Free August in Paris by Marion Winik

The Getaway

    When I had only two children and they were small, I spent a few days in a cabin in the woods at a retreat for artists and writers. I remember standing in the grocery store in Georgia befuddled. What did I like to eat? I had no idea. I was pretty sure it wasn’t Hot Pockets or sliced orange cheese. Eventually, I put in my cart a bag of rice, a bottle of Tabasco, and one can each of beans and mustard greens, chosen for their endearing Southern brand names and labels.
    Oh, coffee. And a bottle of wine, and a peach.
    A mother can forget what she likes. She can even forget what she is like. Wherever you go, there you are, say the Buddhists: but so are they. The fruit of your loins, in their Fruit of the Looms. Buy them, clean them, fold them, fix them, hunt them, buy some more. Eventually, you run out of memory, like a computer running too many applications. Before you were the finder of socks, the maker of sandwiches, the driver of carpools, the kisser of boo-boos, the full-service factotum of family life, you were a person who filled whole days with something. What was it? Who were you? There is only one way to find out.
    Though it is difficult to abandon those who count on you for their very undergarments, if you play your cards right, distant obligations arise. A business trip. Personal duty. An obligatory invitation. Really, you must go. If only to pry yourself loose from your pathetic martyrdom and see what is left.
    Good-bye! Back soon! Just microwave them for two minutes on high!

    To gaze at the ocean. To meditate on a mountaintop. To steam in lavender and eucalyptus. To this list must be added what I have found to be an equally restorative experience of spiritual solitude: to sit in the airport terminal. There are few things more stressful than being in an airport with a horde of children, but when you travel alone, the place is transformed. In its airy, comfortable reaches, wholly devoted to sitting, reading, and snacking, you are resurrected as an individual.
    One person, one seat, one ticket, one will. No arguments.
    Whatever automatic reaction people have to you when you appear in public with your family—pity or amusement, aesthetic appreciation or concern—when you are alone, those reactions are nowhere in evidence. Nor is the presumption that, because you are with children, such reactions may be displayed with impunity. No, instead of conducting your private life on a public stage with generally humiliating results, you will be as untroubled as if wrapped in a cocoon, free to read the New York Times and drink Starbucks coffee. How could aromatherapy on Big Sur be better than this?
    And you never know, perhaps they will announce a delay. When traveling with children, your powerlessness over such things is a problem, a violation of natural law that must be explained and re-explained, even to teenagers. When solo, powerlessness is the dharma. The fact is, you will have to sit there, accomplishing nothing, for many hours. Try to adjust. You have packed three books, and even now someone has discarded a copy of the New Yorker containing a 15,000-word article by Janet Malcolm or Diane Middlebrook. This may be your only chance in the next decade to get through these articles.
    After a while, you might even stop looking up every time a small voice utters, “Mommy.” Or maybe you won’t. Either way, you will soon remember what you like to eat.
    You might think a hotel room a more luxurious experience of solitude than a terminal gate, and it has its points, but it lacks the invigorating friction of a public setting. It is the presence of strangers combined with the act of transit that resets one’s sense of self. See: suddenly, you are a woman in black jeans sitting in a chair reading a 15,000-word magazine article. A compact, self-contained organism. If someone speaks to you, they do so politely, and if they look at you, they do so covertly, because that’s all that’s