We had moved to Northern California from Chicago, where the crime had begun to feel overwhelming and the weather seemed almost punatively harsh. I didn’t mind these things so much for myself. I was, as any Midwesterner will tell you, ‘used to it”. But now we had little children, and a small town in a moderate climate seemed ideal. So we planned on raising our kids in Mendocino, a tiny hamlet on the Pacific ocean, far away from the ills of modern society. If that sounds stupid, it was an idea born of the mind of new parents. “I”, it thinks, dully, “will protect my children from guns, drugs, gangs, cynicism, violence, pollution, monsters.” It had all seemed so simple. We would get them to a small sea-side village, where they would grow up among nature, far from the horrors of a big city. They could become who they were supposed to be, free from the stresses and corruption of urban life. As I look back on myself as I had thought these things, I can only muster the bare minimum of empathy for such naivete. The responsibility of having small children can be overwhelming. The idea of protecting them can seem like the stuff of fairy tales; a tall tower, perhaps, where predators can’t reach, or a fairy godmother who will help them through hard times. Or maybe its a place; a perfect somewhere, not too big, not too small, not too isolated, but “just right”.
So we moved. Mendocino was a rural existence. In summer I hung their clothes in the sun, absorbing lavender, jasmine, rosemary, and wild mint as they dried. They ate fish and produce from local farmers markets, breathed ocean air, played in redwood forests, ran in fields full of wild flowers, made sand castles on pristine beaches. At nighttime, they had a sky full of stars, in winter, thunder and lightning storms that seemed like bravura performances by the world’s most beautiful and melodramatic diva. They bathed together looking out the window at birds, foxes, rabbits and deer. At bedtime I sang them songs, Honky-Tonk Girl, You Are My Sunshine, Love Me Tender, Eight Days A Week. I read them stories; Frog and Toad Are Friends. Owl At Home. Go Dog Go! Are You My Mother? I Am A Bunny, and of course, the classics; Rapunzel, Cinderella, Goldilocks.
It seemed ideal, until Ares started school. For one thing, it became apparent that Ares was being bullied, and there was no one at the school who cared about it, least of all the parents of the bully. I had no cell reception, no family, no friends. Ares broke his arm when he was five and we had to drive more than two hours to get him to a doctor who could set the break and put a cast on his arm. More than that, the school was depressing. Funding was increasingly scarce and the teachers seemed burnt out and mean. One day I was in his classroom and I noticed that his name was written on a paper plate that had been pinned to the wall. When I asked the teacher about it she explained that he had looked out the window at a red tractor passing by, when he should have been looking at her, so the paper plate with ARES written on it had been placed on the “demerit wall” for all to see. I didn’t understand this. I would have looked at a red tractor if there was such a good thing to see out the window. Who wouldn’t? One day she told me that she had seen me holding his hand as we walked to his classroom. “Don’t do that.” She commanded sternly. “You’re coddling him.” I hated driving away from there, leaving him there, and the thought of leaving Anais there was incomprehensible to me.
I felt trapped. I had already fled Chicago, then Kenilworth. You couldn’t just move any time you had a problem, could you? You couldn’t just keep looking for the perfect place, the perfect situation, could you? You were supposed to deal with your situation and not just flee, weren’t you?
We did though. We fled. We moved to San Anselmo, a small, sunny town in Marin County. The day after we moved, Ares and I visited his new school. As we walked around the campus, kids began to notice him, some jumped up and down, excited to meet the “new kid’ they’d heard about. We met the principle and the receptionist in the office. It was “popsicle day” and kids were walking around, in shorts and flip flops with mango, pineapple and blackberry frozen treats.
The weather here was so much warmer, and I realized I needed to get the kids some new clothes. On our first first week there, I dropped Ares off at school, and Adam, Anais and I went to the nearest Target. The plan was that they’d go to a cafe and have lunch while I shopped, and we’d meet after. There were so many things I needed, like shorts, t-shirts, dresses, flip flops, swimsuits, and pajamas. But as I walked through the aisles, I realized that there was also a surprising amount of things I hadn’t known I needed, like bean bag chairs, playroom rugs, toys, lamps, bubble bath, books, and kid’s dishes and cups. Once I had packed my huge red shopping cart full of treasures, I made my way to the checkout line. ‘This cart is full of our future!’ I thought happily.
As I loaded my purchases onto the big conveyor belt, I saw Adam standing near the exit holding a visibly upset Anais, one tear still making its way down her perfect, pink cheek. He was clearly angry. Adam never gets angry. The second he saw me he started yelling. Adam never yells. “Where have you been?” he began. “We’ve been looking all over for you for a half an hour! Anais had a total meltdown!” As I unloaded cargo shorts, dinosaur T-shirts, soothing lavender bubble bath bombs, sundresses, ‘sensitive skin’ sunscreen, and moon shaped nite-lites on to the belt, the joy vanished, instantly, from each item, one by one.
The checkout lady seemed to feel sorry for me, but there was also a soupcon of contempt in her gaze, which subtly but succinctly communicated to me that in her eyes, I had brought my squalid, abusive domestic situation in to her place of work. It didn’t matter that she was wrong. There was really no way to tell her that she was wrong. It only mattered that I flee the stage on which I was cast in that role as soon as possible. I paid her quickly, and loaded up the car. I held Anais in my arms for a bit, and then we left the now cursed Target and got on the highway to go home. I was silent, stunned by the unexpected avalanche of rage that had been shot at me. I had been so happy, finding things for the children and our new life. It seemed so strange to be yelled at, and alien emotions came over me; shame, humiliation, mortification. It seemed wrong somehow. Up till now it seemed like we’d always been on the same team, or something.
The shock of it. The tears started, hot and fast. I could not speak. I could not stop crying. I couldn’t completely ‘lose it’, because Anais was in the car. So I just let the tears fall quietly, pathetically, all the way home. I cried as we drove. I cried while unloading the white bags with the red Target logo out of the car. I cried quietly, while preparing dinner for Ares and Anais. Adam had disappeared somewhere after arriving home. Somehow I made it through bath time and pajama party and put the children to bed. And then I went to bed. Alone.
After a while of tossing and turning, dehydrated from crying, I went downstairs to get some water. After a brief search, I found Adam, curled up on his side on the one couch we had. It hit me how he must be feeling. After moving from his peaceful existence by the ocean, his life uprooted, he now had to deal with a completely new environment. He never once complained about this, never spoke of the financial disruption to his career. How awful to have been at the mercy of Anais’ panic attack and my tear-filled silence with no one to talk to. I thought about all this as I looked at him, empathy slowly entering my tiny, selfish heart like an IV drip. Somehow, feeling wounded gives you a license to hurt others. Self pity can blind you to another’s pain. “Here’s what we’re going to do.” I said, as a way out came to me. “We are going to go upstairs with a bottle of red wine and some things to read. We can sit in bed and read until we feel like sleeping. We won’t talk about what happened today. Ever.” He got up and followed me upstairs.
In hindsight, it seems obvious that all of us were stressed out by the whole situation, the bullying, the move, and the new environment. Anais would not normally have become so upset at not being able to find me, Adam would not have been so stressed out by her reaction, and I would not have been so devastated by his anger. I think I was shell-shocked by the trauma of Ares being bullied day after day, and feeling responsible for putting him in that situation in the first place. Also, we had been uprooted from our home of four years, the only home Anais had ever known. We had moved there from Kenilworth when she was only seven weeks old. I had reacted to Mendocino’s bullying, its danger, its isolation, by moving heaven and earth in an abbreviated amount of time to get us out of there. It was like falling dominoes. I was completely blindsided by such an out of proportioned reaction to being a few minutes late. Now I understand what he must have gone through, but at the time I was just knocked over by grief, shock and humiliation. We were all probably exhausted and overwhelmed.
The next day I was still sad, but I was sure we had made it through the worst of it. After I took Ares to school, I went grocery shopping at the local shopping center, and on the way out, I let myself look at the window display of a little consignment store that I usually forced myself to pass by, so as not to want what I could not afford and did not deserve. It was all so beautiful. But I had cost us enough as it was, with the move, the new house, and all that they entailed. That day though, because of the trauma of the day before, the crying, the residue of feeling sorry for myself I guess, I looked. There in the window was a pair of the boots. Not the old, beat up, Laura Luck, busker boots, of course, but the Celine, Fall Vogue boots that I had given up almost five years earlier. I could not believe it. I went in and asked how much they wanted for them. “Eighty-five dollars” was the reply. I handed over a credit card. Adam’s credit card.
As I drove home I looked around. There was a pretty little downtown, a library, and a park with a statue of a deer. There were coffee shops, a book store, children’s shops and boutiques. This place was small, bustling, charming, cozy. I began to feel an unfamiliar sensation. I was cautiously but unmistakably optimistic. I hadn’t even known that I had lost that feeling. Somewhere along the way I had become a nervous wreck. I had been operating from a place of fear. In Chicago, I was afraid of gangs and gun violence. In Kenilworth I was afraid of my children becoming, elitist, entitled. In Mendocino, I was afraid of the ocean, cliffs, drugs, isolation.
As I drove up the mountain, I thought of something I had heard on NPR’s ‘Science Friday’. Scientists have a theory that to look for life on other planets, to narrow down such an enormous search, they have to consider only planets that are located in what they call the ‘Goldilocks Zone’. This means that only planets located in ‘just the right’ distance from their suns, the way our earth is, will have liquid water on them, which is necessary for carbon based life as we know it. If a planet is too far away from its sun, any water it ever had will be freeze dried. If a planet is too close to its sun, any water that it ever had will have been boiled away. This lack of liquid water will then disqualify these planets, for the time being anyway, from scientific consideration. Like Goldilock’s porridge, this “Goldilocks Zone” is not too hot, not too cold, but ‘just right’ for study. It reminded me my own situation. For me, Chicago, had been too big, too harsh, too violent for raising children. Kenilworth wasn’t right either, as I was always the only mom in a sea of nannies, and I felt like I didn’t belong there. Mendocino was too small, and had provided different kinds of disasters, with its life or death danger and its remoteness.
Adam once said to me when we were contemplating leaving Mendocino, that I couldn’t protect our children from drugs or danger, these things are everywhere. I replied that I while that may be true, I wanted the chance to find a place that could provide them with alternatives, that could keep them busy. Now I felt sure that we were in that place. Here there would be sports, school plays, summer camps and friendships. And while it was undeniable that along the way we had left behind great places; a sophisticated and wonderful city, a gracious and exclusive North Shore enclave, and an exquisite place of profound beauty, none of them had been, well, quite right. Here, there was a more modest kind of happiness, and new, if quieter, kind of adventures to be had. Here, I would host “Taco Tuesdays” for Ares’ football ‘squad’ on our deck. Here, I would do the hair and make-up for ‘West Side Story” and ‘Grease’ and design costumes for “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and “School of Rock” at the local Play House. Here, Anais would go to horseback riding camps and play volleyball and water-polo. Here, Ares would run track, play football and LaCrosse, wrestle, and escort lovely girls to school dances. There would be graduations and swim team dinners, pre-prom parties and sleepovers, Easter egg hunts and day trips to Chinatown across the bridge in to “the city”.
But all that was yet to come. For now, I was just grateful for the chance to have a new beginning. If Chicago had been too big and scary, Kenilworth too small and exclusive, Mendocino too wild and dangerous, it seemed that San Anselmo, with its manageable size and family-friendly personality was just right. Here I was in a place where I would be with other families, raising children as a community. It was close to a big city but not in one, elegant but not elitist, small, but not remote. As I drove up the mountain, I looked over at the boots next to me in the passenger seat. They seemed to me like little soldiers in a children’s storybook. Facing straight ahead, they sat there like a couple of old friends; two beautiful, perfectly crafted, twin ambassadors of ‘Laura Luck’. Could it be that finding them, after all I had been through, meant that I now had a bit of my own? Was it was possible that I had made my way in to my own story?
Maybe, after all the moving, all the testing, all the trying, I had finally found my very own Goldilocks Zone.
