the new(est) romantics

We left our long awaited summer vacation four days early due to wildfire smoke.

The hope was to be snuggled up in the Canadian Selkirk mountains, hiking and swimming by day, and searching for shooting stars in a vast summer sky by night. The week we were retreating, the Perseid meteor shower was going to be at peak, so we were set up to have a truly sweet getaway, and as a single income family, our bank account only allowed for one vacation a year. This was our shot, and it went up in literal smoke.

David drove us back home on a Tuesday when check out was set for Saturday. I clutched my throbbing head as we zig-zagged down a two lane highway, sick from the high levels of carbon monoxide in the air, my eyes exhausted from squinting through cloudy, diffused light. We relinquished our clementine snack oranges to border patrol and drove back into Spokane where just days before the air had been nothing less than noxious. Everything seemed steeped in loss. As forests burned in Canada, we rolled into our freshly charred city, sick, tired, and as unrelaxed as we could possibly be.

To make matters worse, my natural demeanor towards the future leans towards nervous apprehension with a side of pessimism. Often when I plan things that I look forward to, a nagging feeling deep in my gut bubbles to the surfaces, telling me those plans will likely fall the hell apart. I am often wrong, but when I’m not, no one sinks further into themselves than me. I become a proper grump. A curmudgeon. An exclaimer of glasses half empty. This was bound to happen.

I told you so.

In my opinion, pessimism gets a bad wrap. A pessimist wraps themselves in the certainty that good things cannot happen for them, and disappointment that is a “sure thing” can be controlled and contained. If it is seen coming, then it hurts less.

Right?

As a lifelong pessimist, I can tell you that even disappointment that I swore I saw coming controls nothing. The disappointment comes and instead of safety in knowing it was bound to happen, I am instead left with bitterness.

Why did this happen? Why do I not deserve good things?

These are the questions in which I wrap myself while I continually choose pessimism. It’s wrong, it leads to more bitterness but, God-help me, for whatever reason, it still feels safe.

On the ride back to Spokane, my six-year-old son Sam watched a movie. He sang along to the songs he knew and giggled as characters found themselves in hijinks that seemed hopelessly silly. He opened his wallet and pulled out the crisp Canadian five dollar bill and marveled at the gold loonie he received at the exchange before we left. When we got home, he asked to go play with a friend, and we made plans to go to the nearby lake Coeur d’Alene the next day. He seemed undaunted by our disappointing return to civilization, so I moped for the two of us, falling into bed as soon as we arrived home.

We were not hiking, not star gazing, not kayaking, but the next day we made good on our promise to take a day trip to a local lake—one we knew well. Sam laughed and splashed and asked random kids to help him build a sea wall, sharing his bucket and scoop, digging furiously against the shallow waves that nearby boats were kicking up against the shore. His joy was palpable, but puzzling to me. This was not the vacation we had hoped for, but you couldn’t have told him that.

Later, we took Sam to an ice cream shop we had frequented in summer’s past—it was in no way novel—but Sam still giggled relentlessly when we allowed him to have a regular sized scoop of strawberry in a waffle cone. He had had this exact same ice cream before, but to him, it was new all over again. He went outside with his oversized cone and propped his feet up on a nearby table, taking the posture of a permanent vacationer. I couldn’t help but smile at him. This kid was the main character of every day of his life. He wasn’t thinking about Canadian wildfires sending him home to places he’d seen before. He had a waffle cone and an adult sized scoop of ice cream. He was a king.

The rest of the week quickly fell into the mundane patterns of the lived-in grooves we knew well before leaving for our ill-fated vacation. Grocery runs and yard work and the making and cleaning up of meals we had had hundreds of times before. But there were also pockets of time that felt restful within the productivity. I studied and read, chipping away at the stack of books I was meant to read for my master’s degree, and David and Sam worked on house projects. David had taken the time off, so we did our best to find moments here and there to do things that felt vacation adjacent—a family lunch out of the house, a trip to a toy store so Sam could spend some of his lemonade stand money, quiet time for me at a coffee shop with a large matcha latte and a fat stack of (rather enjoyable) homework. I had not realized just how much I had to do for school, and the time away from the house working felt relieving. I would come home after several hours away and notice a project David had worked on, and he in turn would greet me standing a little taller, as he finally had found the spaciousness in his day to make our house a little more like a home.

I stayed generally grumpy, determined to lament the time we lost while also wrestling with the false idol I had made out of thankfulness. Despite my best attempts at telling myself that bad things always happen to us (they don’t), I noticed that the smoke in Spokane had lifted. Fire containment percentages were going up, and the air quality became clearer each day we were home.

I could see sky again.

On Sunday, I sat in church and watched as a gaggle of kids went forward to listen to a shortened lesson of this weeks homily taught by one of our church’s deacons. In the lesson, he referenced Psalm 65, and specifically, his deep love for verse 11:

You crown the year with your bounty,
and your carts overflow with abundance.

Our deacon explained that he loved the image of God having a cart so full of blessings and mercy, that as He walked down the path with it, much of it would fall out, and He didn’t even care to gather up what had been wasted off the side. He had more than enough for everyone—enough even to waste. Our deacon then pulled out a basket full of fruit snacks and invited the kids to walk behind him as he tossed them over his shoulder. It made for a hilarious and beautiful image.

Later in the homily, he looked at the congregation and with the same earnestness he had shown the kids during his fruit snack analogy, said to us, “The mercy of the Lord cannot be contained.”

Mercy had been biting at my heels all week. It found me in the clear Spokane skies. It was in the laughter of my child eating an adult sized ice cream cone. It was the proud look my husband had plastered all over his face when he had attached the long overdue trim around our dishwasher. It was in the 16 ounce iced matcha that assisted me in banging out pages of notes on a book I planned to annotate for school. My pessimism had been kicking that mercy off like a small rabid dog, saying I didn’t want it. I wanted to be sad that I wasn’t vacationing. It wanted to be safe in knowing that I was right—I didn’t deserve good things.

It told me that I knew better.

But that little dog wasn’t trying to bite at my heels. It was attempting to gnaw at the pessimism I had willingly chained to myself.

~~~

Late in the week, Sam I went to Costco to stock back up on the essentials. It was a crazy day and store swam with a flurry of back-to-school shoppers. I knew that in order to not black out from overstimulation and to keep Sam grounded, I was going to have to turn into the main character Sam so easily knew himself to be. Playing the part of the “fun mom” I stopped by every delectable sample given out, drove the cart like a bat outta hell with Sam hanging on for dear life, and made faces at him while we waited in the check out line. On the way home, I turned on a curated playlist and as Taylor Swift’s “New Romantics” came on, I turned the volume up high enough to rupture our ear drums. Sam rolled his window down and screamed in joy, looking on as his insane mother yelled the lyrics in the front seat:

Baby, we’re the new romantics, come on, come along with me!
Heartbreak is our national anthem, we sing it proudly!
We’re too busy dancin’ to get knocked off our feet
Baby we’re the new romantics
The best people in life are free.

Sam laughed breathless and we punched the air, allowing the lyrics to pulse through my bodies. Here we were, my little main character kid and his formerly sulky mom, driving home with an overloaded car, high on the mercy of a canceled vacation and Costco samples. We were in fact the new romantics: those who’d been disappointed and made whole again. Those who’d been caught up in the overflow of God’s wagon of graciousness and mercy. And none of it sucked. Because there was mercy enough for all of us.

Even me and my pessimism.