Last weekend I took the train, alone, to New York City. Even before becoming a mother, I loved the container of experience that ride providedâtwo hours and twenty minutes where I wasnât supposed to be doing anything else. I could simply allow myself to be carried along. Sure, I could read a book, listen to music, fall asleepâbut most times I would just gaze out the window at the ever-shifting landscape and think.
Because I ride Amtrak for pleasure, never work, I always find myself riding at different times of day. This time, the pale blue of the morning sky reflected identically onto the frosty waters below. Iâd never seen baby-blanket colored water before, but there it was. Because I ride infrequently, maybe once per season, the viewâwhile always technically the same, if you remember to sit on the river sideâ is unrecognizable. Last week, trees at the waterâs edge stood unmoving in a pool of ice, spooky and wondrous. The river, as we rattled by, had a float of ice on top, like the fat youâre supposed to strain out of homemade broth. Little sticks poked up here and there, like bunches of thyme. I breathed a sigh of solitary bliss.
The plan was to spend the afternoon with my cousin before her own March baby arrivesâto have lunch, see her apartment, and maybe, if she was tired, take myself off to Muji for some new pens before riding home again, before the semester started. A plan! After all, a plan is what makes me feel competent, as I wrote about last week.
The train ground to a halt in Poughkeepsie and the quiet car was suddenly crammed with boisterous passengersâa large group hunting down seats together, wearing matching red basketball jerseys. One of the crew chose the empty seat next to me, and shortly after, he cracked open a beer and began to declare things out loud that made little sense to me, like: âput a c-note on it!â
I was happy for him and his friends. I googled âwhat is a c note,â even though I thought maybe I knew. I did. I put in my headphones and listened to my murder mystery. I hoped to see a heron out the window. I wondered what would come next.
At the next stop, a mother and child came to sit in the seats behind me. I felt warmly towards them, and the adventure they were embarking on together. It felt suddenly strange to be out in the world alone, without my child. The mother had a loud, clear voice and began narrating to her child, maybe 15 months old, every single thing she saw out the window.
DO YOU SEE THE WATER, MOLLY?1 she asked, THE WATER? she continued. The baby said nothing, perhaps overwhelmed by the speed of the train and, perhaps, the loudness of her motherâs voice.
DO YOU SEE HOW THE BRIDGE LOOKS REALLY SMALL? THATâS BECAUSE ITâS SO FAR AWAY, MOLLY. WE CALL THAT DEPTH PERCEPTION, MOLLY. CAN YOU SAY DEPTH PERCEPTION?
âDuck,â said Molly, correctly pointing out the species of bird floating in the water.
I tried to make eye contact with one of the basketball boys, to see if they were as overcome by the intensity of the lesson as I was, but no. They were better people than I wasâor perhaps just childless, carrying no anxiety about their own offspringâs vocabulary, pronunciation, or their role in the matter.
OH LOOK, MOLLY, gasped the mother, and I could see out the window that were were going through Ossining. THATâS A PRISON! CAN YOU SAY PRISON?
Molly couldâor wouldânot.
I closed my eyes. I opened them again. I decided to check my phone. I had a message from Jimmy. Anyone want to guess what it said? Consult the parenting handbook, the ancient tome, handled by billions, brown with the oil of our fingers, textured with crumbs and boogers, brittle with cross-referencing, ah yes: page one million and twelve, On Travel: if a mother should travel more than fifty miles from her spawn, said offspringâs immune system shall falter and weaken.
There was nothing I could do but send a series of profane texts back:
This was terrible. Terrible! Poor Jimmy, I thought, poor Rosalind.
On the other hand, I thought⌠on the other hand I was free! Freer than ever! My fingers were shit-free fingers! I was free of the endless torment of attempting to optimize my child! The whole day was mine, mine, mine!
And a wonderful day it was. Arriving at the restaurant, we ordered hot chocolates and raw tuna tostadas and some kind of wonderful mushroom burrito and gluten free churros. We talked about family and babies and clothing and which lamps would look best in her new apartment. We made a plan for the rest of the afternoon, and I fantasized about my solo outing to Muji after, envisioning myself breathing in the various, steaming essential oil diffusers around the store.
Back at my cousinâs apartment, I suddenly felt something that was frankly quite out of character for my digestive system. Well, I thought, it has been a big day for me, with all the travel and all the interesting items on our brunch plates. Well, I thought. We continued to talk until suddenly, it was clear I could no longer be trusted to sit on a couch. I ran to the bathroom. The mystery was solved. I, too, had the diarrhea.
New York City might be one of the worst places on planet earth to have diarrhea, let alone regular poop or pee. Friend of Mom Blog and former NYC resident J once told me that, while pregnant with her second, she traveled everywhere with a childrenâs travel pottyâthe kind you can set up anywhere and piss into the attached plastic bag. Public restrooms are so few and far between, it was truly a stroke of genius on her part. Unfortunately, I hadnât considered this a necessary item for the day tripâalso, it didnât fit into my perfectly organized fanny pack.
There was only one thing to do: get back within a 50 foot radius of my daughter, and within 10 feet of a perpetually available toilet, as soon as humanly possible. I booked an Uber, hugged my cousin, and prayed to the Gods.2 I fled the apartment building into the (metaphorically) open arms of my driver, who, frankly, had no idea what he was risking by accepting my request.
The whole ride to Penn Station I practiced deep breathing, trying not to compare the scent of the tree-shaped air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror to the eucalyptus steam at Muji, where I would not be going. I played through various scenarios that I hoped would not come to pass: me, begging the driver to stop so that I could run into a (Starbucks? Subway? Shake Shack? Certainly Dunkin, of all places, must be prepared for the particular type of emergency I was experiencing?) I wondered but stopped short of googling if it was illegal to shit on the ground in New York City? I assumed it was, if theyâd once criminalized jaywalkingâwas New York back into broken windows policing or was it more hands-off now? Why couldnât I remember? Once, years ago in Brooklyn, I watched as a woman used the curb in front of my apartment as a toilet seatâthe image had been seared into my mind in what had previously felt lightly traumaticânow it felt instructional. If worst came to literal worst, I could do the same.
The cab driver was grim-faced and silent, but he played an optimistic, bouncy kind of French pop music. I tried to focus on the beat, rather than the red number at the bottom of the Google maps app. I tried to look out the window, watching the buildings grow taller and taller as we headed uptown.
If New York is a city that refuses to acknowledge the physical needs of human bodies, then the flip side of this refusal is a striking and near-beautiful commitment to anonymity. If I had to shit on a sidewalk anywhere in the world, maybe New York City was the best place to do it. Iâd lived here as a young woman and, many times, had felt overwhelmed; minuscule; meaninglessâand free. There was a freedom to my powerlessness and in it, a chance to figure out who I was and what I was meant to be doing. Had I done that? Maybe. But at this precise moment, if I had to, if I had to be anywhere, if I was going to shit my pants: let it be running, limping, grasping my asshole, gasping the hot, plasticine air blasting out of an infinite, eternally-open Duane Reade.
Recently Iâve seen various people on Instagramâand heard my girls on Poogâtalking about the archetypes of âmaidenâ and âmother.â3 You donât have to literally be a mother to experience this shift; rather, itâs symbolic of a move into oneâs own power. The maiden, (and Iâm quoting but Iâm sorry to say I have no idea where I got this from) is someone âthings happen to,â and a mother, get ready for it, is someone âthings happen through.â
I remembered a long-ago trip on a Chinatown bus from Boston to New York, where Iâd developed diarrhea; the bus bathroom was out of toilet paper. Iâd survived, somehow. I remembered my yoga teacher in college, telling us all that we hadnât really lived until weâd had diarrhea on a train in India, as she once had. I wasnât alone. The mother is not always as free as the maiden, but she is more powerful, stronger, bigger. Sheâs done it before and can do it again. She makes a plan, but isnât strangled by it. No: she is the plan.
Reader, I made it to the Hudson News in Moynihan Train Hall, where I spent twenty five dollars on Immodium and ginger ale. I made it onto the train, too, and to a seat, weak with relief at the proximity of the train carâs rattling, piss-scented bathroom. I made it home, too. The only thing that âhappened through meâ that evening was the idea for this essay.
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