[We took the kids canoeing yesterday, which brought to mind a canoe trip down the Rio Grande that my father and uncle took my brother, sister, and me on when I was seven years old—the same age as my son now. I kept trying to write about that trip as a story, but it kept coming out as a poem of sorts. So here it is.]

It is not the lapping water at the edges of the boat that brings to mind the memory of age seven and sunburned—paddling down the Rio Grande, a snake finding its way onto our boat, the Indian boys swimming out to meet us, their brown skin that looked so much thicker than my own. The sun bounced off them. It saturated me.

And it isn’t the tug of the earth under the boat as it’s pulled ashore—my children scrambling from it as I did then.

It is the oar in the water, that act of cutting without blood, that returns the memory in full color. You were younger than I am now. No shirt and no plan beyond making it down the river with your brother and three young children. I never doubted you.

And when it was all over, hours later than planned, no drinking water, skin seared in retribution, a worried wife and mother waiting at home, we all had a story to tell, didn’t we?

We’ve told it so many times since I sometimes doubt it ever really happened. That snake. Those Indian boys reversing evolution before our eyes: human to amphibian as they slid from the shore to the water. You said later that you worried they were angry. That we were trespassing. That they would capsize the boat. You held the oar ready to fight. But they just asked us where we were going, as those who are stationary always ask those who move. I still remember one boy—the oldest one—brushing aside his long, dark hair that hung like curtains across his face.

And I realize now the light that bounced off their skin is the same light that reflected off the water yesterday. It is the same sun—its rays spanning a generation. But we saw no snakes and no Indian boys. My children’s adventures are a thin page next to my own. I try to give them the world unfettered by rules, but I can’t. I strap them in life jackets and apply sunscreen and tell them not to rock the boat. But you…you parented as if your very will for our survival would be enough. And somehow, it was. Somehow, the oars cut into the water and pulled us forward in spite of it all.

I’ve often wanted a glimpse of what my life would be like if I hadn’t made the choices I have. I know I’m not alone in this. It’s the great human dilemma: that every time we say yes to one thing it means we say no to something else. And so we comfort ourselves with phrases like “everything works out for the best” and “I wouldn’t be who I am today if it weren’t for those mistakes I made yesterday”—but I think it’s just what we say to protect ourselves from the much scarier truth: We don’t know. Who’s to say if we hadn’t gone to a different school or married someone else or not married at all or had more kids or had no kids or devoted our life to music or God or the stock market that we wouldn’t be happier than we are today?

Of course, it’s futile thinking. The fact is, my choices have made me who I am, and it’s better to learn how to live and love that reality than wonder “what if” about the million and one things I did or didn’t do. And I do that quite well, actually. “Happy” is an arbitrary word—one that I’m more comfortable attributing to a moment than an hour, much less a life—but still, if someone were to ask me, “Are you happy?” I would answer, “Yes,” and mean it.

But because I’m me that means I have to navel gaze and create these stories in my head about what my life would be like if I’d chosen a different path. I call it Sliding Doors Syndrome and hope you will, too, because I really think “coined an internationally recognized phrase” would be a cool thing to add to my resume.

Lucky for me, I have a couple people in my life who fulfill the “what if” role for me. One is my best friend, Natasha, who is single, childless, and a lobbyist. When she and I were in our early 20s, we moved to DC together. My career sights were set on being a lobbyist. Hers were less clear but she had no interest in lobbying and thought I was weird to want to do that. Back then, she was also more inclined to marriage and kids than I, who had just ended a two-year relationship that had lasted 23 months too long and had thus fully committed myself to singlehood for the next decade (three days after landing in DC, I met Dave).

If you had asked me then who, in 18 years, would be a writer, married and the mother of two, I would have guessed Natasha, and so would she. Yet our lives flip-flopped somewhere along the way. (We once went to a psychic in Sedona, Arizona, who told us that Natasha and I have been friends for hundreds of years and were even married at one point—she was the man, which brings me no end of joy to remind her.) She is living the life I had expected I would have; and I am living hers. Whenever we’ve doubted our decisions, we’ve often said how great it would be to swap lives for a couple months. But we can’t, so instead we listen to one another’s joys and disappointments and, depending on the day, are thankful for being where we are or filled with longing for the other’s   [fill in the blank] .

But in some ways, Natasha’s life is too far removed from mine to really give me an idea of what my life would be. We’re different in many ways and the things I love (animals, the outdoors, country life) hold little interest for her. Plus, I always thought I would be married. Kids might have been a question mark in my life, but marriage never was. So often when I look at Natasha’s life, I can’t really see mine, simply minus a husband and kids.

So I have Lori Dagley. Lori and I were best friends in Mrs. Tomlin’s third grade class. But the cruel lottery of class assignment separated us after that, and neither of us could handle the long-hallway-distance relationship. Although we graduated from the same high school, we have virtually no memories of one another after third grade. And even then, my memories are fuzzy. Lori remembers us playing with my model horses on the steps of our house and I remember her being in my childhood bedroom—but beyond that, nothing.

But then Facebook (glorious Facebook) reunited us. I’ve been reunited with a lot of old classmates through Facebook, most of whom I don’t remember. So reuniting with Lori shouldn’t really matter, except that I fell a little bit in love. I saw in Lori a childless and more interesting version of myself (and isn’t that always why we fall in love…because we see in the other the potential for whom we could be?). She lives in the middle of nowhere in Idaho, where she and her husband built their own house. She plays the cello. She loves dogs and the mountains and backpacking. She also loves horses, although she doesn’t own one. Instead, she and her husband own a plane and spend a lot of time flying to remote locales (they just logged 4,600 miles on a nearly two-month trip to Mexico). And she’s a really amazing photographer (check out her work here).

Now before I scare you and, more importantly, Lori (who’s likely Googling “restraining order” as she reads this), I’m not obsessed. I swear. And I realize that, like any virtual relationship, the person I’ve created in my mind is probably not who she really is. The fact is, I don’t know Lori. Not really. There’s a good chance she and I could meet for coffee someday and have nothing to talk about beyond our pixilated memories of third grade. But I can’t help but feel like I’ve found in her that sliding door that shows me a little bit what my life would have been like had Dave and I stayed in New Mexico and not had children—but without the plane or the cello or the photography and carpentry skills. We exchange occasional emails and I live vicariously through her adventures that seem so much more interesting than my own.

That’s not to say I don’t think I have an interesting life. It’s just that it’s mine, so I know it. I’ve wandered its hallways and poked into its dark corners and memorized the wallpaper. I imagine even the most interesting life becomes mundane when you live it everyday. And when you add the domestic routine of life with children, “rote” is pretty much a given.

Although I would never give up my children for anything—and even in my darkest times as a mother, I know they’ve enriched my life in a way it never would have been had I chosen not to have kids—I have that longing deep within myself to see what could have been. So I turn to my third grade friend, with whom I played horses on the steps of my childhood home, and crane my neck to peer into her world. And as I do, I tell myself it’s okay, that everything works out for the best.

Some Sunday nights are different than all the rest.

Some Sunday nights you go downtown to a club to see one of your favorite bands—the Shout Out Louds—with your friends Derrick, Juan, and Skye. But Skye forgets here ID. Even though she’s 38 and a mother, they stamp her hand with the dreaded scarlet letter that tells the bartender not to serve her. Skye is told that if she drinks they will kick her out. You tell her you thought one of the benefits of being middle aged was that you didn’t have to worry about getting busted for underage drinking. But you would be wrong—because the bouncers do indeed watch your friend and she does indeed have a drink and she does indeed get kicked out. She takes the keys to Juan’s car to drive home to get her ID at her house in the suburbs. You shake your head and wonder why club management isn’t more concerned with the 19 year olds there that might be trying to sneak a drink, but whatever. You’re there to enjoy the music, right? You say a silent little prayer of thanks that you remembered your ID.

The opening act is the Freelance Whales, which you like very much, though you quickly realize they take themselves way too seriously…saying things like “You get us,” and “The energy we’re feeling tonight is what we’re going to take with us on the road.” Derrick, Juan, and you do a lot of eye rolling and fake barfing into your drinks. But they sound good and the drinks are good and it’s a Sunday night and you’re not at home doing laundry and making the kids’ lunches, so the fact that the Freelance Whales insist upon themselves is okay. You’re going to let it slide.

Then the Shout Out Louds take the stage and your heart does a few teenage flips.

This is the first show of their North American tour and for some reason that seems to matter. You saw this band three years ago at this same club and have sworn your undying devotion to them ever since. Never mind that the new album isn’t quite as good as their older stuff. It’s good enough and they’re great live and you’ve totally got a thing for the lead singer, which is sad because you’d think you would reach an age where you stopped having crushes on guys in bands from Sweden you don’t know and will never meet. But you haven’t reached that age yet.

Juan observes that the guy working the fog machine seems very excited about that fact, enveloping the stage in enough mist to make you think a miniature Stonehenge will descend from the rafters.

But, my god, the band is good. Great, really. Even the new songs that you don’t like that much sound amazingly good and you don’t even try to wipe the dopey grin stretching ear to ear off your face.

During the encore, Skye returns—ID in hand. She’s missed almost the whole act, but that’s okay. The music doesn’t matter to her as much as the very fact that she’s out and having fun. She and Juan head to the front of the stage to get a copy of the set list. Juan has tried to do this at the last three shows we’ve attended and failed (you can read about one of those times here), but this time, he emerges victorious…holding the set list above his head like a conquering hero returning to the homeland.

And some Sunday nights, after the concert you go down the street to the bar (past the gay sports bar that says under its name: “Join our team”) and find a booth and sit and drink and talk and drink and talk and drink.

And you’re starting to realize that tomorrow is going to be awful. Really, really awful. But that’s okay, because right now it’s totally worth it. And you’ve had just enough to drink to make you think you’re really funny and interesting so you strike up conversations with the bartender and a guy sitting at the bar who tells you his name is Ever and you believe him. You talk about music because what else would you have to talk to about with this guy? Ever is 25. And he thinks your taste in music sucks.

Around one o’clock you and your friends decide that you should probably go home. So you walk to the parking lot and find a chain across it, but the parking attendant is still there, thankfully. He sees Skye and gives her all sorts of crap about how she was supposed to come back over an hour ago and Skye swears he never said that. Poor Skye is having a tough night. But no matter, he lets you have the car—a minivan, because that’s what happens—and you fall asleep in the backseat on the drive back to the suburbs.

Some Sunday nights you stop at a McDonald’s drive thru at 1:30 in the morning and have never been so happy for Chicken McNuggets and a Diet Coke in your life.

Some Sunday nights you fall into bed at two in the morning cursing your lack of self-control and hoping somehow the morning doesn’t ever come. But it does. In five short hours. And you wake up and shower and eat breakfast and take the kids to school and sit down at your desk to work and set your expectations for the day very, very low. And you’re surprised when you manage to write a blog post, even if it’s a crappy one. Because that’s just how it’s going to be today. Some Mondays are like that.

I noticed while I was washing my hands that the toilet paper roll wasn’t on the toilet paper holder. The empty cardboard roll was still there instead, stark in its nakedness. And I realized that this was the case in every bathroom in the house: all of the new rolls of toilet paper sat perched on the skeleton of the last roll. I had a sudden urge to go through the house and correct this—to discard the old and put the new in their proper place. Because it’s not about just the toilet paper. (It’s never about just the toilet paper, is it?) It’s this life that so often feels like it’s flying faster than I can manage it…

Today I ordered new underwear for the kids (and, yes, I ordered it because I refuse to go to the mall unless under the threat of death—so the $5 shipping is absolutely worth it) and I asked Noah if he wanted the kind with patterns and pictures or plain white. “Plain white,” he said.

He’s seven, and he wants plain white underwear.

At that moment I wanted to freeze time and tell him he couldn’t grow up anymore. I, who have dreamed of my children’s eighteenth birthdays since the day they were born, wanted to stop the clock and maybe even turn it back a few clicks to a time when Noah would have wanted trains or cars or aliens or footballs on his underwear.

But I can’t, of course. Every parent wants to do this at some point in their children’s lives. It’s the occupational hazard of being a parent, I suppose…the knowledge that these small creatures will keep growing and slowly shed the accoutrements of childhood. We know that it’s just a matter of time before we ask them if they want to snuggle on the couch and are met with eye rolls and a shudder that starts at their earlobes and ripples down to their toes. Babies grow up. Old people die. It is the same as it ever was.

I can’t change that.

But I can change the toilet paper rolls. So I do. One by one, I go to each bathroom and slide the cardboard tube off its plastic spring-loaded cylinder and replace it with the new roll. It’s a mediation of sorts and I’m ashamed by how satisfying it feels. And after I’m done, I go to my office and I make a list of all the things I need to do this week. And I pay bills. And I answer emails. And I file paperwork.

And for a fleeting moment I believe that I’m in control of it all. I’m holding my finger on the second hand of the clock and daring it to tell me otherwise.

During a dinner party with friends a couple weeks ago, a conversation ensued about whether Dave (husband) thinks I’m the funniest person he knows.

This was a set up. Or rather, a distraction from the issue at hand…which was that I made the mistake of saying in front of our friends that I thought Dave was one of the top five funniest people I know.

Top five.

Seems like that should be good enough for most people, but not Dave…who rightly observed, “Top FIVE?! That’s not even a bronze medal!”

To which I replied, “How do you know? Maybe you’re in second place.”

“Because,” he said, “then you would’ve said I was one of the top two funniest people you know. If you say ‘top five,’ you’re implying fifth.”

To tell you the truth, I don’t know why I said this. I’ve proclaimed many times over the course of our almost 14 years of marriage that Dave is the funniest person I know—because he is. And, yet, that night, for some reason I still don’t fully understand (but am blaming on the copious wine), I decided to demote him.

When I could feel the flames licking my feet, I decided to turn the question around. “Well, what about me? Am I the funniest woman you know?”

“Yes,” Dave replied, without even stuttering.

Crap. “Okay,” I said, trying to gain at least some semblance of ground, “but am I the funniest person you know?”

Pause.

Dave stammered for a moment and then managed to sputter out, “You’re in the top five.”

“Ha!” I said victoriously.

While Dave and I were arguing, much to the delight of our dinner guests, our friend Juan leaned over to Derrick and said, “But I thought Laura was a dude.’”

This elicited howls of laughter from the group, particularly from Derrick, who I think nearly choked on his steak.

So this is an ongoing joke among pretty much all of my friends—particularly the guys: that I’m really a man. The reasons for this, from what I can gather, are the following:

1. I have a very crude sense of humor. Much like a 12-year-old boy, jokes involving bodily functions and “that’s what she said” make me laugh. Every.single.time.


2. I don’t like most stereotypically “girlie” things…spa days, shopping, The Bachelor.


3. My wardrobe consists of jeans. And T-shirts. And more jeans.

I’ve been this way most of my life—and the “I thought Laura was a dude” jokes have followed me since high school.

I’ve often wondered why this is. I mean, I’m not the only woman with the qualities listed above. I know plenty of women who are just as crude, who don’t like shopping, and who wear jeans—yet are not teased constantly about being a guy. It’s enough to give a girl (?) a complex.

But, okay, I don’t mind. Really. I think it’s funny and I actively play into it. What does bother me is how frequently I feel like I’m more man than woman…that I might have two X chromosomes, but my second X leans heavily toward the Y.

Before you start worrying that this blog is going to be about my pending sex change operation, let me put your mind at ease. I don’t feel that conflicted. I am very much a woman. It just sometimes bothers me that I can so much more easily relate to (stereo)typical male feelings, including:

1. A reluctance to have children: As many of you know, I really struggled with the decision of whether to have kids. Dave absolutely wanted them; I wasn’t so sure. Although I know in theory there are women who share my experience, I don’t know any of them. Among my couple friends who have kids, either both wanted them, or the wife wanted them more. This might be because women are more likely to have the final say in this matter—so for those women who were, like me, in the maybe-to-no camp, the “no” prevailed and they are now childless. I’m not sure. But it bothers me that more often than not, when I hear couples having the Great Children Debate, the father-to-be is the more hesitant one—and I more closely identify with him.

2. A disinterest in most things domestic: I don’t really care what we eat for dinner or whether you put your feet on the coffee table. I advocate putting all clothes in one load in the washer under the pretense that it saves water and electricity, but really it’s just because I’m lazy. Beyond a very basic desire for things to look nice (decent art on the walls, attractive furniture) and a strong tendency toward OCD-like tidiness (not cleanliness—I can tolerate the balls of dog hair rolling across our hardwood floors like tumbleweeds in the desert; but I can’t tolerate stacks of paper on the table), I don’t care what the house looks like.

3. An affinity for sophomoric comedy—mostly cartoon-based, like The Family Guy. I don’t think I need to say any more than that.

I’ve wondered more than once if someone were to describe me to a stranger without identifying me as male or female, would they think I was a man or a woman? I suspect the former.

While this frequently makes me feel like a freak of nature, I have to remind myself that it’s actually a healthier way to be. I read once that the more androgynous a person is, the happier they are. It seems that when we’re able to shrug off traditional gender roles, we free ourselves up to become more complete human beings—ones who are governed by our own needs and desires, and not by the vagaries of culture.

I often think of this with my own children, when I discourage them from getting sucked into the “boys do this” and “girls do that” mode of thinking that predominates the early years. And I’m proud that I can be a living, breathing example of how people don’t fall into neatly defined categories. Because few people do. The fact is, most everyone I know—both women and men—cross gender boundaries: I know men who love romantic comedies and cooking, and women who love football and Howard Stern. I know men who define themselves first and foremost as fathers, and women for whom their careers are paramount. I know women whose sex drives eclipse their husbands and men who wish their wives would cuddle more.

So while I might share more traits with men than the average woman, I take comfort in knowing that pretty much everyone falls somewhere along what is a very long and messy continuum. And we’re a much more interesting species because of it.

But all that being said, I’m not willing to give up my womanhood just yet.

This past weekend I volunteered at the Fun Fair at my kids’ school and was able to talk my neighbor R.J. into attending for a while (a victory given he hates crowds and things with the word “fun” in them). My volunteer shift was spent in the beanbag toss room, where I handed tokens to kids who successfully tossed said beanbags into three baskets. The other volunteer was a man who said to one of the children who won, “The lady over there has a token for you.”

When R.J. heard this, he burst out laughing. “Lady?” he mouthed to me.

Yes, lady. Maybe I’m not such a dude after all.

My homesickness always hits in the spring—which is strange because spring is actually New Mexico’s worst season. The only season, in fact, that pales in comparison to the mid-Atlantic’s. Spring in New Mexico brings winds that whip sand into your eyes and ears and hair. It is sometimes cold, sometimes hot, sometimes wet with snow or rain, sometimes impossibly dry—all in the space of 24 hours. Spring may be known as an unpredictable season the world over, but in New Mexico, spring is beyond unpredictable. It is schizophrenic.

Yet without fail, since leaving New Mexico six-plus years ago, spring is when I begin to feel the dull ache deep in my chest, a longing for home so much it hurts. I suspect my friends are beginning to avoid me this time of year because they know where the conversation will inevitably turn. I’m convinced that if I explain it right—if I just tell one more story just so—they’ll understand why I will never feel at home here in suburban Washington. Home will always be 1,902 miles away in Chimayó, a remote village in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo mountains with a population of 2,000, where Dave and I lived for five-and-a-half years.

Like other rural communities, springtime in Chimayó means the resurrection of everything dormant. It is when fields that have lain fallow during the winter are tilled;  when apple blossoms begin to peak through their cocoons; when the thin reeds of grass paint the desert floor sage. But, more than all this, it is when the acequias are cleaned.

The acequias are an elaborate system of ditches that pull water off tributaries of the Rio Grande to irrigate the farmland. First dug by Spaniards who settled the area in the 1600s, the acequias make farming in an otherwise arid landscape possible. But in order for them to work effectively, the sediment and rocks and tree branches that gather in them over the winter must be cleared.

So each spring, every able-bodied man who lives on property with water rights is expected to take part in the ditch cleaning, or pay someone else to do it. It is a full day of back-breaking labor—literally digging ditches beginning at eight in the morning and ending no earlier than five. It’s a hell of a way to spend a Saturday. Sadly, employment opportunities in Chimayó are limited, so it’s easy enough to find someone to do the work for you…at a cost of just $30—less than $5 per hour. Every white person we knew in Chimayó paid someone to do it.

So imagine my surprise our first spring in Chimayó, when Dave told me he was going to do the ditch cleaning himself.

“Are you insane?” I asked.

I didn’t doubt Dave’s physical ability to dig ditches for eight to nine hours. He’s always been very athletic and strong and I knew his body could handle it. But I was less confident his body could handle the pummeling I felt certain he would get from his fellow ditch diggers. The fact is, Chimayó has a very rough element. It holds the title of the city (for lack of a better word) with the highest number of drug overdoses per capita in the nation. Not surprisingly, crime is a real issue. Murder is a too frequent headline in a newspaper that boasts a readership of just hundreds. I imagined Dave, in all his whiteness (and Dave is very white…white-blond hair, fair skin) showing up at the ditch digging with a bunch of ex-cons psyched for the opportunity to earn $30 to buy their next hit of heroin.

Now I realize I’m stereotyping. Many people who participate in the ditch cleaning are surely fine, upstanding citizens who are upholding a centuries-old family tradition of participating in the community event. But I knew plenty of the scarier part of the population would be there, too. At the very least, Dave would be an outsider, and I worried what that would mean for him.

The morning of the ditch cleaning, he readied himself. He put on his well-worn Carhart overalls and work boots, which, thank God, at least made clear that he was used to working outside. Then he filled his Camelbak (a backpack with a bladder in it and tube that runs over the shoulder) with water and ice cubes. Next came the sunscreen, which he applied like spackle. Finally, he found his Epi-Pen and inhaler (bad allergies) and put them in the pocket of his Gortex raincoat.

I watched this the way a wife watches her husband packing his rucksack before he ships off to war.

Dave smiled and said, “I’m sure every man in Chimayó is doing the exact same thing right now.”

***

We drove towards the place where the ditch cleaning would start. I say “towards the place” because we actually had no idea where it started. The only communication we’d seen was a hand-written flyer posted on the bulletin board of the post office that said (in Spanish): “Ditch cleaning. Rincon de los Trujillos” and the date. Dave asked our neighbor Seferino where he should go. He told Dave it started in Cordova—a village about five miles up the highway from Chimayó—but he couldn’t tell him where exactly. “Just drive up the road and you’ll find it,” he said.

So I drove Dave “up the road” that leads through Cordova. Sure enough, after a few miles, we saw two men and a boy whom I guessed was about nine years old walking with shovels in their hands.

We pulled over and asked if they were headed to the ditch cleaning. When they told us yes, we offered them a ride if they’d show us where it was.

“I won’t say no to that!” said the man I assumed was the grandfather.

They piled into the car and soon I heard the unmistakable hiss of a can popping open, followed by the smell of beer. It wasn’t even eight in the morning.

“Breakfast of champions, bro!” one of the men exclaimed as he knocked back a Budweiser in a matter of seconds. “Want one?” he asked Dave.

“No, that’s okay, I had oatmeal,” Dave said.

They all laughed.

These guys didn’t worry me. They seemed harmless. So, they were drinkers? Drinking was the past-time of choice in Chimayó and, although it was certainly the cause of a number of social ills, it didn’t bother me much. I guess when you live in a place where the community health center hosts a mobile needle exchange at the bottom of your street every week, a little drinking doesn’t seem so bad.

I drove them as far as I could, until the road started getting too narrow and too rough for our 1984 Nissan Sentra. I stopped and they disembarked. Dave closed the door and leaned in the window. “I love you,” he said. “I’ll see you at some point, I guess.”

“Okay,” I said tentatively. “Don’t get killed.”

***

Dave survived. And he survived the following three years, as well. I have no doubt his willingness to participate in the ditch cleaning instead of paying someone with dark skin to do it earned him a respect in the community we otherwise never would have had.

But our final year in Chimayó, he didn’t go. Noah had just been born and we were too frazzled and sleep deprived to imagine it: I couldn’t imagine surviving a full nine hours alone with a baby, and Dave couldn’t imagine mustering enough energy to make it through a day of hard labor. So he paid someone $30 to do it for him. I’m not sure Dave has ever felt so ashamed to pay someone for a service in his life.

The ditch cleaning always ended right in front of our property. That afternoon, our last spring in New Mexico, we could hear the rhythmic ping of metal shovels hitting rocks drawing closer and closer. Eventually, we looked out the window and saw the group of more than 30 men standing waist-high in the ditch that bordered our property; their arms and shoulders rising and falling in time.

We didn’t know then that it was the last time we’d see it. We didn’t know that in a few days, Dave would get a call offering him a job in Washington, and that, in less than six months, we would be selling our house and property and moving to northern Virginia. We didn’t know that we would leave behind a rural life that bows to the will of the seasons for an urban life that, thanks to concrete and gutters and asphalt, gamely ignores them. Water now comes from a hose or faucet—not a ditch that has seen the turn of a thousand shovels. And whenever I think of that, I wonder why a life that has been made so much easier and more comfortable by modernization feels so much harder and more difficult?

I’ve had it. I’m actually surprised I made it this long—that I was able to endure the seemingly endless days that bled into one another like some sort of Jean-Jacques Rousseau film. (Okay, in truth, I’ve never watched a Rousseau film. I actually have no idea who he is. I googled “French absurdist filmmakers” and his was the first name that popped up…although he’s really Belgian. But this alone should give you an idea of my state of mind lately.)

I’m of course talking about the snow. In case you hadn’t heard, the east coast was walloped last week with two back-to-back storms that resulted in the shut down of the federal government for almost an entire week. The kids have missed seven straight days of school (today, although a holiday, was supposed to be a snow make-up day, but it was—whadayaknow—canceled due to—wait for it—snow!). If you count the two weekends we’ve been snowed in, the children have been home for 11 straight days.

I think those of you who read this blog regularly know a few things about me by now:

1) I like horses.
2) I like to sleep.
3) I have a very low tolerance for spending lots and lots of time with my kids.

And I have to qualify #3 because that’s really about me, not my kids. I need a lot of alone time to function in the world. There’s really no one I can spend that much time with without growing tired of them. And really, my kids are great and actually very low maintenance. As I write this, they’re downstairs playing nicely together. Oh wait…no, they’re not…I just heard the television.

Me: “Kids, who told you that you were allowed to watch television?”

Silence.

Me: “Since when can you watch TV without permission?”

I was answered with a chorus of very unconvincing “sorries.”

Sigh.

They know I’m weak. Like a lion watching the lone antelope limping far behind the herd, the kids know I can’t hold out much longer. Any semblance of routine and discipline I’ve worked hard these six years to establish is one juice box and a snack-pack of Hershey kisses away from crumbling. At this point, I’d let the children draw on the walls and set the living room couch on fire if it means I get fifteen minutes of uninterrupted quiet.

So, yes, the snow. I actually did quite well for the first week of it. There’s no getting around the fact that the snow is beautiful. When I woke up in the morning, I would look out the window ready to grouse and grumble, but then be so taken by the pure white landscape filling the window frame that I couldn’t help but whisper—usually to the dogs—“Isn’t it beautiful?”

And the fact that we had so much snow meant no cars were out, which meant I could walk the dogs all over the neighborhood down the center of the street. The night the last storm hit, I took the dogs out around nine o’clock. The snow was falling in giant, pancake-like flakes. No one was out but us. It was absolutely silent. I could have walked forever.

Then, of course, there’s the fact that the kids love the snow. Our neighbors built the equivalent of a skeleton track in their front yard, and every day the kids would trek down the street with their sleds in tow and spend hours zipping down it like they were training for the Olympics.

And because the government was closed, Dave was home from work for the week. So we’ve had FAMILY TIME like nobody’s business. We played cards. We baked. We cooked. We watched movies together and ate popcorn. We shoveled snow. We drank hot chocolate. Seriously, Norman Rockwell couldn’t have painted a better scene—except for the parts where Noah would serenade us with arm-fart covers of “Happy Birthday” and “Here Comes Santa Claus.”

For the most part, I’ve enjoyed it. I commented to Dave how rare it is to have time with the kids where we’re forced to do nothing. Even on vacation, we’re usually running from one place to the next. But being snowed-in, running wasn’t an option. Our lives, typically scheduled to within an inch of our lives, all of a sudden had no boundaries. We didn’t have to be anywhere or do anything. No Tae Kwon Do. No Ballet. No horses. No buying snacks for the Valentine’s Day party at school. No homework. Aside from the little bit of work Dave and I were able to squeeze in from time to time, we did nothing for over a week.

But we all knew I couldn’t enjoy it forever. A refrain throughout Dave’s and my life together has been, “What fun is vacation when you don’t have anything to compare it to?” Whenever we’ve had stretches of unemployment or slogged through too-long, too-boring vacations, we’ve said how important it is to have the routine—and work—of normal life from which to take a break. Otherwise, it’s not a break. It’s Groundhog Day.

And that’s what these snow days have become. Nothing distinguishes one day from the next. Thursday night as we were going to bed, I said to Dave, “I can’t believe tomorrow is going to be exactly the same as today, and exactly the same as the day before that. When is it going to end?” Even the dogs have had it. Our young dog Clara, who spent the better part of the first five days of snow bounding through it like a sled dog (in fact, I even bought her a harness and hooked the kids’ sled to it), now stands on the steps leading out our back door with a kind of bewildered “not-this-again” look on her face.



(Our older dog, Barrabas, has been unimpressed since day one.) They keep waiting for me to put on my riding boots and load them in the car to drive to the barn, but that hasn’t happened in ten days because the roads to the barn have been impassable as well.

In a perfect summation of what this snow has done to our spirits, my neighbor Cy sent an email the other night: “I’ve even lost the will to drink.” To which my friend Lee Ann replied, “I haven’t lost the will. We’ve just run out.”

I was ready to take the dogs for a long walk and never return.

Luckily, our friends Heather and Vince came for a visit from Philadelphia this weekend, reminding us that life existed beyond our single, half-mile block. It was like Noah (of the Bible, not my son) seeing the dove with the olive branch in its beak for the first time that signaled to him the floodwaters had receded. The end of the snow tunnel was, however dimly, in sight.

We got a babysitter Saturday night and went to the city with a group of friends for dinner and then to a bar to watch a band. I drank and danced and reveled in the fact that I wasn’t at home watching Ella Enchanted and eating my bodyweight in popcorn yet again.

…and then came the email yesterday afternoon from the school district telling us schools would be closed Monday…and the weather report predicting another snowfall, albeit lighter, tonight. And with all this went my sanity and any hope that life will ever return to normal. The dove with the olive branch in its beak just took a nosedive into a snow bank. But, alas, I still have my will to drink.

Sunday, January 31, 2010, Orlando, Fla. – I fear I’m becoming a curmudgeon. Or maybe I’ve always been a curmudgeon and am just now realizing it. I’m not sure.

I’m writing this from DisneyWorld. The Happiest Place on Earth. Where You Wish Upon a Star and Dreams Come True. Where Magic Happens. I’m here with Dave and the kids (I hope that goes without saying) and my parents, who very generously bankrolled this trip. It’s our fourth and final night here and, I have to say, we’ve had a really great time. We’ve ridden the rides. We’ve seen the shows. We’ve eaten cotton candy. (Okay, I’ve eaten cotton candy.) We got to enjoy 70 degrees and sun while it as 20 degrees and snowing in DC. All in all, a really great trip.

And yet, when it comes down to it, I don’t like it. I don’t like Disney.

I’m sure writing that sentence just put me on a terrorist watch list somewhere. After all, how un-American can I be? That’s like saying I don’t like football or beer or apple pie (incidentally, I don’t really like those things either). But the truth is, something about Disney gives me the creeps…something beyond the ubiquitous animatronics and mouse ears. It’s the singularity of it all—both commercially (Disney owns virtually all of Orlando) and metaphorically. As metaphor, Disney represents the small world. The belief that we’re all ultimately the same. One nation (nay—one world) united under Mickey. It feels suspiciously like groupthink. Walking around DisneyWorld, I feel like the only one who hasn’t drank the Kool-Aid and that it’s only a matter of time before I’m found out and put in the fake stocks in Frontierland for the rest of my life.

DisneyWorld to me feels eerily similar to the 1960s British TV series “The Prisoner,” of which my high school boyfriend was a huge fan. It only ran for 17 episodes but, as luck would have it, Blockbuster Video carried every single one. So on Friday night, my boyfriend and I would rent them and go back to his apartment (although he was in high school, he lived alone in his own apartment—my parents were thrilled about this fact) to watch it. The series chronicled the life of a British secret agent who resigns from service only to wake up and find himself held captive in an unknown village on an unknown coast, where everyone is happy and pleasant and the weather is always sunny and 75 degrees. No one in the village has names, just numbers (our hero is “Number Six”). Number One is the leader, but no one has seen him (her?) or knows who it is. Everyone in the village seems content with their happy, perfect little life, and Number Six distrusts all of it.

Needless to say, it was the perfect TV show for a couple of high school kids who lived in a picture-perfect suburb of Houston and fancied themselves rebels who raged against the machine on a daily basis. As it turns out, it was also a business model for DisneyWorld (which, suspiciously, opened just three years after the finale of “The Prisoner.”) In Disney, all the little girls are referred to “princesses” (not quite numbers, but close). All cast members (not employees, but “cast members”) smile pretty much constantly. “Dreams come true” is the inescapable theme of everything—every song, every ride, every show, every piece of merchandise…even sections of the park closed for renovation are plastered with signs that say “dream builders.”

Then there’s just the fact that everything is a façade. The buildings aren’t real. Most of the plants are fake. Even the “mud” that the safari trucks drive through in Animal Kingdom (where, to Disney’s credit, the animals are real) is actually plastic molded to look like mud.

Now I realize this is the whole point of a theme park. It’s intended to be a world of pretend into which you escape for a brief period of time. You shouldn’t go there expecting reality. If you want to go on a real safari, take a trip to Kenya, right? I get that. And I have to say, as a patron, I appreciate that the parks are well run and well maintained and the staff is courteous and helpful. But I just can’t lose myself in the fantasy. I don’t trust it. Instead, I spend my time walking around the park looking for glimpses of reality. I try to glance through open doors that say “cast members only” to see if I can spot the scaffolding propping up the saloon wall, or Snow White taking a smoke break, or, hell, even the bathroom attendant scowling and muttering under her breath, “Damn tourists.”

I was talking to my parents about this, and remembering how, as a child, I never liked books or movies that were set in fantasy worlds. I loathed Wizard of Oz and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The book James and the Giant Peach freaked me out. Even now, I rarely read or watch anything that would qualify as sci-fi (thus why I have no desire to see Avatar and haven’t read any of the Twilight series). My dad said he’s the same way. He tried to read the Harry Potter books but couldn’t because the whole time he kept thinking, “If they have all this magic, why don’t they just use it to stop the villain?”

My mom shook her head. “But if that’s your approach to life, you never enjoy anything. If you’re always skeptical, you can’t lose yourself in a book or movie.”

Both my dad and I protested that we could, but only if the book or movie had an element of realism.

Yet I can’t help but wonder if my mom is right. I’ve often wished I could suspend disbelief long enough to read and enjoy a really cheesy romance novel, or spend three hours watching a self-indulgent James Cameron film, or believe in God. Am I missing out by being so hell-bent on what’s real?

I once read about how, when Captain Cook’s ships first arrived off the coast of Australia in the 1700s, the aborigines didn’t see them. Or, rather, they could see them, but they couldn’t perceive them. Because they had never seen these huge sailing ships before, their minds were unable to create an image of them. It wasn’t until they saw the rippling wake of the ships on the water that they could then perceive what they were.

The veracity of this story is widely debated. New Agers like to use it as proof that we are, indeed, surrounded by all sorts of things—spirits, energies, auras—that most people don’t have the mental vocabulary to see. Scientists say the story is apocryphal and that the mind has no problem perceiving things it doesn’t understand.

While I want to believe the New Agers are right, I tend to side with the scientists. It’s kind of sad. I’ve always loved Hamlet’s words to Horatio, who doubts the events that are transpiring: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,/Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” But even if I love the sentiment, God knows (if He exists) that I don’t live it.

And what’s worse, I’m passing this way-too-healthy dose of skepticism on to my children. Noah lost his first tooth a couple months ago, and already he doubts the existence of the tooth fairy. He’s not too sure about this whole Santa thing, either. Gwyneth told Dave today that the only princess she likes is Pocahantas “because she was a real person; the others are made up.” Dave blamed this on his genetic contribution (his side of the family is lousy with scientists), but I know I’m responsible, too. Not just my genes (which are weighted heavily in favor of engineers), but my very outlook on life, which seems to be slowly sucking the magic and wonder of childhood out of my children.

Last night, we were at the Magic Kingdom for the fireworks. And I have to admit, it was, for lack of a better word, magical. We arrived just as the first firework made its arc through the air. Amazingly, we even managed to find our own private little spot from which to watch the display burst in all its pyrotechnic glory above Cinderella’s castle. For a few moments, I forgot that the castle was nothing more than plywood and plastic. I forgot that the music being piped through the loudspeakers wasn’t a live orchestra, and that the fireworks were specifically designed for Disney using a reduced-smoke chemical (which Dave informed us). For a few moments, I completely lost myself in the beauty of the show. I looked down at my kids and could see the wonder of childhood seemingly steeled against escape and locked deep within them…until about half-way through when Noah and Gwyneth turned to us and said, “Can we go now?”…reminding me that magic, even in its truest form, is always short-lived.

This isn’t a blog post. No, really, it’s not. It’s just a note to tell you I won’t be writing a blog today, and possibly not at all this week…or the next. The Time Gods apparently read my blog last week and decided I had way too much time on my hands. So they punished me by sending me to the racetrack on Thursday for 16 hours of research and interviews for an article I’m working on; and then sent me to the barn yesterday for 10 hours and today for eight hours for another article–all of which resulted in 75 pages of crappy handwritten notes that I need to transcribe. Now don’t get me wrong…I’m thrilled to have two paying jobs that require me to write about horses. But even I have my limits. Add to this an essay that I have to write to meet an end-of-week deadline and news on my arrival home tonight that Noah has a 103-degree fever…and we’re leaving town Thursday.

I know I will garner little sympathy from you, my gentle readers, given that I am simply getting what I deserve after tallying up my free time like a British monarch. But the downside of all this is that the blog gets neglected. And for that, you have my apologies.

I’ll be back–soon, I hope. But know that while I’m gone, I’m thinking of you. Totally.

I’m hopeless. I promise to post a blog every Sunday night or Monday morning to provide my faithful readers (don’t laugh) with some predictability. And yet I posted mid-week last week. And I didn’t post Sunday. And here I am posting mid-week again. No doubt I’ve created mass confusion in your respective lives. And for that, I apologize. But it’s the holidays, right? That gives me some leeway, doesn’t it?

I’ve been awake since 5 a.m. Eastern time, which is 3 a.m. Mountain time, the zone in which I now sit and type. And it is indeed Mountain time because I am, indeed, in the mountains. The rocky ones, to be exact. We arrived this morning and now I sit in a house in the middle of ski country (courtesy of Dave’s father, God bless him) and try to rally my sleep-deprived brain cells to write something interesting and worth reading.

It’s harder than you might think.

But before I begin, I have to get a little housekeeping out of the way: I promised my brother-in-law Dan (the elder of the three Lyons boys) that I would dedicate this blog to him because he’s kind and generous and got Dave and me a $100 gift certificate to a really nice wine vendor for Christmas, while Dave and I generously got him nothing. Zip. Zero. Zilch. He drops a Benjamin on us and we give him a hug. We are a whole new kind of asshole.

So, like a kindergartener, I’m making him a gift. And because the only skill I have is writing, he gets a blog. Just for him.

But it’s not going to really be about him. This isn’t DanTalks.com after all. But it’s inspired by him. Because what I’d like to write about is how much I suck at giving gifts.

If you are my friend, you know this: I never give gifts. Well, almost never. Occasionally, inspiration strikes. For instance, recently my friend “Lee Ann” celebrated her 40^th birthday. You might recall from At the Crack of Dong that Lee Ann is the one who thought my dawn simulator was actually a dong simulator. So for her birthday, I made a special weeknight trip to The Pleasure Place in Georgetown, where I bought her a vibrator. Not just any vibrator, but a huge, flesh-colored, vein-mapped dildo. I strode confidently into the store, browsed the wall of fake phalluses, made my selection, and took it to the counter, where the friendly gay cashier took it out of the package and slipped batteries into it, then asked me to hold it. They do this because (and you’ll be glad to know this if you’re in the market for a vibrator) you can’t return them. So I held onto it and he turned it on and it did, indeed, vibrate. (When I recounted this story to Dave, he asked me if I told the cashier it was a gag gift for a friend. “No,” I replied, “because no one ever believes anyone who says it’s a gag gift for a friend.”) Then he told me as he was putting it back in the package to wash it with antibacterial soap after using it. I’m not sure why, but this spurred me to ask him if it was submersible. (Dave: “You asked a follow-up question? Why? Are you planning to use it underwater?”) “No,” the cashier told me, “it’s not submersible. Just wash the shaft to the base.”

“Okay,” I told him. Glad we were square on that point.

I walked out of the store with my $20 dong simulator that was too big to fit in my purse and headed to CVS to buy the second part of the gift: a battery-operated Christmas candle to duct-tape to the dildo—thus making it a combo dong/dawn simulator. I returned home and sat on the couch, putting the gift together, giggling the whole time. Dave stared at me a little suspiciously and then said finally, “I’ve never seen you put this much effort into a gift in your life.”

He’s right. Because I don’t give gifts. It’s not a conscious choice. I seem to have a mental block when it comes to gift giving. Part of it is just because I’m not a shopper. I spend literally no time in stores outside of the grocery store and, occasionally, Target. So I don’t have the opportunity to see things and think, “So-and-so would love this!”

But is that really a good enough excuse? Shouldn’t I at least make an effort?

This Christmas Eve, Dave and I were wrapping gifts and congratulating ourselves on what a great job we’d done getting gifts for our parents and the kids. And I realized at that moment that I didn’t get Dave a gift. Nothing. Not even a card.

“Crap, Dave,” I said to him. “I didn’t get you a gift.”

“That’s okay,” he said. “We said no gifts this year.”

“But you got me one, didn’t you?”

Silence.

“Dave! That’s not fair! We said no gifts and you got me one.”

“No, that’s not true. Technically, I didn’t get you a gift…”

“Good.”

“…the kids got you a gift.”

“Dammit, Dave.”

My thoughtlessness extends beyond gift giving. I don’t even remember to say things like “Merry Christmas” and “Happy New Year” or—worst of all—“Happy Birthday.” My best friend in the whole wide world who has been my best friend since college has a birthday the day after mine, and still, I forget. Luckily, she forgets mine, too. We usually end up talking to each other a week later and one of us tells a story that starts, “Well, I went to dinner last week for my birthday,” and then the other says, “Oh God, I totally forgot. Happy birthday,” and the other says, “Yeah, you, too.” This is a big part of the reason we are best friends.

I’m not sure my other friends take it so well. And I don’t blame them. I make sure to let any serious friend know early in our relationship that I don’t remember birthdays and I suck at buying gifts. I make it clear that if they’re in this for the loot, they best keep moving. So my friends’ expectations are mercifully low. Snake-belly low. But I’m not sure low expectations are the best foundation for friendship.

Sometimes I’ve considered changing my ways. I tell myself that I could keep a calendar of birthdays and anniversaries. I could easily set up email reminders. It would require almost no effort at all. But I can’t bring myself to do it. It would just feel forced and insincere, like when John McCain smiles. When it comes down to it, being thoughtful just isn’t me.

So I try to be a good friend in other ways: I’m a good, non-judgmental listener. I don’t give my friends unsolicited advice. I love them, unequivocally, for who they are. I never say things like, “No matter how hard I try, I can’t seem to put on weight!” And, occasionally, I mention them in a blog. Like I’m mentioning Dan. Because that’s the kind of friend I am. I hope that’s enough. I’m banking on it.