Escape to Gordon’s House
Adventures in Friendship
I closed the e-mail and sat back in my chair. My shoulders relaxed and I let out a breath that I’d been holding in, somehow, for weeks and weeks. I had just been given access to a magical escape hatch from the persistent cold, low light and mounds of gray snow that had narrowed the sightlines of my neighborhood for months. The e-mail was from a friend in Los Angeles saying she had been planning to redeem airline passes to fly to Chicago to visit me, but she quickly modified her thoughts after realizing that March where I live is hardly an ideal vacation destination.
In case you’re wondering, the average high temperature we hardy Chicagoans muddle through in March is 45 degrees; the low is 28. I should note that, on average, we live with temperatures in the forties from about October to April. Those numbers translate to many fires in the fireplace, twice that many cups of hot chocolate, and plentiful cases of seasonal affective disorder.
“I was thinking. What if you used my passes and met me out here instead?” my friend suggested, likely wondering why on God’s green earth I live where I do. “We could rent a house for the weekend. Maybe in Palm Springs.”
The average high in Palm Springs, California, in March is over 80 degrees.
“You mean Chicago in late winter doesn’t appeal to you?” I replied, teasing her.
“Meet me in the desert,” she wrote. “And I’ll see who else can make it out here.”
I should note, in case you hadn’t yet detected it, I’m a Midwestern girl. I like kicking through a blanket of fallen leaves in the woods and digging my hands into the pockets of my fleece jacket on a chilly day. I’m good at making fires in the fireplace, cooking with a slow cooker, and using the word cozy as a verb, as in “I’ll cozy it up in here.” It’s not that I love relentlessly gray skies or that I don’t appreciate the feel of warm sand under my feet, but most of my life, I’ve lived in the north.
I attempt—admittedly with only partial success—to “prefer the given,” an idea my old professor Father McClatchy introduced to us in college. Coined by British author Charles Williams, the phrase means choosing to appreciate what we have instead of being dissatisfied with the grace and other gifts God gives us.
In other words, if winter is a northerner’s lot in life for half of the year, what’s the point in wishing it were otherwise?
A woman who lives near me attempts to “prefer the given” of winter by posting daily PWTs (positive weather thoughts) as her status updates on Facebook every day in colder months. Sometimes they are as simple as “Grateful that the sun is out today.” Other times I can tell she is struggling to accept the day’s weather. “At least the rain cleared away that dirty black ice on the sidewalk,” she’ll write. Or, “Lights on the bushes make dark afternoons a little brighter.”
I’m a fan of the PWT and do try to prefer the given of winter, but—twist my arm!—I was willing to put more than sixteen hundred miles between myself and the sound of snowplows and salt trucks passing in the night.
I’d also just come through a challenging time. It wasn’t so much the literal bleakness of the long winter that affected me, but I had been stuck in an in-between place that felt lonely and disheartening. Part of it was the strange letdown of having finished writing my first book. Writing it had been an emotional trek as I explored vulnerable memories. Shifting my focus back to my usual world of making lunches, shopping for groceries, and relating with the outside world felt strange and almost dreamlike. Although I’d completed those household tasks over the months, my gaze had been inward and otherwise occupied. I’d been going through the motions, ever writing and revising in my head. And months before its release, I had been initiated into the business of the administrative details and publicity tasks into which authors must plunge. I felt hollowed out.
These are First World problems, to be sure. My children were healthy, happy, and thriving. I had the peaceful home and functional marriage and family I’d longed for since I was a child. But I felt dragged down. A spiritual director to whom I’d gone for guidance told me she felt I had become “fractalized,” or fragmented. She encouraged me to find quiet places to be with God, to try to do one thing at a time, and not to be so hard on myself. She told me she was praying that I would have eyes to see all the ways God was showing his love to me. Perhaps, in retrospect, part of my problem was that I was too burned out to see my life clearly, let alone “prefer” it. The Palm Springs trip was a gift and a sign of God’s love for me. It felt like a clean break and an opportunity to recharge. I counted the weeks, then days, until it was time to go.
Finally the weekend came. Four friends and I traveled to Palm Springs from around the country. We left our children with our husbands, packed our swimsuits, and made our ways to the rental we would soon affectionately know as “Gordon’s House.”
After arriving in California, I went out to the curb, stood under a palm tree, and blinked in the warm, afternoon sun. A moment later my friend pulled up, jumped out of her car, and grabbed me in a hug.
“You can take your anorak off now,” she said, tossing my bag into the back of her car.
Gordon’s House was beautifully decorated and cleared of all its owner’s personal effects, except one. On one of the bookshelves was a thin book that contained pictures taken at the house at a 1960s-themed birthday party. In miniskirts, leisure suits, wigs, and striking outrageous and comic poses, images of the aging guests at Gordon’s party kept my friends and me laughing all weekend.
Gordon’s House is a stellar example of Desert Modern architecture with an open floor plan, walls of windows, and a swimming pool. Beyond the pool in the backyard were two fruit trees, one orange and one grapefruit. Upon stepping into the yard, the gentle sunshine a kind of miracle, I walked to them, marveling at the palm trees and mountains that rose all around us. I reached up and plucked a grapefruit. Still standing under the tree, I tore into the fruit’s thick peel and opened it.
Where was I?
Had I really stood in the freezing rain outside of O’Hare airport only hours before?
When we had all arrived from points east and west of Palm Springs, my friends and I sat together at a round, white lacquered table in the dining room. We gave each other gifts. Salted caramels. Beaded bracelets. Bath salts. A silver heart hung from a soft leather cord. No one bickered, asked for a ride to lacrosse practice, or needed to be told to use the potty. I didn’t have to assign chores, answer a telephone, or check over homework. It was bliss. We were just five women, remembering what it was like just to take a deep breath and be ourselves. Our grown-up selves.
Looking around at my friends, I blurted out my first thought: “Even if we had to leave right now, this will have been the best weekend ever.” The weekend, of course, didn’t end then, but my exclamation became a catchphrase for us. As we cooked together, swam in the heated pool in the moonlight, or lounged on one of the huge sofas in the living room, one of us would exclaim, “Even if we had to leave right now . . .”
The weekend wasn’t all about shopping or drinking pink martinis—activities that seem to be de rigueur when girls’ weekends are portrayed on TV or in movies. In fact, none of us was interested in shopping for anything more than groceries. All of us are women who read, write, and edit professionally, and we had work to do. On Friday, we sat in companionable silence on deck chairs or at a glass table by the pool with our laptops. I occasionally went to the grapefruit tree to grab a snack. One friend set a gargantuan stack of magazine clips on the table in front of her, reading and critiquing them as she judged a writing contest. Another prepared lesson plans. Still another answered e-mail and worked through upcoming production schedules for her company. I wrote a few articles and blog posts, including a newspaper column on creativity in the digital age and a blog post about Charlie Sheen.1 (Sheen, at the time, was the focus of the national spotlight for what turned out to be increasingly bizarre behavior.)
Our weekend at Gordon’s House happened to be when a devastating earthquake hit Japan. One of us, Keiko, has family in that country and watched, grief-stricken, as the tragic news was delivered. For the rest of the night, we watched news coverage and sat around her like protective aunts, rubbing her back and praying for the safety of her family as she frantically tried to contact loved ones in Japan. Fortunately, thanks mostly to the power of Facebook, she was able to determine that her friends and family there were unharmed.
We five friends rarely talk on the phone. The majority of us, in fact, are allergic to that form of communication. But that weekend, between dozing in the sun, swimming, and tapping away on our laptops, we shared the private hopes and burdens that we’d not been able to articulate via e-mail. We thanked God together for our friendships and the other gifts he has given us. The two of us who’d come from the Midwest stood in the sun for long periods of time, our faces raised to the sky, soaking in the light. One friend, a brilliant woman whose life at this moment doesn’t afford her much room to be the artist she is, said she felt like the four of us were midwives to her that weekend, helping to birth ideas that had been gestating in her, hidden away for so long.
We also talked about the way that motherhood changes us. Our girls’ weekend didn’t bring us back to who we were before we had children but invited us to explore and know who we are now. After all, who we were five or ten or fifteen years ago is sort of beside the point. All five of us are mothers. Two of us have children by adoption. Two have found what one has named “second-chance love” after losing first husbands, respectively, to cancer and to divorce. All of us continue to journey through our own losses, uncertainty, and pain. We spoke of the energy of girlhood and how we felt the tingling of that preteen buoyancy reappearing in our hearts and minds as we approached midlife.
“Even if we had to leave right now . . .”
On Sunday morning, we moved out of Gordon’s House and went out for brunch before leaving for home. Azaleas hung off of trellises around our table. I looked from the faces of my friends to the brilliant pink flowers to the clear, sunny sky above and wondered if all of this would seem like a dream when I was home again that night.
(It would. It did.)
Amy Hilbrich Davis, the CEO and founder of Familylife success.com, encourages parents to maintain their friendships, even—or perhaps especially—during the most difficult seasons of parenthood. Moms and dads need friends, she reminds us.
“Friends play,” Hilbrich Davis says. “They bring joy to your life. They make you laugh. Friends provide healthy perspective. They listen. Friends save you when you’re sinking. They remind you of your priorities. Friends are life-sustaining. They are invaluable.”2
“You know something I love about you?” my daughter Isabel asked me recently as we sat on the couch, my arm pulled around her.
“Tell me!”
“I like your friends,” she said. She snuggled in close and looked into my eyes. “They make you happy, and they make me happy too.”
We do need friends. Real friends. We need people to whom we can say our worst things on our worst days, particularly when children are very small and our worlds, similarly, seem to shrink too. We need heart friends who accept us as we are, see the best in us, and are comforting presences to us wherever we are in life.
“The best advice I ever gave to a friend when she was a new mom is that there are days when you really think you can’t stand it one more moment,” a woman tells me. “The baby won’t stop crying. You’re so lonely and isolated. Everything’s messy. Everything smells bad. Terrible thoughts enter your mind. To leave your family. To abandon the baby. Or something even worse. But just telling someone how desperate you feel releases you from those kinds of thoughts. If it’s a friend who has gone through it before, sometimes you can even find a way to laugh about it.”
Getting away for a few days works wonders too, as I found at Gordon’s House and during many other times in the course of my parenting. Although, for most of us, most of the time, a trip to an exotic locale is out of reach, there are other ways to get a break. Had my children been a few years younger than they were, I doubt I would have been able to take the time for the getaway to Palm Springs. But at this moment in life, it was possible to accept the gift of the airline passes and pack my bags.
When my children were much younger, my husband made extended business trips. He still travels for work, but a flagging economy reduced the number of times he’s sent abroad every year and shortened the trips’ duration. (Silver linings, I suppose.) Although I might be remembering this detail incorrectly, it seemed that all of his longer trips needed to be taken in the winter when, as previously established, the warmest it got for months at a time was not so warm at all.
The combination of winter, four children, and single, stay-at-home parenting was a recipe for cabin fever of the most extreme sort. Every week was a blur of numbers and household tasks for me. One hundred nails to trim. Five sets of teeth, twice a day, either to brush or to oversee their brushing. Forty library books to check out, read, and return. One hundred twenty-six meals to prepare. Eighty-four socks to wash, dry, and pair. Countless scraped elbows and knees to bandage.
Sometimes, regardless of whether they were a few days or weeks, my husband’s trips never seemed to end. When my kids were too young to read the clocks, I took to misrepresenting the time. Remember what I said earlier: desperate times call for desperate measures. Anyway, the extra sleep was good for them. Having four overtired kids and a husband half a world away is no fun for anyone.
“Oops. Almost bedtime! Time for tubs!” I’d announce at about five-thirty or six instead of the usual seven o’clock. Sunsets in the late afternoon were my accomplice in this ruse. After getting the children bathed, read to, prayed with, and safely tucked into bed, I’d busy myself loading up the preschool backpacks with sneakers, empty paper towel rolls, a canned food item that starts with T, or whatever was the requested item on the half sheet of paper from their teachers. I’d then crawl under the kitchen table to chip away at the dried spackle of rice cereal, yogurt, and pasta that coated the floorboards. I’d load the dishwasher, check on whichever child was calling for me, pick up toys, and then retreat to the basement to attack the principal job of the evening: the laundry.
(Isn’t being a mommy glamorous?)
Most of the time, I failed to put smaller numbers, numbers that related to my own care and well-being, on the daily to-do list. What I aspired for every day was to spend thirty minutes on the treadmill, take one hot bath at the end of the day, and read for one hour before going to sleep. On the rare occasions I accomplished even one of those tasks, I was a more balanced person and more equipped to mother the following day. But it was rare that I did.
Self-care continues to elude me too much of the time, even now that my kids are older. After the kids are off to school, I open the kitchen cabinet to put away the cinnamon sugar and find myself taking all of the spices out onto the counter, washing down the shelves, checking expiration dates, and tossing out old jars. As I close the cabinet, I notice that someone has spilled grape juice and it’s splattered and dried on the wall. I wash it, noticing that the baseboards are in dire need of washing. After crouching down and moving around the room spraying and cleaning, I glance over at the clock on the microwave and see that it’s way past when I was supposed to start my workday and I decide that, yet again, I must forego jogging on the treadmill. (Alas.)
But when they were very young and David was traveling for work, I almost always failed to take good care of myself. I think of it now, every time I’m sitting on a plane and the flight attendants do their safety spiel. They inform passengers that, in case of loss of cabin pressure, oxygen masks will drop from the ceiling. They instruct us to pull our masks toward ourselves and position them over our noses and mouths. Only after securing the elastic band behind our heads are we directed to assist any small children beside us. The message is clear—we’ll be no help to our children if we’re unconscious and slumped over in our seats. Too many parents, in the thick of caring for little ones, have reversed those steps—even after securing the oxygen masks for our children, we forget to put on our own.
During those periods of single-parenthood, I tried to prefer the given. Winter could be snow angels and marshmallows and hot chocolate, right? Of course it was, but in reality, it also could mean chapped lips, hacking coughs, and drooping heaps of wet snow pants. Many days, I lit a fire in the fireplace, piled pillows and blankets in front of it, and read to the children. I bought a giant roll of craft paper and we did art projects at the kitchen table. After the excruciatingly long bundle-up period, we all went outside and played in the snow until someone lost a mitten or the sky grew too dark to see.
Not long ago, while looking through some old pictures, my daughter pointed out that our snowmen sported red, green, and blue polka dots.
“Why did our snowmen look like that?” Isabel asked. “With those funny dots?”
“One of you insisted on it,” I answered. “I can’t remember whose idea it was. Somehow it was very important to that person that our snow people didn’t look like everyone else’s. So I let you use food coloring.”
“They’re weird,” Isabel said.
While David was away, I was grateful for each and every minute in which the kids were happily occupied. I remembered those long days and how happy I’d been when the polka dot project began. Letting them all squeeze colors onto the snowmen busied the children for an extra half hour each time we did it. After our outside adventures, we’d all trudge back inside, again. I made hot chocolate, again. I arranged mittens, gloves, and hats over the heat registers, again. I hung the snow pants and coats to dry in the laundry room, again.
Meanwhile, David was across the globe working in India. On longer business trips, the kids would sometimes say to me, “I can’t remember what Daddy looks like anymore.” (I didn’t share that tidbit with him. He already missed them terribly.) Although his longest trip approached three weeks, most were shorter.
My friend Elizabeth’s husband also traveled for work. Our sons were friends and, back then, we had a secret agreement that when one of our children was invited to a birthday party that for whatever reason we didn’t want them to attend, we could use the other family as an excuse. We knew it would have taken our boys weeks to recover had we allowed them to go to some of the extravagant and overstimulating parties to which they were invited.
We were each other’s built-in excuse, free pass, and “Get Out of Jail Free” card.
“Oh, I’m sorry, honey,” one of us might tell our four, year-old son. “But you aren’t free for the combination paintball, Chuck E. Cheese, laser-tag sleepover next Friday. We’re getting together with . . .”
And we would plan an outing together.
Once, when both of our husbands were traveling, I called Elizabeth.
“Would you and the boys like to have a sleepover on Friday? I think I’m sort of losing it here,” I said. “Bring them in their pajamas. They can all sleep in the basement in sleeping bags. And our living room couch folds out. You could sleep by the fire.”
She accepted my offer in a heartbeat.
“It would be nice to have a little adult company,” I murmured, trying not to sound desperate.
That winter night we talked. I couldn’t believe what it was like to speak to an adult again and to laugh about something more nuanced than the antics of Bob the Builder or Elmo and his goldfish, Dorothy. The bigger kids played games, watched a movie, and slept on sleeping bags in the basement. They were happily occupied with the novelty of it all. My friend and I sat by the fire and laughed.
When Elizabeth and her boys left the next morning, I was restored. I found myself paying better attention to my children and being able to appreciate the ordinary blessings around me.
A little hand reaching up to hold mine.
A drawing of a row of hearts on a roll of craft paper.
The smiles on my children’s faces.
A polka-dotted snowman.
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• If you checked 1–2 boxes, consider yourself fortunate. Keep investing in healthy friendships that make you glad to be you. Send your true friends a note in the mail—yes, the real mail—to tell them how much you appreciate them. (Consider suggesting that you all meet for a weekend in Palm Springs.)
• If you checked 3–4 boxes, acknowledge that you are headed toward Mommy Burnout. (See appendix 2.) Tell someone how you are feeling. Find ways to be restored: create a playgroup with trusted neighbors and friends, join a MOPS (Mothers of Preschoolers) group (www.mops.org), or trade babysitting hours with a friend. (Also, do a little research on rentals in Palm Springs.)
• If you checked 5+ boxes, do all of the tasks listed for 3–4 checkmarks and, additionally, speak to a therapist, doctor, pastor, and/or other trusted person about how exhausted and out of sorts you are. It’s time to get help. (And get to Palm Springs at your earliest convenience: 360 days of sun! Joshua Tree National Park! Orange trees!)
You can’t remember your favorite color.