Big Drive-Thru Energy

What you need to know is that I’m a good-ish driver. Except when I’m stressed, which is 89% of the time. In a stress zone behind the wheel, I do things like chew up the insides of my mouth and sweat buckets and become cartoonishly startled when someone honks. I’ve amassed a number of speeding tickets (not proud) and totaled a car before (super not proud) and even drove a motorscooter into a garage door (bought someone a new one who is not me) but I’m trying to be a better, more steady, more circumspect driver. Then my oldest kid wants to show me a video, probably a TikTok that makes a subtle reference to a classic meme that I need explained to me, and said kid is doing so whilst riding passenger, and my number one parenting strategy is to become intrigued by the things that dazzle my children. I just should probably make exceptions to doing that when I’m, e.g. operating a moving vehicle. Ah! There’s the addendum. 

That addendum obviously eluded me sometime in July, which is why when we were exiting the Rockland Wendy’s (where we had just purchased a highly nutritious meal that totally did not include a Frosty that was masquerading as a meal replacement) it was so strange when we noticed a car pulling up the narrow exit lane in the opposite direction. 

Like what the heck, did this driver not know this was an exit only lane? 

We were about to crash into an oncoming car, when lo! I realized that because of my TikToking While Driving, I was actually driving through the Drive-Thru in the wrong direction. 

Not only was I blocking a whole stream of cars, but I had passed all signage and windows and other Giant Throbbing Clues that would have easily tipped me off that I was the bozo. 

As I tried to reverse on a curve, a feat that should not be attended by any old station wagon whipping amateur, my oldest child and I waved hello to the drive-thru cashier who had seen us advance in the wrong direction and now reverse in the right direction. His 15 ½ year-old face was one of bemusement. Apparently I was his first. 

We then passed a bright bay window of all the rest of the employees, whose collective age was 17. They had gathered to see what I hope was the highlight of their whole collective summer: a woman and her kid in a Subaru who apparently don’t know how drive-thrus work. YOU SAW IT HERE FIRST, FOLKS. I believe they were even grabbing their phones to document this seminal moment on TikTok. Full Circle! Also, we are no longer welcome at the Rockland Wendy’s.

Thirteen

I don’t know if this is still an expression in Korean parlance, but in 2007, an elder at our Korean church announced that I was a woman “who was no longer alone.” Meaning I was pregnant with you.

As was pretty on-brand for me in my twenties, I resented the phrase. Pregnancy did not automatically change me from “no longer” anything, especially as determined by an elder male. That was for me to determine.

Some weeks later, I was sitting at my work cubicle and struggling to stay awake. I know, I know. You’re like, Mom, can you not with the tale again about how you were all working and grad schooling and commuting and incubating a human. WE GET IT. You’re Pioneer Woman.

Okay but this is important. Because my boss called me into his office and waved a report at me that I had “written.” He basically said there was nothing in it he could use. You’ve probably never had someone tell you that, or maybe you have, but since you are not a “hard-o” like I am, let me assure you. That reckoning should have been devastating and I should have been way insulted. Instead I was just so tired all the time that it just made me feel…sad. For my boss. Because he was depending on me to do the dang thing and I was just a tired fail potato that housed a Costco sized M&Ms every afternoon.

I went to the restroom (as I did in those days every 12 minutes) to pull myself together.

I stood in the stall and held my belly and felt the full freight of my sadness. And then I felt you. You turned and for the first time I could discern the outlines of your head, your back, your legs all tucked. Sacred encounters can happen anywhere, and there I met the holy and the wholly lovely person who had been with me for all the conversations and the commutes and the interminable classes at night. I was no longer alone.

I had no idea. No clue. Not even a speck of the dustcloud that trails after the miracle on which a love like you floats.

You are musical and hilarious. You are still a nature baby, held in the thrall of frogs and turtles and other amphibious creatures. You speak fluent sarcasm and can carry a bit with an ease that amazes me. We recently met a family at the dog park whose Boston terrier named Monte has spawned an entire fiction series that you will oftentimes play out while riding with me in the car. You are so beautiful and don’t know it. You are learning to love being you.

You spent this year fighting a personal crisis of which only you and Daddy and I will ever know the true depths. You will meet people in life, good and loyal friends and partners, who will learn about this crisis, but they will only understand it as ones learning about the events of a history instead of marching across the battlefield in combat. I hope you will remember what we learned in fighting this war alongside you, and that you will always know the miles we would travel to help deliver you to safety.

Throughout this past year, none of us have been alone. We have been always together, and the edges of where we began and ended became blurred by the seasons that bled into one another that we have called this long quarantine. We dream of a time when we will be free of the restriction and the fear and the stupid masks. But we also know there will be a loss that accompanies this freedom, and that loss will be the togetherness we will have called Never Being Alone. I would not relive this year for all the M&Ms in the world, but I will not soon trade in the marvel of once again finding myself with you.

On Watching Girlhood Fade

I believe in patent leather shoes. Cartoon band-aids. Sleepaway camp. The long, coast after you shed your training wheels and before your first lesson in driver’s ed. 

I have been an agent of Girlhood, splashing around in the 3 ft. level of the pool, fully immersed in the game, crying out and suddenly realizing no one was matching my Marco with a Polo. I glimpsed Girlhood riding off on the horizon for other girls. I was clinging to it, playing school in the basements of my friends, passing notes and trading secrets in our own little huddle.

I remember when everyone’s bathing suits started to change, the filling out and filling in and the tuck and the plunge and I was no kind of ready. My growth spurt was never up, it was only out.

Now, I am watching The Girlchild who lives with me board the growth spurt train. I add an extra bathing suit for her to the online Target cart. She will need two for sleepaway camp. She favorites one; I explain the plunging neckline and how it may not be the most comfortable for her. As if comfort were a major theme of becoming a young woman. I tell her this - all this - will not necessarily be comfortable, but it will be manageable, and I mean it.

She has questions about herself and there is acrylic paint all over her legs. Her dreams are so big and she swings between one and the other and oh, yes, her eyes alight at that other possibility there covered in paint. I am willing her dreams to be as outsized as she will allow them. I am willing her a future unrestricted by jeans size or the number of followers or likes. I will wrestle the world’s measuring stick with my own bare hands if I must. I will hide it from even myself.

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The other night we were riding the subway home The Girlchild and I. In my wisdom, I had told her to bring a book in case we were waiting at the station for awhile.

A woman sitting across from us was YELL-INGG. I trusted that I would get to hear EVERY-THINGGG that “Bro” kept calling her about even after he (allegedly) hung up and called back. The YELL-ING lady kept repeating it wasn’t her problem (it was) and she was trying already (allegedly), trying to get her $*#!ng card to work but nothing would $*#!ng work 

Meanwhile on the other side of the car the guy with the ear buds and the tattoos lamented on his phone that he couldn’t find Anybody EN-KNEE-BUH-DEE on Facebook anymore.

The Girlchild was reading and thumbing the same page of Percy Jackson. She said it was her first time reading the book, though she had listened to the audio version already. She admitted she was glad which she had, since she knew how to pronounce the brother’s name properly, Chiaron, pronounced “KEER-an.”

It strikes me now that this is one way we navigate the transition of our lives, the transferring from the girlhood train to the one that only women are fit to ride. We look and we listen and we absorb; the world presents itself as a text. It is a mercy and a gift that we then get to write our own chapters, though sometimes casting a different set of characters in a completely distinct setting than the one chosen for us.

I had felt fearful, even as near as the beginning of summer, for The Girlchild to turn the page. Fearful of what she might discover about the cruel world, about her incompetent parents, about her unadulterated self. I am reminded once more that we are reading and writing this text together, riding a rumbling subway, absorbing the input, synthesizing what all will become the story of how this momentum continues, with a denouement that is well beyond our sightline.

I still believe in the sanctity of Girlhood, and she still exists in peeks these days like the fireflies that the Girlchild spent so many summer nights chasing after. (And I hope she always does.)