escape it? How does it determine what to remember?

At the edge of the Rådhuspladsen there sits a big bronze statue of Hans Christian Anderson gazing off into the distance. When I lived here I visited him often, hoisting myself up onto the base of the statue, leaning up against his ice-cold legs. At age twenty, I was convinced he was looking off into my future; in our imaginary conversations he would reassure me about its promise. This weekend, meeting him again, his gaze looked less hopeful, more reflective. Standing before him now it seemed he wasn’t looking off into the future at all. No, he was pondering the past, probably trying to place me, just barely remembering something from long ago – something close, vaguely familiar – nearly within his grasp, but not quite.

I stepped on to the escalator and let it lift me diagonally toward the second floor. At the top, a group of women stood in a circle, laughing. Behind them, more women waited in line at the registration desk. I became aware of something gnawing uncomfortably in my stomach: that would be butterflies. I was nervous.

Kind of ridiculous, I told myself. I’m no stranger to conferences and conventions. I learned early in my career how to work a room. I’ve organized, presented and facilitated meetings of all sizes and shapes. And this time I had no responsibilities whatsoever, only myself to consider: What sessions do I want to attend and which parties to drop in on? What was the big deal?

It’d had all come together at the last minute. I’d put the BlogHer ’10 conference in my calendar knowing it was nearly impossible to attend. A mid-summer air-fare. A non-essential trip away from De-facto and the girls. Another excursion just on the heels of my annual escape to the fiesta. But a client’s shifting of dates worked in my favor, landing me too close to the conference – in proximity as well as timing – not to feel absolutely entitled to take a few days and join in.

I knew nobody. Except that’s not true – I knew a lot of bloggers. I’d read their stories, empathized with their rants, gasped at their brave disclosures. If you read someone’s blog – even sporadically – you can know them in ways that are more intimate than you know people who live down the hall from you for years. Still, I was nervous. What would it be like to meet, in the flesh, the bloggers I’d admired and appreciated? What if I never managed to meet any of them? Or what if nobody wanted to meet me? What if it turned out to be a haughty bunch of competitive women, an inner circle of high-trafficked web-mistresses, a network woven too tight to penetrate, a clique around which I’d feel inept and inadequate?

It made me think of something that happened two weeks ago, when Buddy-roo was begging to go to the Centre de Loisir. She was tired of having only her older sister to boss around and interested in the arts-n-crafts-n- things that go with organized summer child-care. On our way to the centre, she skipped with glee. She couldn’t wait to get there.

Until we reached the door. While waiting to register, she moved out of my view and hid behind me. She gripped my hand tight, pinching my fingers. When it was our turn to fill out the paperwork, she began to cry. Her imagined joy about being there had crumbled to the dingy reality in front of her: she didn’t recognize anyone. I knelt down and said all the things you’re supposed to say – you can imagine the pep talk – but inside I was giving myself the big eye roll. Com’n Buddy-roo, don’t be a wuss. How could that bold girl who’d skipped fiercely down the street shrink so swiftly into a timid mama’s girls crying to go home?

Now I knew. Because it did occur to me, standing at the top of the landing that I could make an immediate U-turn to the down escalator and out the door and away from this crowd of smiling women who all appeared to know each other already and to know everything there is to know about blogging.

This is what the girls go through, I thought, every time there’s a new or a first something. First day of school. A new music class. Starting a dance class. Registering at the Centre de Loisir. Whether you’re four years old or in your forties, entering the unfamiliar can be daunting. I’d forgotten how easy it is to feel shy.

But by lunchtime I’d run into Magpie. I’d said hello to another Maggie, Dammit, and shook hands with two of my heroines Mom 101 and Mominatrix. It took me a while, but I managed to track down Amanda and I bought two books for Sweet/Salty to autograph at her book-signing.

But it was just before that very book signing moment that I bumped into two British women bloggers. Nothing against the ‘mericans – I’m one of them and always will be – but there was something reassuringly familiar about these accented voices from the other side of the pond, feeling slightly other, just as I was. That they were interested in finding a bar didn’t hurt. We bonded over Berry BlogHers, a special drink concocted for the conference and I knew I’d found my tribe. So special thanks to Sian and Jay and Jen. And also Minnie and Liz who rounded out our international circle with west coast flair and made it all that much more fun.

I could add several dozen more links: four truly inspiring activists who risk their lives to blog, a number of women (and men) who spoke intelligently and articulately on panels, composers of the cleverest of tweets or people who just cracked me up making conversation in the ladies room. By the end of the conference, I was fearlessly riding up and down those escalators, going where I wanted to go, meeting exactly who – it turns out – I needed to meet. Not feeling shy anymore, and feeling very much part of the tribe.

The alarm goes off, but we have already been awakened by someone on the street buzzing our door to come up for the encierro. Our balcony overlooks Calle Estafeta, where we can see the bulls on the street below as they run by, so we extend invitations to various friends (and occasional strangers) to come up to watch the ritual running of the bulls. Our instructions are precise: come at the last possible moment, minutes before 7:00 when the street is blocked off for cleaning before the run begins at 8:00. The drop key, permanently tied to a long white string, is lowered through the stairwell to allow our guests to pass the locked door at the bottom of the five flights of stairs to our apartment. We usher them out to our balcony so they can watch the street as it’s prepared for the run, and we go back to bed. That extra twenty minutes of sleep can mean everything.

But before 8:00, we, too, must be up, dressed and ready to run. Not with the bulls, but between our living room, where we can see the bull-run on the television, and the balcony, where we charge out as the bulls turn the corner to run up our street. Their broad brown backs rush forward, the bells on the steers that accompany them make the soundtrack to their morning run. On a good day, the bulls are still packed together with the steers as they run toward the corrida, and a few skilled (or lucky) runners sprint ahead of them, just off to the side of their horns.

After the instant replay of the encierro and ensuing TV commentary, we rush our guests out the door and head to the Bar Txoko where many of the runners we know go to swap stories and drink ritual morning drink: Kaiku y Cognac, a sweet vanilla milk mixed with a double-shot of cognac. It so happens that the street cleaners choose that moment to clean the very patch of the Plaza de Castillo where we stand, so we are forever maneuvering our conversations around to accommodate the sweepers and hose-masters who are kindly cleaning up after the previous night’s party, only part of the party that goes on for nine days. These guys are the true heroes of the fiesta, constantly cleaning the streets of the gray goop that is a mixture of beer and wine and urine and puke that accumulates during the week.

A quick drive-by to greet the brothers Carmelo and Fermín at the newsstand where we buy a paper with the photographs of the previous day’s bullrun and bullfight, and then on to our breakfast club, a long table set up in the street where friends meet to eat greasy eggs or pochas or bull stew. Such nourishment can be acquired anywhere, but we always take it here to be in the company of a few very distinctive jota singers who serenade us with traditional Navarran ballads with poignant lyrics (like wishing to be an ivy vine in order to crawl up to your window just to watch you sleep).

The midday rituals have some variation, but might include a long meander through the city streets in search of the Gigantes, a troupe of eight giant figures that represent the kings and queens of the different continents of the world. This year I saw them no less than a half-dozen times, their towering figures turning side-to-side in an enchanting dance in step to the music of the high pitched txistulari pipers. The Gigantes are at least three times the size of the men who carry and spin them for hours every morning; occasionally you see the figures stop and appear to stand still in the street as the men slip out from under the robes and duck into a nearby bar for a rest and a drink. In the meantime, parents carry their toddlers up close to examine the clumps of pacifiers that dangle from the wrists of the giants. When Pamplonese children are ready to stop using their binkies, they give them up to the Gigantes. This is a ritual I find priceless; I can imagine the conversations between the child and parents as the fiesta approaches, the building up to the ceremonial hand-off of the prized pacifier, tying it to the enormous hand of their chosen Gigante. I had a fine childhood, but if I could do it over, I’d do it in Pamplona.

This is the moment that seems to have become a ritual for me, when I wonder why Short-pants and Buddy-roo and De-facto are not there with me, swallowed by the sea of white and red and music and magic. I have kept the fiesta San Fermín as my annual escape, but each year I wonder, how can I not share this with them? For how long should it remain my getaway with my girlfriends and my “Pamplona friends?”

The fiesta is embedded with rituals, those offered up by the proud Basque culture, the noble Taurino traditions, not to mention those that my friends and I have invented for ourselves in the years we’ve been attending. Like our Hemingwayesque ritual of taking two days in the green Navarran countryside just prior to the start of the fiesta, when my girlfriends and I stay at our favorite B&B. Here we slide into the Basque culture, nibbling our favorite asparagus and drinking homemade Patxaran. We retire early and sleep in, padding the sleep bank before the fiesta quickly depletes it. In the morning, we take over a table to create masterpieces of jewelry we bead together with small plastic bulls that have been borrowed from Tequila bottles from a Mexican Kmart. Our own spontaneous designs that every year we make, wear and give away: the running of the bull-earrings.

Each day in Pamplona, a brief afternoon nap rejuvenates us to make the run for sandwiches and cookies (and a chilled bottle of Rosado) to carry into the corrida for the post third bull snack. The bullfight itself is a remarkable ritual, a 3-act drama of skill, bravery and intimacy. Though I am far from an aficionada, there was one moment this year that moved me to tears: the matador raised his hand to stop his cuadrilla as they came to his aide. He knew he had done his work well, the bull was ready to die, and so he stood back with his hand raised, and waited for the bull to fall. It happened swiftly; a good death, with grace and honor, the kind we all hope for. It made me think of my mother, of course, how nobly she fought during the last year of her life, and the dignity of how she finally let go.

Each year I painfully extract myself from my friends and the festivities and leave to be with Short-pants to celebrate her birthday, which falls the day before the end of the fiesta. I could have gotten a pass this year, I suppose, having done my duty with the big party last month, except that I want to be with her on her birthday. As hard as it is to leave the fiesta early, the return is always a relief. This year was no exception: I was as glad as ever to see De-facto and the girls waiting for me at the train station, waving wildly when they spotted me.

“I missed you so much,” cried Short-pants, throwing her long arms around me. “Where did you get those white shoes?” said Buddy-roo, who notices everything, especially if it has to do with new items of clothing or jewelry.

Over the last few days, the final post-fiesta rituals have been enacted without fail: the detoxification, the redepositing of sleep in the bank; the gradual removal of those haggard circles under my eyes; the return to an exercise regime to address the abnormal number of carbohydrates consumed at the fiesta; the washing of the whites, which requires the special formula of
bleach and Coca-Cola (this tip given to us by a Spanish grandmother we met in the supermarket) to get that gray goop off the bottom of all my white jeans; the telling of stories (only mildly toned down) and the fierce expression of gratitude toward De-facto, who always lets me run just as far as I need.