Note: This post began months ago over Labor Day weekend. For reasons noted below it was not posted until mid-November.
Sandy needed a weekend away. For him, backpacking provided solace and restoration, so in spite of the kids’ activities on Saturday morning, we agreed that he should get away Friday afternoon. What I hadn’t told Sandy in the days preceding this was how low my mood had grown. It had been two weeks since the psychiatrist had increased the dose of my antidepressant, but his stress at work had only grown worse, and I hesitated to throw one more burden on top of the pile.
Recently, doubts about my capabilities as an employee, friend, wife, daughter, and parent had increased, and my perspective narrower. At home, in particular, I felt as if I could do nothing right. I couldn’t even manage the shopping list without forgetting essential things. I couldn’t help my kids with their music or their math. I wasn’t as much fun as their father. And their extra-curricular support fell to Sandy because the extra curriculars were ones at which Sandy excelled. Auden played soccer, and while I read my Kindle at his practice and got hit in the head with out of bounds balls, when Sandy went with him, he came home red and sweaty because the kids convinced him to play a game with them. Kids always love Sandy more than me. He’s the human jungle gym. I’m the human log. Although Eliot is not athletically inclined, he has excelled at music taking both clarinet and oboe lessons, and playing clarinet both in the Advanced (Jazz) Band at his school, but also auditioned and got into Berkeley Youth Orchestra this fall. Sandy can play seemingly any instrument, can hear something play and identify the notes. He readily coaches Auden on early piano, and having played a Bb instrument, trumpet, through college and after, Sandy assists Eliot with new music with ease. The only musical thing I may do better than Sandy is find and make playlists in Spotify. Likely, if Sandy put some effort into it, he’d do that better than me as well.
Depression is different for everyone. For me it lives as a forever possibility. It is a darkness all around me kept away only by the lights I keep on. I’m reminded of the movie Pitch Black starring a young unknown Vin Diesel. Stranded on a planet about to undergo a planetary eclipse, darkness lives , one valiant criminal who can see in the dark leads an ever decreasing group to escape. My monsters in the dark are doubts, and although prescriptions offer the safety of light, there is no escape.
Auden loves me, unquestionably, but he has recently made a habit at pointing out my faults, sometimes highlighting Sandy’s comparable strengths. Daddy cooks better than I do. Daddy is more fun. Daddy plays soccer. Daddy is stronger. Daddy can help him more. When told that Daddy was going to go away for the weekend, Auden expressed disappointment. “Daddy is more fun. Daddy can drive us, to like places, where we can hike and stuff.”
Comparatively, between Sandy and I, driving is really the nail in my coffin, so to speak. That is, my lack of it. Sandy drives. It’s a simple thing, but it makes all the difference to the children. When people ask me about how I manage without driving, I share that it is about how you arrange and select the things in your life. For instance, it affects which health insurance plan you choose, because you need to be proximate to a hospital. It affects the selection of every kind of provider you might need: the dentists, hair stylists, grocery markets, bike repair shops, massage therapists, veterinarians, dog parks, therapists, doctors, pediatricians, and more. It affects which blood drives you can attend. When you decide to have a kids, It impacts what activities, camps and schools your children can attend; which friends they can make and visit; which sports they play; which lessons they take. You carefully curate your life so that it mostly fits within a 2-3 mile radius. You can have the occasional outlier, but know that it will eat considerably into your day. For a short while, I was seeing a podiatrist five miles north of where I live. I would bike to our appointments. Although Google Maps “Biking” directions tells me that it should take between 27-30 minutes, I think their “Biking” directions have been in perpetual Beta for four or five years because they lie. Even if I was blood doping, it would be difficult for me to make that in 30 minutes. It was more like 40 minutes each way. Not only does losing an hour and twenty minutes to commuting cut dramatically into my day, but bicycling that much on top of everything else you are doing wears a girl out. Someone who drives wouldn’t blink at going to a doctor 5 miles away, especially if they came highly recommended, were covered by your insurance, and were also a former runner with some appreciation for your foot needs. But I don’t drive, so we try to limit our selections.
This weekend with Sandy away presented some challenges for us. Eliot had BYO practice at Laney College in Oakland, with a mini-concert at the end from 8:45-12:15. Auden had a soccer game at 2:00pm in Berkeley. BYO met at Laney College, about a block away from the Lake Merritt BART station in Oakland, which a bit over six miles south of where we live in Berkeley. If Eliot were a bit older, and a bit more experienced, he probably could have taken public transit on his own, but he had yet to ride the BART (underground train) there, nor had he taken the 88 bus, the other route via public transit option.
So the dilemma that faced me Friday evening after Sandy left. How would we navigate Saturday? Originally, I had hoped that I could give Auden to one of his soccer pals to pick up after Eliot was all done, but that fell through. So I had a six year old, a surly thirteen year old, a 40-50 minute commute one way, and three hours to kills between practice begin and when the mini-concert we would attend would begin. The first directive in this mission, arm the children with ample entertainment. So Friday evening I assigned both boys the task of downloading shows, movies, audiobooks, comics, and games to their iPads. It was possible that Auden and I would be on the train up to three hours if we rode there and back to drop off Eliot, returned to see the concert, and then rode home with Eliot. Then I contemplated other options. I could theoretically Uber or Lyft Eliot to Laney College, but legally, he shouldn’t go alone, and if Auden and I accompanied him, then we would have to lug around a booster seat for Auden. Then I recalled a service my friend had raved about called Zum. It was like a baby sitter service on wheels for kids. Like Lyft for parents, capable not only of driving your children, but also of signing them out of an afterschool program or into an activity/lesson, etc. They would provide childcare (for a fee) between when they needed to be picked up and dropped off if you needed them to stretch that time a bit. Through your Zum app, you create rider profiles for each child, which their name, grade, whether they needed a booster seat, school, mobile number (if the child had one), and absolutely required, their photo. I convinced Eliot that maybe Zuming him in the morning would be the best solution, then Auden and I could come back, watch the concert, and we would all go home together. I wondered if maybe I Auden and I could Zum down to Laney and then return with Eliot via Zum. A 20 minute drive there would shave off half the time of commuting. I sent Zum a message asking if they allowed non-driving parents to accompany a ride. While I waited for a response, the boys and I met some friends for dinner out that Friday. I mentioned our commuting dilemma to my friend that evening, and she suggested that maybe Auden and I could go with him and hang out for the three hours of rehearsal. I looked at her like she was mad. “What the heck am I going to do for three hours on the south side of Lake Merritt? I need to walk the dogs; we need to do the shopping; laundry needs to be folded; and we have to clean the house.” After cleaning up the droplets of wine she’d sprayed over the table at my list, she suggested perhaps we could find a farmers market. I was increasingly sold on the notion of sending E on his merry way with Zum. How Auden and I got there was TBD.
After dinner, I checked my messages, and sure enough, I had a message back from Zum. Anyone could ride along as long as they had a rider profile and were scheduled for that ride. Sweet. The first hiccup in my plan came when I started to fill out a profile for myself as a rider. First name and Last name were not difficult. I knew those. Grade in school was a drop down list from K-12. Hm. It was a required field, so I selected 12. I did not need a booster seat, and for the school field, I added UC Berkeley Extension. Technically, I did work there. The “Child’s Photo” was required, and I’ll admit I was tempted to find a photo of myself as a child, but I assumed wha they wanted however paradoxical it might be was a selfie of a 48 year old mom. Mortification complete. Then I went to schedule the first ride, for Eliot. He wanted to get there early, so that meant an 8:00am pick up. Upon selecting that time and pickup location, the app apologized curtly and said that all of its drivers were booked for that time. That would be the first of the many expletives that emerged from my mouth.
I told Eliot he was off the Zum hook, and apparently, we’d be BARTing together. So he and I sat down at the table to figure out what time we’d need to leave to catch the BART to get him there before the 8:45 rehearsal start. Google Maps directions to the rescue. Just like if you were driving somewhere, you add in your destination and indicate that you will be departing from home. When you hop over to the bus icon, you get additional options, like indicating whether you need to depart at or arrive by a certain time. I chose arrive by 8:30. It then advises you of several different transit options. What you hate to see are exclamation marks next to any of the options. Especially when the option with the exclamation mark is the one you were planning on. The expanded details indicated that due to maintenance, a certain part of the BART service between North Berkeley BART and Lake Merritt stations would be closed and passengers would be shuttled by buses from the point of closure to where it resumed service. In my 20+ years of public transit experience, the thing you want to eliminate the most are transfers. Like flying, a direct single plane route is the most reliable. Stifling another expletive, I turned to our alternative, the 88 bus. It’s not that I dislike buses. In fact, in many ways, I prefer a bus to an underground train. I get lost so readily, that being above ground watching the streets go by helps to keep the map in sight. If I’ve traveled two miles underground at a diagonal across the city, I will reliably emerge above ground completely disoriented.
The 88 stop is an easy walk, but it’s still a walk with kids complaining about their heavy cinch sacks because I made them carry water. Of course, there’s no complaints about the added weight of an iPad or headphones. Only the essentials with my kids. Who needs water when you’ve downloaded eight episodes of Captain Underpants. And so it was decided, we’d take the bus.
The bus ride there was completely uneventful. The bus interior was shiny and unscarred, unlike the fierce city buses all punked out, giving off a tattooed, multi-pierced, I’ve seen it all impression. We took prized seats along the back row of the bus, because we were alone, the only riders foolish enough to be out of bed and commuting across towns before eight in the morning. The driver a indeterminately aged woman in her crisp uniform and crisp curls and caffeinated eyes had invited the boys with a wink. It’s not every day that you see three of the whitest suburbanites climb aboard the downtown bus. The boys settled in and had transported themselves to their Netflix or Amazon worlds before we sped by the next stop.
With no other riders requesting stops, and no riders standing waiting to board, the bus swiftly went through South Berkeley’s and North Oakland’s patchwork quilt of unkempt apartment buildings and weathered Victorians stitched next to hipster coffee shops and newly modernized home construction. As we grew closer to downtown Oakland along Market Street, the road numbers decreasing rapidly from the thirties through the twenties, the influx of money or the lack of it grew increasingly obvious. With tired, barred homes, and explosive, incomprehensibly stunning art covering every greater surface, the environment pleads for change, for recognition, for a chance. I elbow my kids behind me to point out a mural: a impossibly green dragon almost popping from the way with a steam-punk festooned panda side-kick. The incongruous modernized coupling of symbols for peace, harmony, luck, and power singled that with a turn we’d entered Chinatown. I find it, too, so different from the semi-urban streets of West Central Berkeley.
I am self-conscious of oversimplifying all of the factors that go into the creation of a neighborhood zeitgeist, the many socio-economic, racial, cultural, historical, and other factors that I cannot comprehend, but I also do not want my boys to pretend that it is all the same or that the differences separate them from others. They should note the differences but not with fear instead with awe.
I see our stop approaching, and I rip my stare from the window to my boys whose eyes have never wavered from their screens. I shake the boys knees, and we bag up to get Eliot to Laney College in time for his practice.
Auden and I opted to stay in Oakland for the duration of Eliot’s gig, exploring Chinatown as it woke on a Saturday morning. Eventually, we landed in the Oakland Museum science wing until it was time for the BYO mini-concert. The collection of children and their representing parents were at the intersection of East Bay’s racial diversity and a ridiculous commitment to musical overachievement. The performance was surprisingly coherent for so few sessions of practice, hinting at a strong winter concert on the horizon.
We trundled out of the hall with our bags of iPads, Kindle, music binders, water bottles, and of course, the clarinet, the walk to the bus stop reassuringly short. Auden and I had accumulated a couple of miles of wandering, and Eliot professed an unsurprising headache from three hours of practice. The bus came within a few minutes, and it being both the end of the line, as well as the beginning of the line, we had time to settle ourselves as the driver took a quick break from the monotony of his drive. He stretched his legs on the bench and caught up on messages and other things on his phone that he couldn’t tend to while driving. When he returned, it looked like we may be the only passengers for the ride home, but by 12:30pm on a Saturday life had percolated, and the first to join us were a couple rushing to the bus grateful to catch it before it left. He got to the doors first, calling out in Mandarin and waving to hurry with the presumption of a spouse of many years. She climbed aboard with a combinatory smile and pant that made me think unintentionally and unfairly of a dog who happily returned a pesky tennis ball to her owner. The dropped into a bench forward of us, and we took off again.
The boys once again plugged in, and I put on my glasses with the intent of reading my book. This bus had some wear and tear, but other than a persistent grinding sound from the wheel we sat atop, it too showed the county’s commitment to public transit. We stopped at the next stop to pick up a passenger, and then again at the next stop, and again at the third. I was buried in my murder mystery, so the small number, but frequently changing passengers blurred together. Perhaps it was the irregular starting and stopping, or the long morning, but I noticed when Auden took off his headphones and put down his iPad, I put down my Kindle. I knew that look. Seriously, of all the things that I could have forgotten as a mother, Auden’s motion sickness ranks among the least convenient. “Honey, are you feeling nauseated?” I’d taken to using the word nauseated instead of nauseous after having been corrected of years of misuse from of all things a young adult novel I’d read. Imagine my surprise and embarrassment. My children would never know such shame. Auden, meanwhile, nodded his head while his face broke, the fear and tears magma pouring down the ruins of his carefully constructed visage. The setting suddenly came into focus. The heat of the engine immediately below us roasting our bottoms on an increasingly warm day, the automotive white noise from the engine under us and the cars whooshing by us. The bounce of the tail end of a whale of a vehicle sending us surfing upon those waves of exhaust. The grind of something the mechanic should look at. And mostly, the swerving in and out of bus stops with the sudden and masterfully timed braking of a the timekeeper’s favorite bus driver. Like the unexpected and unaccomplished female heroine playing next to a male lead in any good disaster flick, apparently in some scene before being rescued, I shifted into Fixit-mode. First, I slapped Eliot metaphorically, by ripping at his headphones, and had them switch seats, Auden crawling over his brother in a desperate tumble of electronics and intertwining of cords. But after another block the air from the window offered no relief, and I could see that Mt. Audenevious was about to erupt. The bus pulled into a stop for another passenger, and I ordered the boys to grab it all. We were getting off. I scooped up Auden’s stuff, leaving Eliot to gather his own, and Auden to simply get off of the bus before he blew. The driver saw my frantic wave to hold the door and accepted with a quizzical look at the “Thank you!” I hastily threw at him. We landed on the tree-lined sidewalk and a not-quite manicured retirement home lawn with no inconspicuous place to vomit.
My attention whipped between the state of nausea that Auden experienced, the state of early teen outrage Eliot was expressing, a quick assessment of where we’d landed ourselves, and how stupid it was or was not for a blatantly privileged white family to be standing with a new iPhone, two iPads, a Kindle, and a clarinet on a fall Saturday afternoon on a sub-urban thoroughfare of post-industrial North Oakland. The eerily quiet elementary schools across the street gave way to a solid block of padlock-accessible, tangerine-hued garages. Weekend pedestrians had no interest in this part of Market street. This wasn’t an unsafe neighborhood, but it was unused on a Saturday afternoon. Mostly, it was unfamiliar to me, to all of us.
I unconsciously went on alert, the way I do when walking my bloodhound where I have to stay attuned for the sound of vile skateboarders, the presence of aggravating small dogs with superior attitudes, and the potential disasters that I could not, no matter how vigilant, prevent from happening, like a child walking by with an ice cream cone that I could not smell the way my hound had. In these situations, I find myself paying as much attention to the anxiety level of my charges, as I do the threat level of the surroundings. As with my hound, the best thing to do is to just keep moving. I attempted to convey cheer, comfort, definiteness, and urgency in the sentences, “Ok, guys, pack ‘er up. We’ll walk a bit to the next bus stop.” In frustrated unison, “Ahhhh, Mommmm.” I’m never “Mommy or Mama” when they hate me. “What about my clarinet? Can you carry it?” “My bag’s too heavy, you carry it!” I’m used to overlapping language. “No” and “No. But maybe you can fit the clarinet in your backpack? And I’ll carry your water bottle so you’re bag’s not to heavy.” In the end my backpack ended up filled with all the electronics, two of the three water bottles, and Auden’s cinch sack was on my front with Eliot’s clarinet in it. I’m not usually such a pushover, but the clock is ticking. The bus only runs every 20 minutes.
Perhaps it was the extra baggage, but likely it was just my regular inattention, but about midway up the next block, I jammed my big toe into a tree-rooted chunk of cement sidewalk. I caught my body from falling, but I did not catch the words that escaped my lips. It was not pretty. Ok, yes, a pack-mule of a middle-aged mother swearing up a storm over a stubbed toe is classic slap-stick. But this was not just any toe, this was a toe that had sent me desperately to a podiatrist a couple of years before. I had hallux rigidus which literally translates into the demeaning: stiff big toe. What was not a joke was that the degenerative arthritis in that toe had stripped my wardrobe of my collection of wicked shoes and reduced me to wearing a single model of old lady running shoes with everything I wore. My toe went from its regular two on the pain scale to a seven. After I finished swearing, I put down the various bags, dug into my own back pack like our hound dog until I found the ibuprofen liquigels. Swallowing four with water at least lightened the liquid weight. We re-packed again, and I hobbled on. Both boys subdued and suddenly helpful.
There are so many ways to tell this story. I wrote in my journal soon after we got home emphasizing privilege and the boys experiencing the fear of the neighborhoods unlike their own. I wrote it again in Word Press with much of the above language, but finding myself introducing the bit about my depression and ending with us arriving at the end of the Lake Merrit line. I wasn’t ready to post the entry, so I saved the draft. A day or two later I copied it and pasted it into a Google Doc and continued the story expanding the portion that was most trying and nerve-wracking: getting off the bus in a foreign neighborhood and assessing where we were. A week or two went by and I forgot I even had the Google Doc, so I went back to the WordPress blog post and continued the emphasis on the comparison between Sandy and I and reached a conclusion that lessened the adventure and emphasized the people involved. I was please with this post when my dog came barreling in, did something to my keyboard or touchpad, and the page went back to the prior page, when I moved it forward again everything I’d written had disappeared because WordPress doesn’t autosave drafts with any regularity, and I had gotten used to Google Docs autosave. I was despondent. One exuberant wet-nosed touch, and it was gone. I did not cry, but I thought I might, so I showered, my goto space for sobbing. With multiple modes of white noise, a lock on the door, and a certain respect born out of fear of seeing mom naked that keeps the kids away, there’s no better place for a good break down. But break down I did not, so I came back and found the Google Doc. Elated that some part of the story had already been re-written, I was caught off guard by the details that were included in this version as opposed to the one I lost. The neighborhood components in one version – the elementary school, the storage lockers, and such a description of the bus ride. The other bypassed much of the bus ride home but focused on the walk, the quick and comforting conversation with a man on his porch, and the understanding help of a store owner.
This story began one way, restarted and drifted off another way, and then resurfaced a third way. All of the themes within them unfinished. A couple of months later I revisit this in-conclusion and what I see is a story about my brokeness, my discomfort with that which is unbroken. That I want for my children to inherit and appreciate that there is spectacular beauty painted over bricks with crumbling mortar. I want them to look back on these bus rides that they must take because their mom cannot drive and realize that taking the longer route under the overpass exposed them to a million things that they would never have seen otherwise.
The playful dishware that Sandy and I received when we married have been chipped, shattered, and glued back together again, a few more pieces each year. When Eliot was still a little kid, Auden was an unspeaking sponge, and spider webbed cracks in a dish were the exception, Eliot sometimes baulked at a chipped bow. I would lean over and take the dish, “That’s great. It means that I get the special one. There’s no other bowl exactly like this one. I’ll get you one of the regular ones like everyone else gets” or “Oh, you shouldn’t have been given the chipped one, only our special guests get the unique pieces in our collection.” It took only a few variations on this, and a few years later Eliot was explaining the same thing to Auden. Of course, Auden went on to make more dishes “special” than I would have liked, but I am rather good at jigsaws.