Shady Lady

I wore sunglasses fished from a public toilet. In fact, I fished them out myself, with my bare hands, dried them on the hem of my shirt and stuck them back on my head. You might be thinking $1200 Gucci shades, but you’d be wrong. Like almost all of my accessories, these were from Target, probably purchased on sale.

It happened when I was meeting my mother at the airport, and I’d just left my husband. I don’t mean I left him in the parking lot – I mean left him, in italics. My mother, God bless her, was flying in to survey the damage.

The truth is I’d been holding up pretty well, considering, but I suspected that in the age-old tradition of daughters in crisis, I’d fly to smithereens as soon as I laid eyes on my mom. And with my two kids gawking from the sidelines, smithereens weren’t really an option. I was determined to keep it together.

For the first time in days, I showered and put on makeup. Head high and shoulders back, I navigated Denver International with a kid gripped firmly in each hand. I would greet my mother as I planned to greet my new life; dignified and unafraid.

Then, of course, Naomi had to pee. And so I found myself crammed in a stall, supervising her novice tinkling while simultaneously trying to keep an eye on her sister’s feet, visible under the partition. There was some crouching involved, and that must be when the sunglasses took the dive.

At a different moment in life, I might have hesitated. I might have cringed and winced, and probably left that mess of toddler pee and plastic as someone else’s problem to clean up. But I’d just left my husband, left him in italics, with two kids under five and only a part-time writing career to fill my purse. And in the shadow of that crisis, this one barely registered as an inconvenience. I didn’t think twice. Just plunged in, grabbed the shades and kept moving.

That day at the airport, I didn’t meet my mother with dignity as I’d planned. I met her with toilet water in my hair. And I didn’t meet her unafraid; I was petrified of every single thing about the life that lay before me. But none of that really mattered. What mattered was that I was in motion; navigating on instinct through a mess that only weeks before had held me paralyzed.

I forgot all about the sunglasses until the next day when I realized they were awfully streaky. And as I washed them, it occurred to me that through those grungy lenses, I was seeing life more clearly than I ever had before.