Blog Post 6: How I Bravely Drove on the Highway Because I Had to, Part 2

I’ve been distracted the last few days. I haven’t been feeling great, Drew has had like 3 sick episodes in 2 weeks, and I’m supposed to go overseas for Spring Break. All of these things are keeping me awake at night, and I’m already a bad sleeper. How distracted am I, you ask?

Oh, you didn’t? That’s a sloppy segue?

Is it Segway? No, the computer’s capitalizing that spelling so it must be the motorized scooter.

  Anyway…

So I picked Drew up from daycare the other day, and the plan was that we would go to the bundt cake store and get a birthday bundt cake for my mom ( Happy birthday, mom. This is how I’ll know if she REALLY read the blog and didn’t just look at the first line and say, “I liked it. It sounded great. Can you bring Drew over?”) I figured the quickest way to the bundt cake bakery was the highway, so I merged and re-merged and emerged, ready to be a grownup adult and blend in with all the other hapless rush-hour drivers. Unfortunately, one of those hapless people was sort of in my way. I couldn’t get into the right lane. I tried, I put my blinker on, but they were just not looking. Ok, I thought. This is how we’re gonna do this…fine. I’ll just loop around to the other side of the bridge, come back onto the highway, and then decide if this was a good day for bundt cakes. Some might say that ANY day is a good one for cakes. But I’ll let you be the judge by the end of this tale.

Past the college, the museum, the other college, the Mexican restaurant, the other Mexican restaurant, the old building that was the prior home of one of the Mexican restaurants but is now a store, the health food store, and the giant supermarket, Andrew and I drove. He mostly sucked his thumb and listened to NPR while I drove through my distraction.

At some point I realized that I was on the highway…and that I had driven over the suspension bridge and past the football stadium. I didn’t know at the time just HOW distracted I was, but when I looked up and saw the big billboard for the University of Somewhere Other Than Lindsay’s Town, I realized…uh oh. I’d gotten turned around somewhere between the Mexican restaurants and driven a third of the way to Dallas. What now?

“It’s okay, buddy, it’s ok,” I said to a silent Andrew. “We’re not leaving Daddy…Mommy’s going to get in the turnaround lane and…” Unfortunately, it was the wrong turnaround lane. I had turned around, yes, and ended up under an overpass. Several overpasses, actually.

Do you ever have those waking moments where you wonder if you’re dreaming? Things just feel so…different. So weird. I couldn’t see any cars. There were three or four roads criss-crossing over my head. I was in a jungle of old cement, and wasn’t sure which lane to take. Just as long as we got home, I figured, and went right. I turned. Then I turned again. And somehow ended up on a closed road. How did I know it was closed? Not because of a sign or anything…because of a bunch of orange road-block-things that were NEXT TO the road. In front of me? There was just a bunch of broken pavement, puddles, and metal sheets. The street sort of…petered out and beyond that, there were dragons.

“We can do this, Drew,” I insisted, as he began to fuss, realizing that this was not only NOT our usual route home, but we might not be in REALITY anymore.

We don’t need to talk about how I got out of the semi-closed road. But eventually I got back on the highway…the RIGHT highway going the RIGHT direction…and by the time Andrew’s patience had dissolved into crying, coughing, and calling out “Now! Now!”, we’d abandoned the bundt cake bakery and made our way home.

Like episode 1 of this tragedy, there’s nothing in this story that deserved a bundt cake. It turns out I don’t know the roads of this city like I thought I did…or the roads that lead to Dallas, anyway. But we made it. In daylight, in rush hour, with a crying little boy with a respiratory infection in the backseat. If anyone deserves a bundt cake for having to deal with me all the time, it’s Drew.

Still, we made it. I guess in adulthood “making it” is almost as important as doing well. It’s the “showing up”. That moment when I realized we could either be stuck on the mysterious not-closed road forever or get back on the stupid unfamiliar highway was a rough moment, but then it was over.

Oh, and thank goodness Drew can’t read yet. We passed a bunch of bakeries that advertised world-famous cookies, and a place that was doing pet adoptions.

So anyway, I’m about to go expand my food horizons by eating a yellow dragonfruit, and maybe this time next week I can write to y’all from a cafe or something across the pond and report about my international travels sans freak out. But we’ll see.

Thanks, team.

Lindsay 🙂