Washington to Washington and Back Again

First weekend of May was a milestone: Chaya stayed at her Grandma's house and Andrew and I went on a trip together. Note I say "Andrew and I" not "mommy and Daddy" because that's how it felt. Andrew's had a handful of trips away, but this is my first childless trip since our visit to Prague shortly before the monster's conception. Having a kid in tow can make you forget that you love travelling despite all the ways it throws you off. I mean I like travelling with Chaya too, but it's different. It's definitely not "getting away from it all" so much as "taking it all in a number of large bags and one shrieking little mini-me.

Between my back (sciatic pain) and feet (chronic plantar fascitis), there were reasons to worry the empty space of travel that once appealed so much would wear thin fast in a haze of discomfort. I definitely felt agony in the plane and had to sit OFTEN during our inevitable museum shuffles between some serious hobbling (and the occasional e-scooter ride). But it was still amazing.

We did the tourist thing. Air and Space Museum. National Portrait Gallery/Smithsonian American Art. The gutting Holocaust Museum. The International Math Conference. And several restaurants. A variety of Lyft and Uber experiences.

Mostly I marveled at the freedom of sleeping in, living more on urge and impulse than my carefully parsed schedules and routines.. I think Andrew was a little unsure what to make of my sudden ambivalence to a normally ironclad schedule, but I suddenly felt very much like time was meaningless, we had nowhere to be, and I'd eat and sleep when I felt like it, with activities coming as they might. I rarely have that much of a sense of control over my own schedule and it gave me a laissez faire confidence in free falling backwards into whatever.

Funny thing: I didn't really miss Chaya on this trip. If anything I felt the lightness of simply being my singular self. I've said sometimes it feels like I pulled all of my best qualities from myself and fashioned her from them. In her absence it was novel to re-encounter these qualities still present in myself. To be fair, she was not fully absent. I got text updates and photos. We had a video chat. Andrew and I discussed her in the present tense. It's more that I didn't really wish she were with us. She was in a good place. I was happy to be in my own place.

When I returned we both hugged enthusiastically and then sat together sadly, mourning the passing of our grand adventures and the absence of our partners in crime This eulogy for our separation lasted a good forty minutes before we dug into smearing peanut butter on the couch and flying leaps towards my neck screaming "I'm part of your soul Mommy!!". I honestly could have used a few more days.

Missing is a funny thing, I guess.

 I usually miss Chaya when she's away from home. Even when I'm enjoying having the home, I feel that deep sting of her absence several times a day. It reminded me that "missing" isn't a steady state. It's an intermittent realization of an absence for some period of time due to some trigger. And a feeling related to that. A flickering "wish they were here" with a visceral immediacy.

 I miss people in my life when something reminds me of them. When an error of the brain expects them to be present through habit or opportunity, but then they aren't. When there's some event that makes me want to tell them and only them. Sometimes when I've dreamt of them. When something has happened to shake up my expectations. More so when I lack certainty that I will see them again (or more painfully possess the certainty that I won't). Give me time and I'll miss every single loved one. I'm sentimental beyond belief. I can miss the temp worker who made a funny joke fifteen years ago if I set my mind to it. I can have a persistent sense of absence for a friend who once was less episodic and more a consistent sense of presence. But missing is incredibly context specific even for the closest people in my life.

When I'm travelling, I sometimes miss less because I am not necessarily tied into that person who inhabits the context of regular life. I'm a bit dazed and straddling a million different points in time. Running into selves who have no connection to the present. Missing and rediscovering other selves...

Maybe the self who lingers in bed on weekend mornings. The self who doesn't know what time it is. the self who sits down when she needs to, eats when she's hungry, and lingers when she wants.

The self with long frizzy hair puffed up in the dripping air.

Oh the humidity. Which I normally dislike, but which feels so silky soft and sentimental in the land of my late teens and early twenties.

The air in that part of the country is rich and creamy and full of a muddy radiance. My hair leaps a million directions at once. My skin gels with a clammy sheen. And the goosebumps upon entering every climate controlled indoor space adds a constant level of shock into waking from the languor outdoors. I remember the burnt brick sapor and doleful giddiness of pre-seminar evenings. Of the last days of class. Of drinking together on broken wooden benches surrounded by a sea of red.

And I remember the post-Saint John's world.

On the drive in, I had a memory of  the very tired and dazed return from my first road trip to Northampton.  I was returning instantly lovestuck in all the most painfully sincere ways - ways that might make me cringe if the passing of years hadn't softened me on the raw vulnerability of that girl and her collision with a long-evaded vulnerability. The song Dream a Little Dream of Me was playing counterpoint to a very stupid grin that had crept across my face. My friend looked at me and said "you're totally into him aren't you?" And I said nothing, but I kept smiling and repeating the words in my head like an incantation. For years it evoked a memory of Cupid's first warning shot. One that inspired several life changes of course for better, worse, and some excellently bitter stabs at fiction.

It's now the song I've sung to my daughter every night almost since she was well enough formed in my belly to be "expected".. I sing it almost by rote. She sings along with muddied and creative lyrics about suckamoore trees and STAAAAAARS! Both experiences brimming with cloyingly innocent childishness. Two "first loves" of very very different sort.

Funny how our life spirals and corkscrews through various motifs and co-opts poignant symbols from one era for another.

The occasional wash of memory aside, there was a little extra boost of self dancing a homecoming jig in those sultry rainy days, and lingering in an unexceptional white robe. And now I return to my ok-to-wake clock and millions of appointments, and the constant clutter and chaos that I can only combat with a certain maternal rigidity.

But I'll be back.