I left my alone and away time in New York to meet my husband at my older son’s baseball spring training.
I left feeling like all my dreams had come true and my book was as good as published and motherhood was simple and problems were small.
This was all easy enough to think while it was up to New York. I’d made it there so contractually speaking, it followed: I could now make it anywhere.
I’d try Florida!
I landed in Orlando at a time that would allow for daylight driving because I’ve learned the hard way that my eyeballs are more decorative than operative past a certain hour now. When I arrive in unfamiliar places, and drive in weird rental cars and in directions I don’t understand on poorly lit highways, facing the glare of oncoming headlights, I might look to other motorists like I’m driving. But really I’m just sitting there pressing the gas and guessing.
So at the comfy, sunlit hour of 6pm, I drove the 45 minutes to the resort where my son was staying. His team had been divided into small groups and assigned to rows of prefab houses. Bumpy stucco exteriors, all with screened in pools to keep out mosquitos and alligators, all iterations of the same plan with only minor tweaks—an extra window here, a gable over the door there. A neighborhood in which you could most definitely go home to the wrong house.
I proved this by arriving and texting my son that I was there, when really I was only almost there, three driveways short of his. I backed out of the wrong place and as I pulled into the right place, the light blue door—his house’s lone differentiator— opened and there he stood, backlit in the doorway like a mirage.
Did he look different? Maybe? His hair was a little longer? Or possibly a little shorter? I couldn’t tell and I didn’t like that I couldn’t tell. One of the biggest adjustments to college kid parenting is not just the obvious: that your kid now lives elsewhere and/or far away; it’s that now when you do see your kid, you constantly see them out of context.
This is someone you have known in and out and around. You went eighteen years knowing what time they got up, if they took a shower in the morning or evening and for how long. Someone you were so used to seeing on certain couches, walking sleepily out of a blue bedroom, pulling into the driveway in the car with music so loud you’d think the windows were down. But they were not.
You are not used to your unshared spaces; you are not used to being guests to each other. You are not used to all these unfamiliar faces they now live amongst, people who now get all this time with them, the same time that while you were trying so hard to hold them to you, somehow slipped right through your fingers.
My son introduced me to the steady stream of players wandering in from other houses. I’d met some of his teammates before, but they all looked different out of uniform, without baseball hats on.
They had just eaten dinner, made by someone on the team. I love these early adult ecosystems where individuals contribute skills for the common good. In this particular ecosystem, though, there didn’t seem to be an individual with clean-up skills. There were plates everywhere, some dirty, some not because the table had seemingly been set for staging purposes—as if someone might walk in and think I could really eat here, I could really live here!
I opened the refrigerator. It was stocked with a shelf-size tray of ground beef and ~1,000 eggs. I suggested to my son that we go get some non-paleo items so off we went to a Florida grocery store, deeply out of context and very remote to my halcyon NYC days. Such a different state.
At the store, I watched my son wander aisles in search of things his teammates would eat, remembering who had allergies and who liked strawberries. I saw the beginnings of his friendship rubric, that in-depth knowledge born of living together 24/7, inputs you don’t even track because these college relationships are organic things. They’re born and they grow.
I dropped my son off with bags of food I knew wouldn’t last through one meal and did the dark driving to my hotel I’d tried to avoid. As I guesstimated distances and highway lines, I thought of the last time I had been in Florida, when I was newly engaged, and my to-be husband and I joined my entire extended family for my grandfather’s 80th birthday celebration. When I told my ~fiancé~ one night that we were going out to dinner at Olive Garden—and I probably said, “Fiancé, we are going out to dinner at Olive Garden” because early on, I couldn’t get enough of that term, a deep novelty, a final validation of all those years of dating and a wonderful testament to ultimatums—he said, in all earnestness, that that sounded really nice, and asked how dressed up he’d need to get. He had never heard of Olive Garden. And I guess taken at face value, those two nouns when coupled, are evocative enough, as if the flora-covered trellis in their branding might be exactly what you’d sit under while gorging yourself on unlimited breadsticks.
About 20 minutes later, I was driving down the streets of Winter Haven, another lovely noun pairing that could draw you in and fool you. In the dark, the town seemed deserted and a little tired and I wondered exactly what kind of winter this was a haven from; maybe the winter that’s coming in Game of Thrones?
I pulled into the parking lot of my hotel to see a man grilling behind the building at 10pm, as if he lived there in the hotel. Across the street was what looked to be the original McDonald’s. I felt comforted by familiar commerce, but jarred that it had a single golden arch, as if the invention of the double arches was still pending. What else was missing around here? Also, could I go missing around here? I’d hoped for warm air outdoor runs in Florida and now felt like I was in treadmill territory.
This was the opposite of New York’s safety in numbers. Winter Haven felt empty and because of it, a little creepy. I unloaded my giant bag from the trunk and nervously rolled it up to the hotel double doors which opened like a hungry little mouth to inhale me. As they clamped shut behind me, I realized I’d stepped into a simulation. The exterior had looked worn and weathered and plain, the only landscaping an otherworldly-colored gravel aligning the sidewalk.
But the interior was new and loved and loving: arrangements of cozy chairs, a long table with outlets and lamps, gleaming desk top computers for guest use. Like an exceedingly well-appointed space capsule, its own little world on a lunar scape.
I was greeted by a front desk attendant who had a clear goal of being the Best Front Desk Attendant in the World. She welcomed me as if I was arriving to the front door of her home and she’d been expecting me and was now so happy I’d made it. As she programmed my room keys, she told me about the free laundry and the little snack shop and the breakfast buffet and the 24 hour gym and the happy hour where they served free beer and apps nightly. She told me proudly that it was a nice time for residents to connect, that it was really fun. I smiled as she told me, knowing I probably wouldn’t go to a Staybridge Suites happy hour, but knowing I should look like I might.
I entered my room to find it had five pegs for hanging stuff, a regular-size fridge, a toaster and a laundry basket. I love when things are thoughtful and orderly like this. I love thinking of a planner brainstorming about what would make a residence hotel feel more residential, more designed for living.
A day later my husband arrived and I gave him an overview of the building and our room as if I was a realtor and he was in the market for an extended stay hotel. He wasn’t as excited about the toaster or the laundry basket, but he seemed happy for me that I could be as excited as I was about these things.
And I invited him to that night’s Staybridge Suites happy hour because I’d gone the night before and it had been fun.
I’d had an Epiphany of the Obvious in New York: if I wanted my book to get finished, I would have to be the one to finish it.
The realization both stunned me and gave me a renewed energy for writing. Every morning before my son’s games, I’d tell my husband I was going to My Office. I’d pack up my laptop, commute down in the elevator, go through the breakfast buffet, tripping over Disney-bound kids losing their minds over the small boxes of Froot Loops and begging for Sprite at 8am because it was free.
And then I’d stake out my perch at a high counter, plug everything in and write for more hours than I can ever manage in one sitting at home. There was something so conducive about the space, but I didn’t know exactly what it was. The harmless pop songs playing on loop? The ambient banter of vacationing young families and college baseball parents? The comforting and inspiring industry of my new friend Anita and the rest of the hotel staff who cleaned the lobby with relentless precision, dusting the curtains, wiping down already gleaming tables, sweeping floors that had given up their last crumbs hours before when the first housekeeper had come through?
Every morning, as the buffet closed, Anita would fill a giant ice water and bring it to me.
“You are going to grow roots in this lobby,” she’d say as she set it down. And we’d chat for a few minutes about how her shift was going, the clouds outside
One morning, I asked Anita if she could keep an eye on my station while I turned my laundry. As I loaded my-clothes-and-only-my-clothes into the dryer, I could see the BBQ area where that man had been grilling the night I arrived. I’d been concerned he’d been back there on some rogue Weber kettle, but now saw that there were two well-appointed outdoor kitchens with built-in gas grills flanking the pool area. I’d made a quick and wrong decision based on little information, a hallmark of so many quick and wrong decisions.
At game time my husband and I would drive to the field, as excited as those froot loopy kids going to Disney. When I was little, my grandfather listened to Red Sox games on a transistor radio as he trimmed hedges and gathered pine needles in his yard at the Cape. Heat bugs and the announcer would compete to see who could drone the longest and the loudest. It sounded so boring to my young ears, somehow worse than listening to nothing.
But that was a long time ago and well before someone I loved played the game. Now I do not think it’s boring. Now there are few things I’d rather do than watch a baseball game.
On the third day, my son’s games were canceled because of rain, and my husband and I, unpressured by Central Florida’s tourist offerings, did not much of anything. I wrote in the lobby. He answered his infinite emails in our room. We watched some March Madness on our nice suite sofa. We walked to the drug store and, as happens when we do mundane errands together, I saw a vision of us as retirees. Ah, so this is what we’ll do. This is how we’ll be.
Kids keep leaving our house (Q: can this be stopped?), and in the growing quiet but over the dull roar of my husband’s chewing, I’ve wondered: what will we do in all these years to come? What will we talk about without the swirl of kids and their activities and sports and lives keeping us engaged? Will we have to have lofty talks about God or politics? Will I have to find a way to be as mystified by the owls in our yard as he is?
Also: who are we after all this parenting? Because as cannot be helped or avoided, we went in as one thing and came out another. I picture the factory in the Lorax—we started as truffula trees— colorful and drunk at a bar in Newport, RI—got fed through complicated, gas-burping Parenting Machinery, and came out as…thneeds. And really: does anyone need these?
But a day like our day in Florida reminds me: we don’t need to talk about everything because we are excellent at talking about nothing. We can pass time quite enjoyably talking about countless things of no consequence—the bracket busters of the day, what it means when long shots win, a crack in the sidewalk. If it might rain.
So maybe the vision of two strolling retirees, with a bag of purchases and no rush to cross the street is a nice one. Except of course, when we are older, buying eye drops and Pepcid AC and God knows what else, my youngest will probably be with us, angling for a Hot Wheels car from the toy aisle or rearranging displays that have become disturbingly uncategorized.
And we will walk home slowly with that shopping bag but also with a tall young man. And we will be a collection of nouns that will look one way and mean something else.
On our fourth Florida night, at 5am east coast time, my phone started buzzing. Our fire alarm at home had gone off, and could not be shut off. Everyone was fine, but my younger son and daughter were sitting with our nanny and her two dogs in a car in the driveway waiting for the fire truck to arrive.
For years, the men of our local Engine 32 came to our house as regularly as the garbage truck. The crew used to blaze in, carrying black bags and an oxygen tank, knowing exactly which way to turn inside our door, running up the first three steps, turning to rush up the two next staircases, taking a quick left at the top to reach their reason, my youngest seizing on the plaid upholstered twin bed in his room.
Once they’d done their work, administered meds, inserted a nasal cannula into my son’s tiny nostrils, calmed his system again and for now, we’d ask the one guy about his son’s travel ball team. We’d ask the other guy how his vacation had been last week.
But now we don’t know the men of Engine 32. And they don’t know us or our house or where staircases lead. They know nothing of our former Emergency Career. None of them have met the long-limbed 14 year old looking non-emergent and typical in the backseat of the car. They don’t know he got too big for that plaid bed. They don’t know his life got so much bigger either.
I had worried about an emergency when I dared to leave home for so long. In fact, I had worried about this exactly: Engine 32 sirening to our house in the middle of the night while I was across the country, a scenario I could easily build based on my reams and reams of historical data. So I’d been right! But also wrong! And the next day I'd be tired, but I’d regard the night before as the best emergency we’ve ever had.
The morning we are leaving I search the lobby for Anita to say goodbye. She emerges from a back room right as I am about to give up. I give her a hug and a tip and tell her the truth: this has been the nicest place I’ve ever stayed.
We head to the field and watch the first game of a doubleheader before leaving for the airport. I hug my son goodbye between games, trying to squeeze out enough embrace to last for many weeks, a fix before separating, before sending him back into the dugout, off to keep leading his new life in his new contexts.
We arrive back in Northern California and I remember that my book isn’t done and whether or not I’ll make it here or anywhere is still up to me, not a city.
I make some dinners, do some laundry, apply some bandaids, pack some lunches and remember some things about motherhood. Problems that had seemed distant and contained while I was away now felt proximate. And expanding, like those little animal-shaped sponges my kids used to get as birthday party favors. The kind you put in water and then powerlessly watch grow into a larger sponge, and honestly why was that ever fun?
I’d arrived home with the silly expectation that despite my dynamic ten days, home had been static, as if teens are any different than New York City. As if they don’t also build and rebuild all night long. As if their skylines don’t shift daily, a sturdy-seeming building coming down, an unexpectedly beautiful one with a funky floor plan going up.
My high schooler wants to know if we can host pre-prom, and probably after prom too, and can she also have some people over Saturday, and since she has to miss her older sister’s college graduation because of her finals, can she just stay home alone with some friends?
My brain jams like Manhattan gridlock.
The next morning, equipped with sharp weekend-detecting senses, my youngest gets up two hours earlier than he would on a school day.
He walks heavy-footed into our room.
“Good morning, Jen the Mommy! Good morning, Vic the Daddy!” We are not so energetic. My husband adjusts his weighted eye mask and groans.
I lift the covers so my son can climb in and I hope, based on nothing in his history, that he’ll lie still and just snuggle. Maybe even go back to sleep. But he’s no longer a little kid snuggle size; in so many breathtaking ways, he takes up more space than I ever thought he would.
He fidgets, starts with too-loud-for-the-hour knock-knocks, explores the land of my bedside table, fingers sailing, disrupting the topography, looking for incredible discoveries he can lay his hands on and claim as his own.
“What is this?” He picks up the worry doll I have had on a tray by my bedside for the past four years. I got it at a dinner at a Mexican restaurant when I was dropping my oldest off for her freshman year of college. It was our last dinner together before I’d fly west and she’d stay east—a set up that felt inconceivable at the time. Weren’t our hearts syncopated? How would they keep the beat 3,000 miles apart? When the server brought us the check, as if she knew the goodbye we were facing, there were two little dolls on the tray, one to live with me and one to live with my daughter.
I have never used this doll according to the directions. I don’t tell it all my worries. It looks too small. I don’t think it could handle half of what I could tell it. But it sits where it sits so I can see it when I wake up and when I go to sleep, reminding me my daughter’s out there eastward. That our hearts have kept beating.
My son turns it in his hands as I explain how it works, that if you tell it your worries before bed, they can be gone by morning. If he thinks this sounds incredulous, he doesn’t let on.
“Can you tell it a worry?” he holds it up close range to my face so I can look the doll dead in the eyes.
My mind flips through my Dewey Decimal system of worries, searching for a broad subject with an innocuous sub-section.
Aha: “I’m worried about how early you got up today.”
It sounds small, harmless. It sounds like I’m joking, but I’m not. I do worry about his amount of sleep. I do worry when he gets too little of it. I do worry a deficit will tip his seizure scales. I don’t let on but this is filed in the Big Worry category.
He turns the doll back to his face to be sure she has listened.
“Do you want to tell it a worry?” I ask him.
“No…” now he’s holding the doll very close to his own nose, to see if she has a nose. He’s picking at tiny threads hanging from the tiny skirt that the tiny doll is wearing. “No. I don’t want to,” he places her back on the tray, settling her and it, “I don’t have any.”
An untold facility.
And I am together.
And I am home.
Jen.
A few notes:
This newsletter is not sponsored by Staybridge Suites. It only seems that way.
To those of you who’ve written saying you don’t want my pieces to end, thank you! —and also this lengthy edition is especially for you!
I wish readership grew as organically as college friendships, but alas: it takes a lot of work and a kind of self-promotion I do not particularly enjoy. Which is why I’m so grateful to share the substack-verse with Irena Smith who keeps championing my writing and recommends my newsletter to anyone with eyeballs. I first met Irena as my oldest’s college counselor and when we left our initial meeting, I turned to my daughter and said, “that is the smartest, most well-spoken person I’ve ever met.” I was right and now she writes not one, but two hilarious, insightful and exceptionally human newsletters that prove this weekly. Please check them out: Personal Statements and The Golden Ticket (is not what you think)
Loves this! It will be so nice for you to have a tall young man carrying your purchases…for me too! ❤️
Great read. I love your writing style. Especially your Epiphany of the Obvious. Laughed out loud.