All Over the Map

sorta wish he'd remembered to bring this along

Steve left yesterday at 3:30 A.M. for British Columbia. His journey took him to Denver, then Calgary, then Golden. As I write this, he’s on a helicopter bound for Fairy Meadows, a backcountry ski hut in the Adamant Mountains that’s run by the Alpine Club of Canada.  

And while I’m thinking of him, in the high northern Rockies, surrounded by snow fields and open bowls and mountains that shoot up to the sky, I’m also thinking about me—about where I might have been today: on a plane to St. Paul, the girls in tow, to see my friend Elizabeth. When I pictured staying here in Santa Fe, on my own for a 10-day solo parenting marathon, I began to panic and immediately thought about getting out of town, taking our gong show on the road and inflicting our chaos on a dear friend. 


But as much as I wanted to go, something about leaving didn’t feel right. I just couldn’t bring myself to buy the plane tickets. After decades of chronic waffling, I’m finally beginning to figure out that when I feel so indecisive, it’s a signal I need to look deeper into what’s making me hesitate. Turns out, when I really peeled away the layers, that going to Minnesota felt sort of like running away: shirking some kind of epic test of maternal skill and unflappability and dragging my girls into my own panicky drama when all signs suggest that after so many months of travel, they really just need to stay put right now.

So here we are in Santa Fe at the end of day two, the night house quiet, the dog snoring, a storm moving in from the west. I’m thinking also about my father, and about Mexico—where we’re meeting my step mom and my dad’s closest friends in a few weeks—and how strange it will be to arrive at the airport and not find him there waiting for us, hiding behind some pillar with a silly grin on his face, ready to jump out and surprise us. My father is still so three-dimensional in my mind. He has not yet faded into a picture of my father, a wavy old snapshot of someone you used to know and love but can’t quite bring to mind anymore. He is still my father—with height and girth and green-flecked eyes and those crazy ragg wool socks he wore everyday, winter or summer—as though at any moment, he will walk out of my memory and back into my regular life. As though I haven’t lost him for my whole life, just for a little while, and once the novelty of him dying has worn off, he’ll come waltzing back to us, camera bag slung over one shoulder and that same old grin, always. 

So I am all over the map tonight, trying to stay positive and open in my heart. That’s what I try to remember when I feel anxious and reactive: to act out of love, not fear. My husband is holed up in a hut with no electricity or cell phone service for the next week, skiing big bowls of unfathomably deep, untracked snow. It does not take a great leap of the imagination to worry. Fear could paralyze me, but I am going to choose love instead. Skiing the backcountry is what Steve loves, and I love Steve, so that’s that. Where is the love? In the Adamant Mountains, skiing his brains out. And right here in Santa Fe, surrounded by friends, with so much to be grateful for. Right where we girls belong.  

cheat sheet taped to my bedpost in case for when I forget