I'm scheduled to fly to Texas this weekend to meet a friend from California for a so-called girls' weekend. By my count, this will be my ninth short solo trip since I gave birth to my first child seventeen years ago. That makes roughly one weekend on my own every other year.
Occasionally I point my finger at Steve, but the truth is that this low number is no one's fault but my own. It's been overly hard for me to leave my offspring. For one thing, it's hard to extricate myself logistically. But more than that, leaving them triggers in me acute maternal anxiety. I want to be their home base, the nucleus around which the electrons continually orbit.
As the day of a solo trip approaches, I find myself psychically squirming, trying to find a way out of the plan. I don't want to ask anybody else to take over my responsibilities. I don't want to miss basketball games--or rides, plans, meals. Making arrangements to leave, I feel how critical my role is in the family, and my anxiety skyrockets. What if something happens to me? What if I don't make it back? I don't want to leave my life. The girls need their mother!
Just over a year ago, I met this same California friend in Arizona for our first girls' weekend. There was nothing particularly risky about that long weekend away. During our seventy-two hours together, she and I talked and talked, wrinkling in a bubbling hot tub much of the time.
We visited a desert garden where I saw things I'd never seen before in a weird lunar landscape. I left my world and was awed by another. I saw an expanse of open sky and dry earth from which sprouted monstrous octopus cacti, their many thick tentacles reaching and writhing. The crucifixion thorn was forbidding, its long woody barbs jutting sharply from each branch. In contrast, whimsical, Dr. Seuss-like Boojum trees stood tall, their skinny, spiky trunks topped with frilly hairdos.
I entered the set of a science fiction movie in which a creeping devil cactus slithered up and among the branches of the Palo Brea, looping and draping itself, an unending fat snake. I saw the ocotillo, whose slender, friendly stems waved upward like an inverted cheerleader's pompom, and the prickly pear, whose plum-colored fruit sat perched atop cartoon-shaped paddles.
At the Mexican market, we washed down our visions with cool watermelon concoctions while taking in the sight of papayas and jicamas, and mounds of richly colored peppers.
It was a short trip to the moon, a chance to break away from the laundry basket to be reminded of what a wide world it is--how rich and varied, how strange and beautiful.
