A woman put her hand up to stop me. “Don’t ride near the horses. Just give them space.”
I was not previously aware of the horses, though now I understood this woman to be the horses’…boss? manager? She was speaking to me like I had already been warned about the horses. I looked past her and saw them clopclopclop around the corner, two abreast. Carriage rides.
“I’m not interested in the horses,” I responded, cuntier than I really meant to be. The exploitation of two-tons of skittish, muscular chaos was not on my radar. I was riding my big bucket bike through the alleys behind the festival, my two girls as passengers. I was their carriage horse, the beast of burden. And like the horses, I was scared. We’d lost Desi and my mind was starting to go to dark places.
My Mystic Pizza-ass town does a Victorian-style Christmas festival in early December. There is hella wassail. There are men in tails and top hats. Women wearing velvet bonnets. And these are not paid actors, just locals who are hype for an even more Dickensian vibe than usual in our little 18th century port town.
As I tried to round my kids up to head home after some cocoa and gawking at cosplayers in their waistcoats, my headcount failed. Desi, my 8-year-old, was missing. I had been very busy unleashing my little micro standup sets on friends I’d bumped into at the festival, a total work-from-home monster craving the attention of 3D adults. Nick had the toddler on his hip and Jane, my dreamy yet cautious four-year-old, was engaging some indulgent wreath vendor in conversation.
I wasn’t worried at all, at first. My main fear re: my kids’ safety is getting mowed down by a car, and the whole town square had been blocked off for pedestrians to worship Charles Dickens, he who died for our sins. Desi knows the way home and it’s a 20 minute walk if it really came down to it. But usually the priority is to not lose your minor child and assume they’ll figure it out.
Twenty minutes later and we still can’t find him, and now all of this is a problem, because the kids need lunch, the toddler needs a nap, and someone has leaped directly out of a 1980s moral panic and managed to stuff my son into their panel van.
I do another loop around the festival, carving my way through the alleys and minding the uneven bricks so I don’t sink a bike wheel into a rut and lay the bike down with my girls in the back screaming, a thing I obviously have experience doing.
This is when the horse woman raises her hand to me like she’s God or a cop or something. I don’t care about your carriage horses, lady, a child is in peril!!!
I never really believed my son was in a panel van crossing state lines; I knew he was safe but I also knew that he was probably scared and confused which was just about as intolerable. My brain ran a supercut of all the times I’d felt the same as a child. Most notably, in a German amusement park, having stopped to look at a sign and lost my dad. I didn’t know how to ask for help because all the German I had was a few nouns, colors and food. Überraschung! Brot! Gelb! Grun!
Nick found Desi playing soccer with a friend — he hadn’t lost us or ever felt abandoned, he was just following the thread of fun to his friend’s house. An exasperating, but ultimately best case scenario.
Later, I recounted the story to my mom over the phone, as an act of trolling. My mom doesn’t approve of how I delight in my incompetence like a pig rolling in its own shit. At this point, I enjoy describing my failures to her because I can count on the ambient disapproval that leaks out. I’m putting a coin into the penny horse to make it gallop.
My mom surprises me, as she sometimes does, and laughs. “With three kids, it’s like juggling. You’re not really doing it unless one ball is in the air.”
The juggling metaphor is not a fresh one when it comes to life with kids, but I don’t know why it never felt so apt and terrifying to me. The one ball, constantly being sacrificed to the whims of the universe, suspended alone above the scrum, and you hope it makes its way back to your palm. And there goes the next ball! If you take even a moment to think, you’ll drop all of them.
A few weeks before Desi Oliver Twist’d himself at the Dickens festival, we were on the beach in Puerto Rico at sundown and I was tracking the toddler. Nick and I have a phrase we use to transfer control of her, the way airplane pilots say my airplane/your airplane. We say blood in/blood out, which you are welcome to use in your lives though I will caution it does refer to gang initiation rituals? Anyway, I was blood in and was doing a great job of keeping my focus on her even though what I really wanted to do was sit on a beach lounger with a book the way many other parents there seemed to be doing, because they had had the good sense to have one child, stop reproducing, and then allow like nine years to pass.
As Polly shuffled back to where the rest of the family was digging in the sand, I noticed that Jane was no longer in the spot where she had previously been arranging shells. Jane is my more cautious child, so while she can’t swim, we didn’t think we had to blood in her. My eyes swooped around the boomerang curve of the hotel’s beach property and I didn’t see her. The sky suddenly felt much darker than moments before.
The waves had been so violent all day that I recanted my promise to swim out with Desi to a distant floating dock. We got about halfway there and the current was just too gnarly. All of the day’s sun worshippers were packing up to go inside and eat dinner. Not only was my girl surely swept away to a watery grave, but I was about to cramp all of these people’s vacations by yelling at them to help me look for her body.
Before I had to start hollering, we found her about 20 yards away in the kiddie pool. She had her shoes on and was raver dancing under a fountain feature with her eyes closed. She didn’t miss us; she was certainly not scared. I saw the other parents quickly clock me and I shouted her name with relief.
I wondered how long she had been here by herself. Were these families wondering what responsibility they had to the unaccompanied raver child? We got the kids extracted, ordered Uber Eats to the hotel room, and watched King of the Hill in bed as a family for hours until we fell asleep to its glow. All of the balls were back in my palm. The next day I’d get up and start sending them skyward again.
yr mate,
Evie
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