By Nichole Bernier
But with the sharing came traveling, time away from the kids and from a household that operated, on the best of days, like a catamaran flying a hull. I created this travel schedule myself, and had anticipated it for forever – three months. The bigger trips shimmered on the calendar like tinsel and Easter grass. Why was I so excited? Did I think I was going to shed my momma skin and slip back into my 20s professional self, the travel and independence, the adult stimulation and striving? The shoes?
But to be honest, I had dreaded it, too. I imagined reading in a Chicago bookstore and receiving a call from a hospital back home. Or almost as bad, a simple text message that I’d failed to call in time before bed, and small people were sad. (Which happened.) My husband was able to come on several trips — my parents gave us babysitting as a Christmas present — which was wonderful. He’s my best supporter and critic, and things are just plain more fun with him around. It reminded me of the early years of marriage, zipping around at the top of our games.
But a funny thing happened once I got home and started doing the regional events this summer: I wanted my kids around, too.
I started feeling this way when some health issues hit my parents and father-in-law, and all three needed surgeries. Home didn’t feel like something that was functioning just fine back there. Home felt like something that needed to be in my back pocket, my tote bag, the train seat beside me.
I adjusted my travel plans, put rollaway beds in small spaces. Reading in New York was more fun with my two oldest along; they were wide-eyed at the hotel mini-bar candy, the Empire State Building, Greenwich Village street vendors, Amtrak’s café. Likewise, on Cape Cod, the highlight of a reading was my dinner date afterward — my four year old so giddy about the high patio over the dunes, that he dropped the ketchup bottle down into them. Ooops.
Back to the launch party, which I’d both hoped and feared would represent a thick yellow line down the middle of my life. Toward the end of the evening, as I sat signing books, my oldest child walked up. My 11 year old, my mature one. He interrupted my conversation with the publisher of a magazine where I’d once worked to hand me his stained napkin and empty kebab stick. “Here, Mom, I can’t find the garbage.”
Here Mom, I can’t find the garbage.
And that — along with the fact that after the party, I was squatting in those vertiginous yellow shoes to change a diaper — perfectly summed up the line of demarcation. Sure, there was stimulation and striving, but mostly, the change to my life was invisible. Because of course there’s no going back to that person in her 20s, and nothing had substantively changed in the watchworks of my daily mamma world. Nor did I want it to. Except every so often, the shoes.
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Nichole Bernier is author of the novel THE UNFINISHED WORK OF ELIZABETH D. (Crown/Random House), a finalist for the 2012 New England Independent Booksellers Association fiction award. A Contributing Editor for Conde Nast Traveler for 14 years, she has also written for publications including Psychology Today, Salon, Elle, Self, Health, and Men’s Journal. She is a founder of the literary blog Beyond the Margins, and can be found online at nicholebernier.com and on Twitter @nicholebernier.