In a word, there are many thorns, but the roses are there too. –Peter Tchaikovsky
Every night, there’s a show. And how often do I miss it?
Thursday afternoon I grabbed a Visitor badge from the front desk at The Kid’s elementary school and headed down the hall to his classroom. When I entered, the Valentine’s Day party was in full swing–all over TK’s face. His cheeks were dyed pink from cupcake icing and his fingers, orange from Doritos dust. This is not going to end well, I thought, recalling our shared stomach virus from just days earlier and considering the long road trip ahead. I wiped him down and loaded him into the car. Half an hour later, our family of four was buckled in and heading south on the interstate.
It was a narrow escape. Little Brother had one more day of the miracle antibiotic that was healing his ears but tearing up his stomach, and both TK and I were slowly regaining our appetites. A few days earlier and the trip would have had to be cancelled. Instead, we barreled ahead (and, through two construction zones, inched ahead while LB screamed from his carseat). We left the highway and began the last leg of the trip as the sun was dipping toward the horizon, and maybe it was because I was driving–not tending to the kids–that I noticed it. “Look at that,” I whispered to The Husband, because TK had nodded off and I was not about to threaten that development. To our right, the sky above a flat field was sprayed with pink and orange. I let it take my breath for a second, then got back to wishing us out of the car and this moment.
We had barely entered the front door when TK began gagging, and we got him to the bathroom before the pink and orange of his party menu were blasted all over the bathmat. The next hour was a flurry of cleaning, bath time, dinner, and bedtime. Some hours later, I heard TK jump out of bed and pad down the hallway to my parents’ room. The Dad escorted him back to us, where I waited, 2 am-confused, in a shirt that barely covered my ass. “Your mom’s sick,” Dad whispered in the darkness, and I tried to listen to the details while I pulled at my shirt and clasped TK’s hand. I failed, and after returning TK to bed, I spent the next few hours imagining what might happen next: The Mom, afflicted with a virus, would be unable to care for TK and LB and the next day would be spent heading back north on the interstate as a family of four rather than heading east to 30A as a couple of two.
It was just a cold. The Mom and Dad pushed us out the door the next day, and my ever-present ambivalence rendered me both giddy and tearful. The closer we got to our destination, though, the more giddiness took over. By the time we opened our hotel room’s double doors onto a balcony overlooking the Gulf, I felt the sickness and exhaustion of the past two weeks pour out of me like a valve had been released.
We didn’t miss the show for the next three nights: sunset as appointment viewing.
The alchemy of sand, salt, and water has always felt like a cocktail blended especially for me. My home base; a call to a deeper part of myself–so much different from, but with the same effect as, the city’s smell of exhaust and sound of horns. A part of me opens up and makes more room, so that anxiety either diffuses out or just gets overshadowed, and my lungs can fill again. As we stood on the sand one of those nights, I felt a whisper ride the wind alongside the salt: Stop. Breathe. Look how beautiful it is–your life. How hard and how beautiful, and YOU’RE DOING IT. And it’s okay that all of that is easier to see from here. Three other audience members, a couple and their toddler, watched the show from a few feet away. TH and I laughed about how different their night would look from ours. I felt both relieved and incomplete. I looked back at the sunset, glimmering magnificently on the water. A rebellious but true thought hit me: I’ve seen even better ones at home.
Five years and two kids in, a sunset splits me in two. Nothing will ever be simple again; everything is simple after all.
When we returned three days later, TK’s grin lasted longer than the pink cupcake dye I’d wiped off before we left. He pulled me to a bedroom and stared at my face while I whispered to him. He wouldn’t stop studying me, smile fixed. I felt concern leave him as if a valve had been released: there’s just something about being home. There’s something–beautiful, and hard, and beautiful–about being someone’s home.
In the car a few hours later, I glanced back between whines and cries, during a moment of quiet, and saw two tiny hands reaching for each other, unbidden by us, fingertip touching fingertip. A giggle from one and a grin from the other. These unprompted connections running through us but not created by us, these graces that keep showing up without my earning or, sometimes, even recognizing them. The sun set sometime between dinner and bath and bed that night, and I missed the show. But I won’t always.