Express Lane Tolls in Effect

 “I sat with my anger long enough until she told me her real name was grief.”

It was several years ago that I came across this C.S. Lewis quote, and it was one of those moments that stayed with me, because honestly, I have been – am – pretty angry lately. And by lately, I mean for years now. The image that accompanied the quote, initially when I saw it, was a black and white photo of two women, wearing black and white, sitting side by side yet wholly separate on a bridge. A little mini abyss. Together but alone. I felt like I knew them; they were both me.

What makes me feel even more unhinged about my daily dose of anger is that it seems like an irrational default for someone who, by all measures, is doing well. A good job in a company I’ve been at for years; bills that I don’t have to shuffle to pay; children who do well in school and have empathy and always come home at night; good friends whom I am truly so thankful fill my texts and happy hours with balance; a husband who truly believes that I am completely capable and tells me he loves me, that I’m beautiful to him, just casually enough, randomly and often throughout our days that I know it absolutely.

But also, as I remind myself the reasons I have to be content and thankful, the world around us is broken. We are the reason, intent on marching like lemmings off our own cliffs to prove our fidelity to our own rigidity. It’s infuriating and embarrassing and upsetting, and I am grieving what I want it to be.

The Arctic Circle has seen 100-degree heat. Hate crimes have increased by double digits over the past few years. I am losing PTO for the third straight year because my company caps its accumulation, but also creates an internal culture that better-nots taking it over losing it. The likely candidate of one of our two-party political system is facing 91 criminal indictments while the other will be 82 years old in January 2025, and both those things make me feel a little like we’re being punked (although, if we are or aren’t, I’ll take the latter). The aliens came, looked around and they left. England is sitting in the pub with France like, “Mates, I know Seasons 1-240 of the US were a little dull, but blimey, have you seen the new stuff?!?” And seeing a concert now costs approximately 400% more than before COVID, which isn’t really catastrophic; it just pisses me off.

My Samsung Health app that monitors my sleep tells me that my sleep animal is a Nervous Penguin. Penguin sleepers can fall asleep but wake up too often at night. Metaphorically, penguin sleepers nap with one eye open and half of their brain awake to watch out for predators. I honestly felt so seen when my watch explained this to me. Of course I’ve been tired for years. Of course I’m sleep-deprived and testy. I am protecting my household, my life, and my country from leopard seals and killer whales.

It seems like it boils down to this: This part is hard. This middle-adulting part. It’s so. Effing. Hard.

Maybe the secret is that it’s all hard, but we get old and forget. Maybe the ability to look back and see all that we’ve made it through, all the hard, is already a gift. I joke that my job – managing proposals – is doable because you jump from fire to fire, but they are different fires. Like the proverbial frog, it takes some time to realize that the new fire is just as hot. In the interim, the new fire feels like respite. Hold your chin to your chest. Remember to pull your shoulders down from your ears. Feel the stretch. Close your eyes. Let your body unclench. Eyes. Jaw. Shoulders. Deep breath.

Baby me (in my early 20s), stuck at at work, watching in real-time as a joint bank account depleted via gut-punching withdrawals in Blackhawk (a Colorado casino town) was hard, while simultaneously doing a customer service job that prized big smiles and lacy camisoles under black suit jackets. We made Otis Spunkmeyer cookies every morning in the adult equivalent of an easy-bake oven, and coffee and hot chocolate, and 80% of the staff was always on a smoke break. Be friendly. Be real. Smile. Always, always smile. Sign here. You’re going to love it.

Having a child in the NICU was hard. Having two under two was hard, two in diapers, two in daycare. We wouldn’t have believed it if someone had told those stressed-out young parents we’d multiply our salaries, 401ks, own houses, plural. I’m not sure how we did it, dancing on a shoestring, honestly.

I thought dealing with undiagnosed dyslexia was hard. Watching elementary school friendships implode with middle school was hard.  Explaining that, in fact, I could not say that we weren’t getting divorced was hard. 2020 was hard. It’s still not fair that your teachers lined the carpool lane to give you the contents of your locker in a brown paper bag marked with your last name. That memory will stay. I can’t fix it or lessen it.

Is this part harder? I don’t know. Memory takes a lot of poetic license, Tennessee Williams said, and I think about that a lot. I accidentally went through natural childbirth but will still blanch at someone else’s non-catastrophic stitches story. It’s not apples to apples, even when it’s our own orchard.

Maybe five years ago – or maybe longer or shorter, because what is time – Colorado started a toll-road expansion project in between Denver and Colorado Springs. It was called “the gap” project, I guess because it spanned “the gap” between metro areas where people went north and south at their own peril. It was a mess, but supposedly finished early, though who really knows. Because of ubiquitous “supply chain issues” post-COVID, the technology to actually monitor and charge commuters via license plate cameras was delayed by probably a year or more. In the meantime, there was an extra lane on the highway, people used it, and traffic improved. There was room for everyone, more or less. Maybe six months ago, a digital highway sign appeared that said that tolls were waived while testing was in process. Then, a couple weeks ago it said, “Express Lane Tolls in Effect.” There is now a price, as promised, where once there was none. But I’ve already mostly forgotten the unavoidable hassle of the construction.

I have a good, well-paid job with fairly exceptional benefits that I mostly dread going to. My name means something there, in certain circles, because I’ve been there for as long as it takes a child to graduate from high school. I have equity there, most of it earned. I have a complicated relationship with my once-mentor boss, in the same way that perhaps my daughters look at me with more and more skepticism as they realize that I’m often still looking for the adult in the room. Perhaps I’ve conflated career goals with being promoted and compensated rather than achieving a satisfying life balance, but also am also looking down the barrel of two children going to college, and beyond. Of parents who despite some scary months and phone calls, are thankfully still healthy and independent, and to whom I am forever grateful and gladly accept the natural circle of things, giving me an opportunity to pay their support forward when they need it.

Because I was such a mild-mannered and respectful teenaged daughter (as I remember it), it was somewhat a surprise that my college-bound daughter’s requirements for leaving the nest were “far, very far, private and expensive.” All her other undisclosed criteria is being kept in Fort Knox, since it had room. I mean, yes, I went to school out-of-state and then studied abroad, but only because of a judicious appreciation for scholarship, and surely I took into account my parents’ concerns about the distance and expense. Yet when I mention things like student debt/income ratio to my daughter, it’s like I’m some sort of carnival barker, highly suspicious and to be avoided unless there is perhaps the possibility of a comically large stuffed animal or maybe a plastic-bagged goldfish who will need a new habitat fit for the very Midas of fishes.

I’ve had a good relationship with my daughters’ father, though since they started driving, we have to plan to talk. It never seemed to matter all that much if there were different rules at different houses. But what are the rules now, for us as co-parents, for our nearly adult children? As “adults” ourselves, we all know what a BS title that is. I will always need an adult who is more adult than I am to be the one to tell me to maybe don’t move my arm like that, and give it a week. And how tax brackets work. And if I need supplemental car insurance at Hertz. This part is hard. This part feels precarious, because if we/I screw it up, there’s not a lot of runway left. I only came home for one and a half summers after I graduated from high school. Not out of animus; out of good parenting that put wings and roots under me, allowed me to make some big mistakes, and work them out. But still, I didn’t spend a lot of time in my childhood zipcode after I turned 18. I recognize the natural cycle, the personal regrets we want to prevent our children from repeating, the hopes and fears that accidentally come out sounding more like criticism than love.

I want to be the person who has it all together, seamlessly. But I’m the person pressing cold hands against my eyes, waking up already aggrieved with a world that probably isn’t particularly targeting me. It’s just that I am carrying so many things, not particularly gracefully. I want to be the best mother, even though I forget who has third period off and who has which student club on Wednesdays and tutoring on which Friday. A good daughter, even though I don’t call often enough. A good teammate and manager, even though I show up late to meetings I scheduled myself and have post-it notes that are weeks old. The best ex-wife, always tricky at best. The best friend, even though most days I can’t commit to plans until I know how the workday will end. The best wife, even though I am tired, and anxious, and failing to keep it all together far more often than I’d like.

There is only so much of me, and I cannot possibly do this again tomorrow. And next month. Not to mention, say, June 2028… which coincidentally, if you choose randomly and then Google, pops up a result a few options down of “Will an asteroid hit the Earth in June 2028?” Mmhm. Cool, cool. I didn’t click.  …Or maybe when I look back on it, I will see how it was all a piece of the whole, and if only I could have just trusted, and relaxed, I could have unclenched my jaw and taken less ibuprofen.

There are two poems that I think about a lot lately. One is Wild Geese by Mary Oliver, and the other is Good Bones by Maggie Smith. I’d encourage you to read them both in full. They’re short. But for right now, I’ll just leave this here:

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting…
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.