My Own Private North Dakota

Last week my friend Natalie went to North Dakota. The way she described it, with its Kmart parking lots under four feet of slab ice and oil men with bare ears sticking out of baseball caps and librarians wearing lipstick-pink parkas and frozen flat tundra stretching empty for miles, made it sound like an alternate universe. Or really, a universe within a universe—the Upper Midwest. She was afraid she wouldn’t make it out of the frozen loneliness alive. But she knew if she were asked back, she’d go in a second. It was so alien it was inspiring. 

not exactly North Dakota

I know the feeling. I didn’t leave home last week, but I was in a different world. Alone with my girls, Steve off skiing in B.C., I had no choice but to be absolutely present, stuck to this spot, paying full attention to the minutiae of life with two young girls. Because if I didn’t, who else would? I was the only one in charge. 

It felt like an awesome responsibility. It seemed possible that if I took my eyes off the road for a second, we might swerve into disaster-land. So I locked into life right here at home. All sort of things unfolded that probably happen here and everywhere almost everyday; I’m just too busy or distracted to notice: a two-year old cracks eggs on the counter for French toast, we comb a bird’s nest out of tangled blonde hair, an eight-month old on the brink of crawling worms her way across the floor, dogs bark, a toddler is rapt by a chorus of Staten Island fifth-graders singing Lady Gaga, someone gets a sponge bath in the sink.

Don’t get me wrong: I was no martyr. I squirreled away some time to run, hike, and do a quick yoga class, and I had tons of help from my friends. But I knew my priority was being here with P. and M., and so I had miniscule expectations for everything else: I figured if I had time to do a teensy bit of writing and work and we all made it through without dying, the week would be a huge success. 

I never thought I’d say this, but low expectations just might be the secret to happiness. Even though I was grounded here with my girls while my husband skied fresh knee-deep powder all day every day, I felt strangely liberated. I had no place to go, so I might as well just sink into life where I was. Even when I was rushing through my to-dos, I had this weird sense of balance and focus, of absolute calm despite the terror. It seemed impossible. How could I achieve enlightenment when I was stumbling around on six hours of sleep and had sweet potato in my hair? 

happily scared out of my mind on Half Dome

It reminded me in a weird but pleasing way of being on assignment, of trying to commit every detail and gesture and one-liner to memory, of  immersing myself in a new world with a rare and thrilling focus. I miss those days—scrapping my way up Half Dome in borrowed climbing shoes, sitting on a knobby granite ledge above the Ottawa River while kayakers cartwheeled though a monster rapid and my nose got sunburned. My only job then was to pay attention and let the story unfold—it always did. That's still my job, only now I can slip into a different universe without even leaving home. 

Steve is back, and I'm back to my old tricks: racing mindlessly from one thing to the next, feeling flustered, torn, out of whack. I miss the calm, the way I had no choice but to settle into a deep place and stay there, even when it wasn’t always pretty. “It was my practice,” I told my Zen friend Natalie, even though I’m still not sure what I meant, I know I miss it and need it and, terrifying and tedious as it was at times, I’d go back in a second.