‘Chutes and ladders

My girl Yin and I were sitting in the bookshop café late on Thursday night, having a cup of tea. She’d announced to her husband that she needed to go out, left him with their three kids, and called me for a spur-of-the-moment rendezvous. Perfect timing. (It was the day I realized that, though I am a rabid Obama supporter, I could find common ground with John McCain on at least one front: Here was a poor soul who was captured and held captive by people who spoke a foreign language and tortured him continually for years. I could relate. Let's just say it had not been a stellar week with Said Husband and Little Bitty.)

As we sipped we talked, as we often do, about the state of our lives as wives and mothers. From all appearances, these klatches could certainly be categorized as bitch sessions. Dirty laundry is aired. Steam is blown. There is a lot of profanity (whispered so as not to offend other coffeehouse patrons). But there is also laughter and, always, the striving for higher ground.

This evening we talked a lot about our "hostage situations" (because that's what I've realized family life sometimes feels like) and our escape routes. How would we get away from the madness of family life if it, indeed, got too crazy to survive? What is our Plan B? we asked each other. What happened to our parachutes? Why don’t we have them packed?

The reality is, though, that we chose the lives we have. We wanted to be married and have children. We love the children and their Daddies. We don’t want to leave them. (Well, not permanently.) We just want a more balanced life with them.

Yin came up with a good analogy: skydiving. She wants her parachute back, not because she thinks she’ll have to eject herself from a burning plane, but so that she can experience the joy of leaping into the free, blue sky; seeing the long view; feeling the wind against her body lifting her on invisible currents. She wants to know what it’s like to look at life from her highest place, knowing that her parachute will bring her back safely to earth when the time comes.

It’s not about escaping our lives in search of the false freedom of the refugee. It’s about being free in the lives we have.