Free August in Paris by Marion Winik Page A

allowed. Your boundaries, under continual assault by the condition of motherhood, start to firm up. You are mutating into that least maternal and most impermeable of beings, a stranger.

    My first experience of this occurred years before my pathetic martyrdom, when I took a trip at 18. I flew to Taos for a yoga retreat, first staying overnight in Albuquerque in a Holiday Inn, then catching a bus the next day to the mountains. I had a sense of who I was during that wheezy journey. (I know this only because I wrote about it excitedly in my journal: girlness is separated from airness by red flannel shirtness. (Sorry, it was 1975 and, as I said, I was 18.) I filled pages with the bubbly chronicle of my experiences, including my purchase of a bright green Navajo blanket the day before. I leaned against the yellowed window of the bus, that blanket in my lap, as small, dusty Southwestern towns went by outside, populated by ethnic groups I had never seen before.
    No one knew a thing about me. I could tell them my name was Kitty or that I was an orphan. I could tell them nothing and let them wonder. After so much adolescent self-loathing, I almost had a crush on myself.
    In maturity, auto-romantic opportunities are rare; also endangered are the crushes on strangers that were a standard feature of my younger travels. Not that I can’t still fall in love with someone on the basis of a ten-minute conversation. I can, but my adult life tends to be overpopulated. Nowadays, most people I meet remind me so much of someone I already know that I just get confused. In any case, if I talk to someone, I won’t be able to read my book. Or make my lists, for the other urge that comes over me shortly after liberating myself from my schedules and responsibilities is the compulsion to make lists of things to do when I return. Even on car trips I do this, scribbling messy columns of verb phrases in a notebook open on the passenger seat. It is hard to write in the car, but I always remember a slightly dotty, doe-eyed poet I used to know named Sandra Lynn who said she wrote her poems while driving. If Sandra Lynn can do it, so can I.
    Lists of things to do are poems of a kind. The free verse of a vast and efficient future, in which cars are inspected, birthday presents wrapped, videos returned, boxes of books packed up and sent off to young nephews. What a beautiful life I’m going to have when I get home. And yet, despite the bright promise of the lists, and the refreshed quality of my identity, I have never once managed a smooth homecoming. Two seconds into re-entry, the traveling me has vanished, my self-possession left behind at baggage claim.
    I walk in the door, and all the things and people I am responsible for seem to fly toward me, neglected and furious. Everything is wrong, and crooked, and left out on the counter. My husband, who has done everything a person possibly could to keep life running smoothly at home, is annoyed in advance, knowing I will be a bitch. “So how was it?” he asks.
    â€œOh God, it was great,” I say. Already, in the other room, they are shouting, “Mom!”
    â€œThey never stopped the whole time you were gone,” my husband says wearily. “So what did you do?”
    â€œNothing,” I say, dropping my suitcase and moving swiftly toward a jar of peanut butter with the lid off, which is also shouting my name. “Nothing.”

August in Paris

    The term “family travel” is an oxymoron. What you see if you visit Chichen Itza with your children in tow is the same thing you see in Ocho Rios or Epcot Center: the exotic crushed relentlessly under the heel of the mundane. For example, the only reason I found to stay up past midnight in Paris during our infamous family trip of 2005 was the same as at home—where the hell are the kids? And while it is true that I had spent much of the month wishing my family would fall into the Seine, after I actually lost two of the