Only five months here and this whole house already screams of us.

Mini-headlamps hanging from doorknobs. Bulk design project samples stacked in closets. Bowls of animal cracker crumbs on various desks or counters. Books of all sizes falling over, cockeyed, diagonal.. some half open.. on shelves in almost every room. Rows and rows of national geographic and other magazines lining and tucked into random spaces. Pillows. Everywhere. Hammers, tape measures and other tools on pantry shelves. Shiny red and pink bikes hiding in bushes. Lounge chairs out back, throw blankets tossed over them by the fire. Computers, laptop and desktop, on 70% of the flat surfaces. Stuffed dog toys under foot. Cookbooks jammed into the kitchen shelving, or perpetually hanging open on the counter. Backpacks piled in corners. Socks. Everywhere. Dusty footprints on rich saltillo tile. Every single window open. And doors, too. Cordless or cell phones left/lost in strange spots in various rooms. Big orange sunflower nightlight in the kitchen, and remnants of round tree-trunk sized wood pillars in the garage. Pens and pencils everywhere you look (but never when you need them). Amusing Cirque du Soleil, Tour de France, sand paintings and cafe wall art here and there. Bulletin boards and white boards. Camera gear resting on window sills. Wine glasses half-full of iced tea. Notebooks and binders and post-it notes. Mentura and NetFlix mailers piled on the living room shelf. Numerous speakers hanging from multiple ceilings. Construction paper and colored pencils. Game controllers. Dictionaries. Archival bins behind doors stopped with big rocks from the backyard. Wheat-ish plants in water glasses on the dining room table. Handprints etched in tile from two Christmases ago. Bundled bookmarks in yellow garden buckets. Wicker hampers with dusty, dirty jeans draping out. Sleeping bags hanging from inside closet doors. Candles frozen in mid-drip on kiva ledges, white ceiling fan always on. Sierra Club fundraisers on the desk, panoramic postcards tacked to walls.

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I’m feeling my 33.

And when I stuck my feet in that silty, foreign water all those years ago without the slightest idea where I was going, when I’d finally leave the freeway or how I’d jump-start a new life that fit us, how we’d eat or where we’d sleep - I felt myself more wide awake and stronger than at any other time.

In some ways I’ve been missing the challenges and hardships of single parenting. The seventeen hands and forty sets of eyes a person needs to raise two beings solo. The feast and famine, mostly famine, of a single-income family. And that of a freelancer, no less. All the decisions, some tough and some that need to be made in a split-second with very little information. Nobody to “run and get the kids” because you have an appointment. Nobody to watch this one over here while you watch that one over there. Nobody to cook while you clean up or vice versa. Nobody to quell the anxieties when you walk back in the door after putting your barely 3-foot-tall off-spring on the bus for the first time. Nobody to bounce ideas or options off of. Nobody to stop you before you make a big mistake. Honey, it’s all you.

But? It’s all glorious, 100% you. And WOW. What a rush.
Because after doing it all solo for so long, you develop a mighty endurance and a bad-ass level of self-sufficiency that you know without doubt will see you through any possible battle or landscape. Your strengths and agilities, mental and physical both, are always out front, taut but flexible, and very, very apparent to yourself.

But when someone else enters the daily picture and you suddenly lose the need to be one hundred percent solely responsible for all aspects of your own survival and well-being, and of those you’re in charge of, there’s a softening that happens. There’s a subtle compromise of the quickness, of the urgencies and keen awarenesses that used to occupy that place. Survival now approaches leisure. One can relax. And boy does one ever.

But there’s a creeping guilt, too, for yourself for letting go and for the other person, for the slack they’re now holding. And some small part of you misses struggle, because it represents its own raw adventure, your personal contest with various natures, including your own. It feels like the tough daily workout you’ve abandoned and attempt to justify while you munch on potato chips. Help feels decadent. Like the extra energy you save by hanging back while someone else helps one of the kids with their homework is gonna go straight to your thighs.

Luckily love and friendship go a long way to make up for this, and let’s face it, it’s a whole lot more fun to share life with someone than it is to go it alone. And so it bugs you sometimes, maybe when all that saved energy and instinct and at-the-ready stuff builds up to critical mass and you find yourself restless and plagued with the sudden urge to leap naked out in front of a fast-revolving world while everyone else is sleeping… just to see if you’ve still got what it takes to make it back alive.

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My mom is careening through Navajo country now, somewhere outside of Holbrook, Arizona at 70 mph en route to Santa Fe for the weekend. GO MOM for taking a two-day-each-way road trip just to spend three days here. This is something she’d have thought wasteful and pointless, years ago.This will also mark the first time Shane’s spent any time with she or my step-dad, Bruce. They met once very briefly last May when Shane was traveling through Reno late one night on his way from San Francisco to Iowa and I was already here in New Mexico. It’s a fun story:

We were on the phone together as he rolled through, he on his headset and me on mine, working late, 1000 miles away. Coming down the hill into Reno he mentioned he had a headache. I told him I knew a place he could get drive-through aspirin. Oh yeah? he says, and I direct him off I-80 and onto 395 south.

I tell him to hang on a second, and click over to the other line and make a call.

“Do you have any advil?”
“What!”
“Advil.. do you have any?”
“Yes, why?”
“Can you go get two and come back to the phone?”
“Tonya! What is going on?”
“Just get them out, you’ll see!”

-a minute later-

“Ok.”
“Got em?”
“Yes I’ve got them.”
“Ok, now take them and go stand outside.”
“What!?”
“Come on! You don’t have much time!”
“Tonya Michelle!”
“Oh live a little! Just go stand outside with the advil in your hand”

(sigh)

“Alright, HANG ON.”

She puts the phone down and I hear the screen door shut.

I click back over to Shane. A few more directions and he, headache throbbing, is rounding the corner onto the tiny, dark street where some strange lady he’s never seen before is standing out in front of the third house on the left looking funny at him, with advil in her hand.

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