Whatever Held

For a long time, Disneyland was a promise that lived in someone else’s mouth. Their father would take them for the weekend, and he’d tell them that this time, soon, we’ll go. Then they’d come home to me, and I’d be the one holding them while the promise dissolved again. I got good at that particular consolation. The soft voice. The maybe someday that I didn’t control and couldn’t make true. You learn, as a mother, to absorb
other people’s broken promises so your children don’t have to carry the whole weight of them. But I hated it. I hated being the place a disappointment landed when I hadn’t caused it.

Then, in 2008, my Poppy died. My mother’s father. He left a little money behind. It was not a fortune, but enough. And somewhere inside the grief of it, I made a decision that felt almost reckless: I was going to take them myself. Not wait. Not hope. Just do it. I took a week off work and planned
the whole thing at my kitchen table, including the route, the hotels, the parks with three kids who were nine, seven, and six, and no one beside me to share the driving or the deciding.

My grandfather’s death is the reason my children got Disneyland. Grief paid for joy. I’ve never quite known what to do with that, except to think Poppy would have liked it. Some part of him got to give them
the week their own father only ever talked about.

So we went. And we didn’t just go to Disneyland. We went everywhere. Knott’s Berry Farm. The Hollywood Walk of Fame, the kids crouching to fit their hands against the stars. San Luis Obispo. Santa Barbara. I packed that week so full it makes me tired just writing it down.

There was a road to Santa Barbara, one of those coastal roads with the drop-off on both sides and nothing between us and the air. I white-knuckled the wheel the whole way, saying something cheerful, keeping my voice loose and my face easy while every muscle in my body was braced. For years I remembered this part of the story as though I’d held it together beautifully. As though I’d kept my voice loose and my face easy so the kids would never know. That’s how I remembered it, and I think I needed to remember it that way.

My son told me recently what he remembers. He remembers me yelling at them to settle down so I could focus on driving. Both things are true. I was terrified, and I couldn’t say so, and the fear came out sideways as a mother snapping at her children on a cliff road because she was the only one who could keep the car on it. I suppose that’s what “holding it together” actually looks like from the back seat. Not serenity. A woman with her hands locked on the wheel, raising her voice because she has no other place to put it. That’s the thing nobody tells you about doing it alone. You don’t get to be afraid out loud, so it finds another way out of you. I’ve spent a lot of my life on roads with no guardrails, hoping I looked calm.

There were the un-glamorous parts, the ones that mean it was real. One of them threw up in the hotel in Pismo Beach all over the comforter. At Disneyland, my two oldest slipped away in a crowd and were gone. That particular kind of gone that stops your heart. But Disney’s
security is its own small miracle; they had them back to me in about two minutes. Two minutes I aged a year inside of.

And I remember standing in a line somewhere in that park, hearing people behind me. This lady has three by herself. That’s crazy. They didn’t mean it unkindly, I don’t think. But I heard it, and I filed it away. Crazy. As if it were remarkable, or foolish, or too much. One woman and her three children, waiting for a ride, having a completely ordinary, completely wonderful day.

What I remember most isn’t the rides. It’s the pool. They lived in it at every hotel until their fingers went to raisins. It’s the face painting; there seemed to be face painting everywhere we went, and I have a whole week of my children looking up at me as butterflies and incredible hulk. And it’s the exhaustion. A complete exhaustion I wouldn’t trade for anything. I was so tired that week. I was so happy that week. Those two things have never lived very far apart for me.

Here is what I know now that I couldn’t have said then: their father never did take them to Disneyland. I did. When it finally happened, it wasn’t the promise coming true. It was me, choosing, with my grandfather’s last gift and a week of my own vacation and both hands on a wheel above a cliff, trying to keep it together. I’d do it again tomorrow. I’d do all of it again.