So, the other day, I was supposed to meet my daughter at an arts club in Washington, DC, to celebrate a friend’s birthday. I’m terrible with directions. I have a near-perfect instinct to turn the wrong way, to panic when given a choice of exiting east or west, to walk out of a restaurant’s ladies’ room baffled as to how to get back to my table. Baffled.
The day I was to meet Emily, I was meticulously following the directions on my phone’s Google Maps when Google told me to turn from a traffic circle onto Rhode Island Ave, only to discover it was completely blocked off by concrete barricades. Can I move them? I wondered from a fear-induced altered state of reality. Drive up on the sidewalk and go around them? I kept circling—unable to instantaneously recalculate.
The GPS’s rerouting suggestion was even more confusing, seeming to take me farther and farther from my destination. Should I trust it? I ended up approaching the parking garage where I had made a reservation from the wrong side of the entrance, which was on a two-lane, one-way street. While I could see the multi-story building from a block away, I couldn’t physically get the car to it.
Stumped, I pulled over and parked illegally in a loading zone for a minute to run over and stand in the garage’s entrance to see if I could figure out how on Earth to route myself to get the car into the one-way entrance with its additionally confusing multiple service lanes. I gazed longingly at my car in the distance, wishing I could call it over like a dog. (But not my dog, who considers a command to be advice, an order to be a humorous suggestion.)
My daughter, having already arrived by Uber, witnessed my intensely riveted circling and said to her driver, “Uh, there goes my mother.” And several minutes later,” And there she goes again.”
I wonder if I’m to blame for my inability to find my way because I’m always distracted. Not ADHD-distracted, just “you-think-too-much,” distracted.
Could that be inherited? I remember being in the car with my mother and my middle sister, on our way from somewhere—the church, school, laundromat —to pick up my eldest sister, Sharon, who was waiting at the drugstore.
I remember staring out the window from the backseat as my mother blew by, glancing dispassionately at the drugstore parking lot and announcing, “There’s Sharon,” as we sped past without stopping. A disembodied observation. Like, there’s Ohio. I can’t imagine what my sister must have felt—probably what my daughter felt.
“There goes my mother.”
At this moment, thirty GPS satellites are in orbit 12,500 miles above the Earth. I need four of them to navigate. We all do. When I turn on my phone, I’m not telling them where I am; I’m listening for where they are, as they constantly signal their precise locations at the speed of light. My phone compares the time their messages were sent to the time they were received here on Earth, on the front seat of my Jetta, circling a DC garage.
Three of those 30 satellites give me the three dimensions that locate me in space, but I need the fourth as well. The fourth satellite corrects the clock in my phone down to the nanosecond. And that personal correction is what makes the difference between almost accurate and accurate, between finding your way to the restaurant where your friends have already ordered the calamari (which you won’t eat anyway because cephalopods are intelligent) and ending up in the Chesapeake Bay. One nanosecond equals a foot of distance.
I recognize now how distracted I was while my children were growing up, subconsciously recreating the childhood I’d known when I’d meant to do it all better, when I’d meant to get it all right, when I thought perfect was possible. When it was all I wanted to be in this world. Instead, I often accepted being on-site for being present. And productivity for mothering.
How do I course-correct history? How do any of us?
My GPS doesn’t scold those who are lost from the heights of heaven; it unfailingly adjusts for delays. If presence has been the missing coordinate, the correction’s been calibrated.
I may not be there yet, but I’m on my way.
Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.
