Ruminations While Driving

This morning we all woke up tired and draggy and I decided not to take Cali Girl to her morning swim lesson. This made me feel a little guilty, since it's only the second day of class, but not guilty enough to gather our still-damp swimsuits and swim diapers and all the other necessary paraphernalia and drive to the outdoor swim center and get into the water first thing on a cool foggy morning. Did I mention that Cali is decidedly unfond of her swim lessons, and that "unfond" is a nice way of saying "terrified"? (The lessons, as it turns out, are not really lessons as much as just a gathering of five moms carrying their babies around in the splash pool at the same time while a teenage swim teacher with unbelievably tan skin and a flat tummy sings "The Wheels on the Bus" and makes the rest of us feel pale, puffy and old. Really, it's kind of a waste of sixty-five bucks, in my opinion.)

So instead of swim class, we all went to Safeway to get bread and yogurt, since we are completely out of food at our house. And since there is a convenient Starbucks right inside our Safeway, I got one of those, too. Cali is convinced that there is a dog that lives outside the window of Safeway, right by the Starbucks counter, because we once saw one there two or three months ago, waiting patiently by the bike rack for its owner to come out. When we get to that part of the store, she starts questioning "dod? dod?" over and over and over and over again until you take her to the window to show her that there is no dog out there, which greatly perplexes her. Then we went home, and I did not clean the house, but instead sat on the couch with Cali and drank coffee and fed her her yogurt.

When Ricardo went to work, I decided to take Cali for a long drive and hope that she would take an early nap. She hasn't been sleeping well because I think she's teething again. At fifteen months she only has four teeth, so we're still in the thick of teething season. I drove up Highway 1, while the girl slept in her seat, looking at the pewter ocean and the golden hills, and noticing this one solitary farmer who was working his brussels sprout field right along the cliff edge above the ocean. This is a drive that my husband and I used to make all the time, back when we were in college and he was still my boyfriend, in his blue pick-up truck (affectionately named Bob), listening to this particular mix CD with a Cowboy Junkies song that I loved on it. I thought about how back then, all I wanted to do was become a writer. And this made me think about how much of the decade after college I spent struggling with depression, and how it makes you feel like you have cobwebs in your brain, and it keeps you from being able to imagine yourself and your life as anything different than it is at that very moment in time. It took a serious crisis after the birth of my baby to get treatment and to realize that feeling that way isn't normal or acceptable.

I'm grateful to be largely free of the intense burden I carried for so long. I'm not perfectly happy, or anything, but I finally feel like what I used to call a "real person". I'm glad to be writing again and enjoying my time with my daughter and planning for the future, but I have this nagging voice in my ear that keeps whispering that it's too late to accomplish the things I once dreamed of. That the last muddled eight years were my one chance to make things work, and now they are gone forever. I'm too old and tied down to think of finally finishing my nursing degree, and of doing humanitarian work with health organizations, and of maybe still writing a book, and of travelling again. Too late, too late cycles round and round my head, and I know this voice is not even worth listening to, but it's rather persistent all the same. So that's what I'm thinking of, and fighting against, lately. The urge to give up on myself, and settle for less than I once thought I could do. Is that a good thing? To be content with what you are? Or are you supposed to keep pursuing the things you feel that you are meant to do? I'm really not sure what the answer is.

When I was nearing home Cali woke up and was crying softly in her seat, wanting to be taken out, and saying "he'p me." I parked and got out of the car and went to get her, and she looked at me with huge tears rolling down her face, and I said "Oh, Cali, you don't need to be so sad!" And she said, in this tiny quavering brave voice, "I know." This is one of her favorite all-purpose phrases, and I don't think she really knows what it means, but she still always says it at the right time.