Looking for the Light

Bev stared out of her Anchorage, Alaksa hotel window as night fell. She knew her chances to see northern lights would be better later, as the tour led them further north, away from the city lights.

            She still couldn’t believe that she was here, in Alaska. She recalled the months before, planning and reviewing tour packages, the emails back and forth between her and a travel agent. She had read and reread the itinerary, imagining each location, forming ideas about how the transitions from bus to boat to train would be. 

            August 27- Arrive in Anchorage. Gather information packet in the lobby and meet your tour guide.

            She had quietly observed the other tour participants at the information desk when she’d first arrived from the airport. This came easy, as she seemed to be unnoticed these days. An older woman, single, gray hair. As if she was fading from view the way the color faded from her hair. 

Most of them were retirees, couples, and one family with two older children, both girls. The mother stood stiffly on the side of the lobby, waiting with the family luggage and children, watching her husband ask questions about excursion opportunities. 

I wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of that stare, she thought. She wondered what the husband had done. He seemed unfazed, enthusiastically reviewing the additional options for adventure. He probably didn’t understand why his wife was so upset. He probably just fumbled some expectation of the wife who would now punish him for failing to read her mind. Poor guy. Poor, baffled men. 

Wait just a minute though! Maybe the wife had reasonable expectations. Maybe she had tried to communicate them, repeatedly in fact. Maybe she had spent years actively seeking solutions with a husband who wouldn’t, couldn’t take her concerns seriously. Was this brief moment a representation of their life together? The mother, saddled with the family’s “luggage”, figuratively and literally, standing on the edge of the action to form a protective space around the children and their belongings, while the husband was free to venture out, and seek add-ons of adventures and experiences? A camera was slung over his shoulder, while the mother clung in her hand a printout of the itinerary and instructions for arrival. These tokens seemed to solidify who got to carry what. 

Why are we so often harder on the women? Why do we so often sympathize with the husband of an angry wife? Give fathers extra credit for those things that are demanded of the mothers? 

She remembered a time when her own children were little. She had raced around grabbing diaper bags, water bottles, snacks to make their way to a group music class where they sat in a circle trying out various instruments and learning simple songs. As they were heading out, she reminded her toddler to slide her sandals on while she juggled the baby on her hip, slipping on her own flip-flops. She’d felt triumphant as she drove, they would make the class on time today. She raced in, settled onto the floor, smiled at her toddler and exhaled in a moment of stillness waiting for the instructor to begin. The serene young teacher sat down in a wind of patchouli air as her long skirt whooshed down with her. She began the ritual welcoming song as she greeted each child by name. Though the teacher was one to always present a zen-like posture, something startled her, an expression of uncertainty spreading across her face that revealed her still human status under that Buddha statue gaze. She began to blush! Stutter even, something about class beginning in just a moment. What had gotten this eternally chill teacher so ruffled? She stood, her skirt flowing around her again, reestablishing the flowery presence of a pleasant spring day, and practically tiptoed on bare feet around the circle. We were all rapt with curiosity, and Bev had wondered if the others were similarly satisfied to see a glimpse of the girl under the identity she had so carefully cultivated and intwined with. Her curiosity evaporated into failure when leaning down, the teacher whispered into Bev’s ear, with the soft, sweet breath of Snow White, “Your daughter isn’t wearing a diaper.” 

Bev’s face had burned with embarrassment. As she stood up awkwardly with the baby, she pulled on her toddler’s hand, encouraging her up as she was protesting, “Why Mommy?! Why?!”  Her bare bottom, and Bev’s failure, were exposed as her toddler’s sundress rose up during the struggle. Sweating, Bev leaned down to whisper, “We have to go. Mommy will explain later.” The room was quiet as Bev worked her way out of the classroom, and she caught the quiet disapproval on some of the other mothers faces. 

Somewhere between getting ready to leave the house and the class, her toddler had managed to remove her diaper without her knowing. This was a rookie mistake, a fathers mistake she thought. She knew if this had been her husband, the women would have chuckled, passed a diaper over to him knowingly, cutely, happy to be in the role of helper. She only felt their harsh evaluation, her not passing. This contrasted with the memory of her mother saying, “You’ve got a good man. Your man helps you out. Will even change a diaper.” She remembered at the time wondering why he was cast as a supporting role to her central one, but that was a long time ago. 

She doesn’t have her husband to wonder about anymore, or children to be evaluated on. She’s not evaluated on much of anything anymore, having now dropped out of all the competitions, aged out. Sometimes this felt like freedom, sometimes it felt like invisibility. Or worse, irrelevance. In the worst times, it felt like profound Aloneness. 

This is what had brought her, alone and unlikely, to Alaska. She was tired of waiting for one of her adult children to join her, for a friend to stop flirting with the idea of a vacation and commit, of waiting for a future potential male companion. Anyway, she really had no interest in making friends with any men. Her husband had driven her crazy, to be sure, but she loved him and he wasn’t going to be replaced, and there was no use pretending she could. 

She had made the decision to do what she wanted now. After all, hadn’t the years been a series of nurturing, giving, with small moments squeezed in for herself?

This was her chance, wasn’t it? 

She looked at the itinerary for tomorrow.

August 28- Boat ride to Valdez.

Her heart ached suddenly, a piercing grip. These were not new. She had come to live alongside them and wait them out. How Jim would have loved a boat ride through the bay. How she longed to read the details of tomorrows events aloud to him, the way she used to. She could imagine now his response, the way his eyes would light up, the way his face would become animated. Hot tears sprang to her eyes as she recalled the ways she didn’t always celebrate this about Jim. 

She understood now why the family in the lobby had been so intriguing to her. 

Hadn’t it been familiar to her, in an old but intimate way? Had she not identified with the mothers put off, left out expression? She had wondered why the woman hadn’t marched over, told the husband it was her turn to review the list of excursions while he tended to the children, luggage, and plans for the evening, but hadn’t she understood why it wasn’t just that easy?

  Or was it? Had it been her own reluctance to relinquish control every bit as much as it had been her husband’s obliviousness at times that limited her, and allowed him? She had read an article the other day. Women today were calling the seemingly obliviousness of men about the needs and tasks around them “weaponized incompetence”. Is that what it was? Had she too weaponized her competence though? Used it as a tool to maintain her edge over the agenda for her family? 

She realized now how she wanted to sit down with both the husband and the wife. Teach them everything she and Jim had learned. How one day, one of them would ache with longing for the other, ache in the deepest way. How he needed to pay more attention, and she needed to manage less. How she understood the absolute exhaustion of parenting in its different stages, and the way it left so little for each other, oneself. But, how these stages would one day be their sweetest, most cherished and treasured places in their hearts. How really, they just had to close their eyes and hold on sometimes, because one day, the ride would come to an end. 

She fought an overwhelming urge to find their room number, shake them awake, and fervently transfer these hard-won lessons. Instead, she whispered to Jim how much she missed him, that she would bring him with her tomorrow on that boat ride, and sat next to the ache instead of resisting it. She allowed herself a moment of excitement as she pictured whales or seals. In time, she fell asleep.

She arrived early to breakfast the next day ready to get started, her grief hiding somewhere, or maybe still asleep, giving her a break. 

One of the new habits she had formed as a newly single woman was to read during her meals. She was enjoying the book she had picked up at the airport on Life In Alaska when she noticed the father and children in line at the breakfast buffet. She watched as he carried two coffee cups to the table and carefully added cream to one of them. The mother joined her family, took a grateful looking sip of coffee and thanked her husband for ordering it for her. They still held that air of left over tension of a recent fight, but they were working their way back toward each other then? Good, she thought. 

After an hour and a half bus ride through lush forest and towering mountains in the distance, they stopped at a grocery store for snacks to take with them on the boat. She took her time in the store, selecting fresh fruit and trail mix, almost telling Jim that she made sure to get him bananas. Passing the magazine and book racks, she paused at the kids puzzle books. Thinking of the children on the bus, she chose one with dinosaurs on the cover. 

She had decided that the couple had to fumble and learn on their own, the way all of us did. How she had hated as a young mother the amnesia older people got about that stage in life, the way they forgot the messiness of life in the trenches and time had filtered out the bad memories, the way all of you had acted when you were trying to survive another day together, frazzled and tired. How they would look at her in the store, a baby crying in the cart, a toddler whining for candy, while she tried to hurriedly gather the items on her list. An older person would invariably stop her as she pulled the candy out of her now crying child’s hand with the proclamation, “Enjoy every moment. They are over too soon.” She would do her best to smile politely while continuing to extract the candy from her child’s death grip. Inside she would be thinking, When I am old, I will never stop to offer some trite advice from someone who has long since made their way out of the trenches, who has long since forgotten the trials of it, who is no longer qualified to speak to it. She decided she would only nod in understanding, or smile encouragingly, or today, take them a puzzle book which she hoped would provide a few moments of peace and quiet, and remind them they were part of an ancient and timeless quest, that so many of the rest of us have been on. A reminder that they would get to the other side of it, to just try to hold on through it. She hoped the gift would say all of this.

As she carefully made her way back to her seat, a bag in each hand, she leaned over with the puzzle book to the family and said, “It is beautiful to see a family on this tour.” The family thanked her gratefully and she thought she could see a small look pass between the parents. She thought it looked like love.