problem-solving
Blame the mother 2.0
Decades of science have helped us better understand autism and meet autistic individuals where they are. But a few weeks ago, the White House looked at all that human progress and apparently decided to make everyone look away while they attempt to put the toothpaste back in the tube. If it was unclear to you whether to be distracted by acetaminophen or childhood vaccines, that was on purpose. Their aim was getting autism back in the headlines for a fresh round of mom-shaming.
Many autism advocates caught on immediately, and some news outlets, such as The 19th News (Sept. 30, “MAHA frames autism around mother blaming”), are starting to catch up. But as we know, the lies can get pretty far ahead while the truth-tellers are still lacing up their running shoes. We also have been conditioned to believe that mothers can be dangerous to their children’s health. It’s easy imagine, then, that Refrigerator Mother 2.0 may find renewed traction, rolling back the progress we’ve made for autistic individuals and society at large.
The “refrigerator mother” theory dates from 1943, when Leo Kanner wrote his landmark paper on autism. He claimed a lack of maternal warmth created the condition and said that autistic children “were left neatly in refrigerators which did not defrost.” A few years later, Time magazine brought the concept to the masses.
The theory stuck for decades, in part because genetic scientists and other researchers—the truth-tellers—were still putting on their shoes. It’s human nature to blame others when our troubles feel intractable. And blaming mothers has been a long-running cultural tactic. Law professor Linda Fentiman’s recent book, Blaming Mothers: American Law and the Risks to Children’s Health, shows how our supposedly neutral laws actually treat mothers (and those who are pregnant) as risk vectors. Take it from a worn-out mother who’s been blamed plenty for her son’s autism over the decades: shiny new wrappers don’t hide this destructive pattern of human behavior.
However, in the last 40 years, scientists have also given us a stunning amount of knowledge. They are starting to untangle what we need to know about our genes and the environment in relation to autism. More importantly, they are creating the space for autistic individuals to learn and for the rest of us to understand how best to respond. Autism has physical and biological attributes, but the way we respond reveals our social constructs and the way that often limits the options for everyone. Ramps can improve everyone’s mobility. Movies with captions help viewer’s comprehension. Audio cues make busy intersections more comprehensible to us all.
Families love their children and it’s safe to say that they want to meet their responsibility to raise their autistic child as best they can. Those of us that know and understand science, including the science of autism, may well be inoculated against mother-blaming. We owe it to our children, and their children, and our communities to resist the rollout of Refrigerator Mother 2.0 and instead share the scientific understandings that have improved our quality of life.
The ‘many-wrongs’ principle
Yesterday, I called my old friend, Donna, to catch up. Soon I was bouncing an idea off her. She’s smart, and instantly finds the holes when thinking or writing about something. I told her I’d been reading the research literature on social networks and stumbled across the idea of the ‘many-wrongs’ principle.
If there’s an idea that gives you permission to be wrong, and for everyone around you to be wrong, well, I couldn’t pass that by. Donna agreed.
It took awhile to piece together the research that lead to this particular paper. But, while combing through citations, I found a webpage that introduced the ‘many-wrongs’ principle to triathletes. This was getting exciting, albeit in utterly nerdy way.
I finally laid my hands on the origin story. In the mid-1960s, zoologists in Finland used radar images and film to painstakingly trace the migration of certain ducks. From what they knew about the individual talents of the birds, they couldn’t explain how they replicated their flight path each season–especially when considering storms, winds, fog and topography. Yet, they proved that, when traveling in large flocks, the ducks flew nearly the same path every year, differing only by a degree or two each time. Other scientists recognized their discovery. They called it the “many-wrongs” principle.
The idea was exciting, but scientists had to abandon the line of inquiry because they didn’t have the technology to do it. Hand-tracing flight patterns from film and radar images couldn’t be that technology.
Decades went by. The idea was almost lost to time. Research into bird migration continued and then stalled. Scientists knew a lot more about the vagaries of migration and the individual capabilities of birds, for example:
“geomagnetic compass precision is reduced near the equator and the poles; stellar rotational cues are unavailable for much of the year in the polar regions; solar cues vary with season and location; navigational errors can be compounded by wind drift; correctional mechanisms can reduce directional bias but add their own random errors. Even if orientation cues were absolutely reliable, flawless navigation would require perfect sensory interpretation and integration of cues by individual [birds].”
But they were farther than ever from answering the question. How did birds migrate with such precision? Another scientist unearthed the old idea. He argued it was time to figure out how many wrongs could make it right.
Soon, other researchers were working on the math, and thus the robustness, of the principle. (As I have argued in this space before, the universe speaks in calculus.) Their study used simulations of people randomly walking from one point to another.
The magic measurement was a radius for the behaviors that suppress individual error in group cohesion. There was a radius for “collision avoidance”, and one for “orientation interaction” and another for “group cohesion” – thus the influence of your neighbor. There were no “leaders” or “more experienced navigators,” even though it is possible to model the following of experienced navigators and it is known to happen.
Renewed interest in the many-wrongs principle has fed new discoveries, including the understanding that humans also tend to navigate better in groups. Triathletes will swim with the group to improve their navigation in the open-water leg of the competition. When survival is the goal, there is intelligence in the tactic that you select.
Researchers also found that when the environment is turbulent, there seems to be no benefit in staying with the group. It’s logical that when conditions are turbulent, it’s going impair a group’s cohesion. But it’s also really sad. That’s when I realized this principle is also one of poetry.
Right now, our path is unmarked and unclear. But we’ve also been here before. Nature is our best guide when we watch carefully and follow her principles. Many-wrongs requires only that we come together to move in the direction we want to go.
It shouldn’t have taken this long
Yesterday was a banner day. I swapped the old Texas tags on the truck for new California plates. The transition took a long time. It took longer than getting a new driver’s license. It took longer than processing my voter registration. It took longer than securing my Golden Bear state parks pass.
This started in January when I drove to a smog check station. The truck passed, but the tech said he couldn’t find the number on the catalytic converter. I said it was repaired in Texas and had passed smog there for several years. He said that I might need to replace the converter. He wasn’t allowed to issue a smog certificate unless he could see that number or there was a sticker in the door frame from the smog referee.
Wut?
I took the truck to a repair shop and told them the sad story. The owner called me the next day to say that he’d called three reliable suppliers and couldn’t find another converter. The truck was just too old. He said maybe the smog referee could help.
This was the second time someone spoke of this magical wizard, smog referee.
About six weeks later, I drove to a hard-won appointment inside the auto shop classroom complex at Modesto Junior College. One of the instructors was a smog referee. He saw the problem right away: the catalytic converter was installed upside down. He said it needed to be reinstalled right-side up. After making that repair and replacing a pair of hoses, I could get on his dance card again.
That took another month. But as he applied the magical approval sticker inside the door frame, he explained why he was called a referee. I was playing the game right. But they had to call foul on the truck because the converter was upside down. Even though the techs likely did that to better clear the cage that keeps it from getting stolen, doing so also makes it more likely to start a grass fire. That’s also part of the game. People steal converters for the precious metals; other people install unauthorized converters. To be fair to those with antique autos or a repaired converter, especially newcomers like me, they call in a referee.
Victory in hand–or so I thought–I drove straight to the DMV to register. The title was still in Mark’s name. I collected the paperwork to transfer it to my name, but the agent refused. I told her I brought the paperwork on advice of another agent there. She said that agent was wrong. She said that I needed to fix this problem in Texas. I told her that I didn’t have a Texas address anymore, how could I possibly fix this? (That’s fraud prevention 101: States don’t issue vehicle titles to out-of-state residents, and titles don’t get forwarded in the mail.) She lost her temper and left the counter. I stood there, blinking back tears for several minutes while she pretended to do something a few desks away. She wasn’t escalating to a manager. She came back with a sticky note that had the main phone number for the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles. Gobsmacked, I left.
When I got home, I called the number. I would have laughed darkly, but I felt for those Texans who call and wonder whether any live person answers in that bureaucratic maze. I just couldn’t laugh. Eventually, I found my way to a state employee who decided to be the title referee that day. She came up with a Plan A and a Plan B to solve the problem.
A month later, the replacement title arrived via my son and daughter-in-law, who still live in Texas and where I “reside” when I visit.
Back to California DMV for my third time at bat. Just to put the best bow on the experience ever, the Modesto streets department closed nearly every route leading to the DMV yesterday. Only because of my many, many, many visits already did I manage to get into the parking lot from the one remaining back alley street entrance.
The agent who helped me yesterday must’ve seen something in my face. She looked and looked at that title. I tried not to panic. I told her I had to fly back to Texas to cure it–you all weren’t going to register the truck otherwise. She finally stopped looking and started typing.
Sam and I recently started sharing “the best thing that happened today” over dinner. I told him he might think that the best thing that happened today was getting California tags on the truck, which Sam cheered, of course. But actually the best thing was this: the DMV could have assessed five or six months worth of penalties and backdated the registration to December. But the agent quietly waived it all. A small gesture, but lovely nonetheless.
Stuff
Years ago, a dear friend said to me, “Three moves are as good as a fire.” She was updating old Ben Franklin (“three removes as are as bad as a fire”) as I was recounting our family’s many moves. We went from California to New York and back, with a summer stop in Colorado in one year. Then, suddenly we were gone to Texas the following year. Even with three children, we didn’t accumulate a lot of stuff with all those moves. We moved twice more before settling into the farm house we’d planned as our forever home. (Spoiler alert: it was not.)
Today, that meaning feels a little out of place against the Los Angeles wildfires. People there are grateful to escape with their lives, since at least 28 have died. They lost their homes and important belongings. Some were meaningful to a single family or small group, while other items were an important part of our creative life and history. Losing things in a wildfire gives them a different meaning.
We can accumulate a lot over a lifetime. Our family started amassing stuff after we settled into the farm house, especially with hand-me-downs from the family ranch. Mark’s grandmother had moved into a nursing home and his mother invited him to go get things we needed. He drove a U-Haul out to West Texas and filled it with furniture and other household goods. I doubt his Mio and Dio were thinking “family heirlooms” when they bought that ranch oak dining set and all the bedroom suites. But inheriting those things saved us thousands of dollars.
When Mark’s Aunt Regina died, it was time to clean out another family home. She lived in that house for 70 years, inheriting and acquiring a lot and culling very little. Preparing for the estate sale was painful. Friends and family helped, but we also had to change the locks after the housekeeper walked off with the firearms. Another gal wore out her welcome rifling through the storage shed. She took many, many items that she planned to use to open an antique store. And still a junk dealer needed a crew, two full-size pickups, a cargo trailer, and an entire day to empty that shed. And I filled another U-Haul with items from the house. We loved Regina dearly and she knew how to have fun, but we really didn’t need any of the things we brought home. Suddenly, my sewing room stash looked like the haberdashery on the Great British Sewing Bee. The Christmas closet overflowed with decor, so much so that we never again displayed it all.
Then, a friend called me for the same kind of help. A mutual friend had died. His only daughter was overwhelmed by the prospect of cleaning out his house. Four of us put on our work gloves to help. His kitchen appeared to have one of every item sold at Williams-Sonoma, including a jalapeno corer. At least two booksellers went through his collection and bought hundreds of titles, leaving hundreds more behind. It took weeks to prepare for the estate sale, including staging his late wife’s craft room like a pop-up creative reuse store. His daughter was happy to have distributed all of her father’s things in a meaningful way and still be able to pocket a few thousand dollars. But those back-to-back experiences were eye-opening.
So when the brother of my oldest friend died, I knew she’d need help. He left behind the family home with three generations of furniture, collections and heirlooms. We first met up at Round Top, Texas’s famous antiques fair, to see whether a furniture dealer would be interested, since all the pieces were gorgeous. We learned that there are trends even in the antiques world. My friend had already discovered that her brother’s massive stamp collection no longer held much value. But we were surprised to learn that something as functional as furniture was sensitive to trends, too. For example, once TVs became flat screens, people stopped buying 100-year-old armoires to hide them and started buying mid-century buffets to display them.
Eventually, my friend stopped trying to find dealers and hired an estate sale company. I drove my pickup to South Texas for several weekends to help her get ready. She brought her pickup, too, and kept track of how much we hauled to the town dump over the summer–nearly 1.5 tons of stuff from the out-buildings and the house that we knew wouldn’t sell. The estate company still worked for another month to stage everything for a weekend bender of a sale.
She took a few heirlooms back home with her. I didn’t plan on accepting, or asking, for anything. Then I stumbled on an old set of sturdy steak knives still in the box. Ours were breaking at the handle, so with my friend’s blessing, I threw that little box in the pickup and took them home.
I’ve been thinking about another friend who culled what she owned until it all fit into a couple of suitcases. The fire that rolled through her life was a metaphorical one, but her response was primal–preserving the basic human freedom to move about. In my head, the case for accumulating stuff was crumbling. The things we accumulate will likely never be worth what they cost, even in a collection. It also takes enormous effort to re-distribute all that we gather over a lifetime, a burden some of us seem to leave behind.
We all need tools, and some lives need jalapeno corers. We all need to connect to beauty, too. The things we accumulate can help make those connections, but sometimes, oftentimes, they get in the way instead. Downsizing helped us think about why we should carry something with us, bringing a newfound appreciation for the things we kept, with an even deeper meaning for the things we let go.
Seek community
The January 2025 calendar went up on the fridge a few days ago and I’ve penciled in three social dates so far. Both Sam and I have been thinking a lot about community lately and how to connect to our new place–leaving after 30 years in the same county will do that to you. Sam said he wanted to join me this year in making a New Year’s resolution about community.
For several years, I’ve been making resolutions by distilling big ideas into little statements. Buy Nothing. Yes, Please. Wear an Apron. Take It to All Four Corners. This seems to work better for me than the standards, like ‘exercise’ or ‘lose weight.’ This year, it’s Seek Community. I’ve been listening to KCBP, Modesto’s community radio station, (yep, already toured it and met the general manager) and getting lots of good ideas. We missed First Day Hike today. Sam had to work. But next week is a citrus gardening class with the extension office. And, the temporary digs for the downtown library open next week too, so I’ll drop in and see whether they need a volunteer for that herculean effort (the remodeling is supposed to take two years to complete). Then, mid-month, a well-established writing group has a poetry event at the local bookstore.
Sam is thinking about making a resolution bingo card instead of an aspirational statement. It seems more compatible with the gentle way he moves through the world. He can fill the grid with smaller items (e.g., take Fang to a new dog park, chat with the barber, go to adaptive rec’s Friday Night Out) and then we can create little celebrations as he bingos his way to a sociable life here.
Thanks to his elementary school guidance counselor, we’ve thought about Sam’s circle of friends. Mr Ball was intentional about fostering friendships between the kids. Oftentimes, people with disabilities don’t have many people in their innermost circle. Friendships with people at clubs and church and work tend to form the next circle out. To be sure, those connections can be a place to find and cultivate deeper friendships. But as we settle in here, we are also coming to appreciate those connections for another important quality they bring: a sense of community belonging.
Sam and I at the Modesto Lighted Parade
When Sam and I went to Modesto’s lighted parade, I paid close attention to the entries once I realized it was another way to get to know the community. We’re slowly learning our neighbor’s names. When running with Fang on Modesto’s terrific rail-to-trail conversion through the center of town, I try to say ‘Good Morning’ to every one I pass. I’m not the only regular on the trail and we are starting to recognize each other, which is sweet. Modesto is full of friendly people, and some meet up on the trail for group walks and morning chats. Yesterday, several families met at the Roseburg Square picnic tables next to the trail to celebrate the new year. One family pedaled up in a Bunch Bike, so I had to say something to them about being from Denton.
Perhaps they were all part of the running club that sponsors the sturdy fitness equipment installed along the 10-mile trail. Hmm. Is this something for the calendar?
What’s your new year’s resolution?
Comfort skills
If there’s a Maslow’s hierarchy to unpacking, Sam and I have worked our way up a level or two on the pyramid. We’re sleeping in our own beds, washing clothes, and cooking for ourselves. Last weekend, we played board games and rode bike. And, I started unpacking books and art.
Sam is setting up his room himself. Because he’s working full-time, he’s still got a lot to unpack. He’s in the master suite upstairs, so he can take his time. There’s plenty of room and his priorities are different.
He set up the internet on the first day. Last weekend, he tested the coaxial cables, to see where they lead. He also tested light switches. Ever since he was a toddler, pushing chairs up to the wall to flip light switches, Sam determines how a home is wired. Given the time, he will set the antenna and wiring to serve both his TV upstairs and my TV downstairs. No need to pay for cable or streaming. And, he’ll label the breakers in the box in the garage–always good in an emergency. (We have many light switches that do nothing in our new home. Maybe half the rooms have overhead lights, so perhaps ceiling fans, etc., were never installed when it was first built.)
I texted Shahla and told her that Sam was in his happy place, mapping the wiring in his head and doing his best to relay that map to me.
She texted back, “comfort skills.”
That’s an idea worth thinking about. When I wrote art reviews for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram years ago, I watched an artist draw the tiny grids that formed the foundation of her large canvases. Drawing the grids was meditative, she said. Her lines were smooth and beautiful. But if you looked closely, you could also see those moments when her pencil shifted a bit. Seeing those imperfections made looking at her work relatable and soothing, too.
Think of all the things we humans do that is both skillful and meditative: kneading bread dough, tying flies, spinning and knitting yarn, sanding wood, walking the dog. Work that can be ours alone. Engaging work, but not so challenging that we get overwhelmed by it. Work that we can do to feel competent and useful. Work we can turn to when we are ready to assert some control over our lives, for times like the one we’re in now.
What are your comfort skills?
‘Metamorphosis is for insects, Mom’
The past month has felt like a purgatory, with Sam now four weeks into his new job in Modesto and me back at the house, forever packing. If it weren’t for the occasional lunch out–and that Michael has come up twice, and Terri has spent a few days here, too–the days flow one into another, like during the pandemic.
Out in Modesto, Sam has good support at work and at home. He’s staying in AirBnB on the north side of the city. He can wash his clothes on the weekend, keep food in a small pantry and fridge, and charge his car at a fast-charge station nearby. We zoom chat just about every evening. There is always some document to sign as we move toward closing on a townhome in the next few days. But we play games and share a joke of the day, too.
This transition had a lot of moving and dependent parts, and not all of them came together. During my last night in Modesto, before leaving Sam to come back to Texas, I felt myself right on the edge. There was going to be no renting a house while leisurely looking for something to buy later. I’d watched the rental market for months, but it was not at all what it appeared. For a good 24-hour period, I put down wave after wave of panic attacks, something I had never experienced before. We were going to have to buy a place. And we’d have to buy fast.
The feeling was rather like the performance anxiety from my music days, but bigger. Much bigger. Hard to see. Hard to regulate breath and heartbeat. Hard to eat food.
That first week or so, as we were pivoting to this new plan, I was able to keep my mental health in check, but it wasn’t easy. Good self-care means more than keeping the yoga and exercise routine. It also means reaching out to friends and family. I’m grateful that they responded with real strategies that helped solve problems, and with just general love and care.
I also have to detach from the busy chatter inside of my head. Once outside my head, I’m better able to closely observe physical feelings and to gather information, usually by reading. Anxiety often follows over-estimating a perceived threat while underestimating your ability to deal with it.
I confess, our life here in Denton had a nice routine that bordered on a rut. I let my critical thinking atrophy. I thought I was challenging myself, but not in ways that made me truly uncomfortable.
Sam, on the other hand, was absolutely blossoming out in Modesto. This decision was his. He enjoyed terrific support from his employer in exercising renewed control over his career. He went out with the real estate agent to pick the townhome we’re buying. He is building a new life that he likes and has a lot of agency over. For a brief period, I flirted with the idea of simply letting him fly on his own. Isn’t that what we want for all our kids?
For many reasons, financial and otherwise, I knew that wasn’t in the cards for us. But I thought we should at least talk about all the changes. As usual, I went for metaphor and allegory.
What did he think? Was all of this change maybe like coming out of a cocoon and becoming a butterfly?
“Metamorphosis is for insects, Mom,” he said.
Special education is innovation
Our need will be the real creator – Plato
Last week, a Washington Post reporter gathered up a lot of string on the status of disability rights in public education and broadcast it on the web. I’m not sure even she expected to learn that special education is innovation.
The first couple of segments featured the big policy folks, including a smiling Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona, who didn’t stray too far from his talking points. But the last segment made the hourlong watch worthwhile. Rebecca Cokley, of the Ford Foundation, and Jacqueline Rodriguez, CEO for the National Learning Center for Disabilities, are both real firecrackers.
They offered two big ideas that I have been thinking about a lot since then. One was that the pandemic was a mass disabling event, which shifted perspectives for a lot of people who didn’t count themselves among the “disabled.”
Behold the hidden scaffolds of our economy and culture, for they have disabled you, too! It was exhilarating to see so many people questioning this “structure” that, in so many ways, makes little sense.
It’s why, for example, many workers are staying remote and others are getting organized. Dell recently announced its return-to-work policy—no promotions for employees who don’t return full-time—and the words felt hollow. Turns out, Dell employees already felt they had few opportunities for advancement. Apparently, now we just say it out loud. Careful what you wish for, C-suite.
Disney recently announced that they would have to change their disability accommodation policies, after so many people used them to jump the lines. Turns out, cramming 15-17 million people a year into an amusement park to maximize profit doesn’t make a kingdom magical. That kind of accommodation was brand new when Sam was young, so we asked for it. The crowds were already massive for so many things. I can’t imagine how miserable that day would’ve been if we’d spent hours in line for Space Mountain and Pirates of the Caribbean and Mr Toad’s Wild Ride.
But back to education. According to Cokley, we look at special education backwards. Over time, special education has proven itself as a place of innovation. Many discoveries, practices and refinements that started in special ed have crossed over to general ed—the way we teach children to read, for example. She argued that if school districts and communities supported special education teachers as the master teachers and innovators that they are—and public policy experts started talking about them that way—our public education system would bounce back much faster.
Not only could we address the current teacher shortages, particularly in special education, but we’d get back to the business of education innovation and human progress.
A lot of slop and wobble
The words about to unfold below weren’t exactly how I planned to start or end this post. The house is quiet and Sam is likely napping. We just finished a Sunday bike ride down the rail trail, which felt a little like a victory lap today. On Monday, we rode the trail all the way to Lewisville Lake so we could get a good, long time with totality.
(That supposed life hack of holding solar glasses to your smartphone to shoot the eclipse? I stopped trying to take photos after this shot. I cherish the images in my memory. It was an unparalleled life experience–babies being born, totality, etc., etc.)
Today’s victory lap was marred by a motorist who chose the moment he passed us (we were waiting at the McKinney Street crosswalk by City Hall) to lay on his horn a good long time. A few motorists have done that to us in the past. Each time, as the adrenaline shoots through you, it feels a bit like someone punched you in the face.
Whether honking a horn like that should be considered assault may feel like an open question. Yet Sam’s reaction today, as in the past, convinces me that it is. He’s a beast of a cyclist, but after the horn, he took off like a cheetah. He was already through Quakertown Park and halfway down Congress Avenue by the time I got to the little bridge over Pecan Creek.
For the rest of the ride home, he’d pedal at incredible speeds and have to circle back to meet me before taking off again. I can’t imagine how much adrenaline is coursing through a person’s body that it takes more than two miles of fast pedaling to work it off. During one circle back, he said to me, “I’m a good person. But it doesn’t matter to him. That’s why I can’t feel safe.”
Risk is always with us. It’s hard to calculate sometimes. I borrowed today’s headline from a Washington Post story about calculating Earth’s rotation. I never doubted the math for the eclipse, which takes into account the slop and wobble of our little orbit around the sun. It was marvelous to sit on the lakeshore Monday, looking up through solar glasses to watch the eclipse start and progress and make the world go dark, just like they calculated.
A lot of modern life takes all this elegant math for granted. We need to remember that the world may speak in calculus, but life is not precise. What makes some math so elegant is that it hasn’t forgotten about all of life’s beautiful slop and wobble.
I suppose we could stop riding bike, but that’s no way to address the risk. Or we could insist that police ticket motorists for assault when they use their horns that way, but that introduces other risks.
Or, maybe I could write an essay about life’s slop and wobble, sending a little message out into the world that asks everyone to please be kind to all cyclists, because you don’t know which ones might be autistic.
Road trip
It took some time to notice, but both Sam and I agree the pandemic made our lives a little smaller.
Don’t get me wrong. There were things we did, things we neglected, routines we filled, habits we clung to, all that needed to change. And we stopped being busy for busy’s sake (what was that about?)
But ‘opting out’ also sets its own traps. A certain brittleness can settle in. We needed to stretch.
We’ve gone on cycling trips to help with that. Acadia National Park in 2021. Lake Champlain in 2022. But this year, we felt like we needed to nudge in another direction. After we were invited to a wedding in Phoenix, I got out the maps and started studying road trips. After all, Phoenix is just a few hours from California. As a good friend says, it’s just “map math.”
But I wasn’t planning a grand tour. This trip could reconnect us to our family’s origin story. Sam and his brother and sister were all born in Sacramento. Their father was principal tuba of the Sacramento Symphony until it went bankrupt. We lived there until Sam was 5 years old.
A road trip could help Sam see that he was a Californian and still belonged, if he wanted that option. We took the kids to California several times on summer trips. Sam went back to visit once on his own (his godparents live in Stockton) when he was in his 20s. But visiting a place for fun is different than visiting with an eye toward making a life there.
Many of us don’t always feel we have options and sometimes this seems more so for Sam. We planned this trip to explore his options,. The company he works for has a similar facility in Modesto. Touring the Modesto location could help him think about his future in new ways.
We had all the fun we could stay awake for in Phoenix, and headed out the next day. We took a nice, leisurely detour through Joshua Tree National Park (amazing!) and spent the night nearby.
Sam takes a selfie at Joshua Tree National Park, and I do my best photobomb
Then the next day we headed to Modesto, stopping in Fresno. I suggested a stop at an underground garden. I thought it would be a world’s-largest-ball-of-twine-roadside-attraction type of stop, but it turned out to be a national landmark and completely charming.
The next day, we toured the Modesto facility and wouldn’t you know, Sam already knew some of the people working there. They didn’t have any openings right then, but that’s not how Sam thinks things through anyways.
In the month since, though, I’ve heard him say many, many times, “I have options now, Mom.”
Never, ever underestimate the power of a road trip.