Love at the Speed of Email Read Online Free

they’re not mine. This was only
underscored by a conversation I had recently with my boss’s wife.
    “Oh, little Sam’s getting over his first bad cold,” she
said, exhausted, when I asked her how the kids were. “He’s not really sick
anymore, just miserable. He’s been hanging off my leg, whining, wanting to be
held all the time, and I can’t get anything done.”
    “Gee,” I said, “that must make you want to bend down and
tell him, ‘Get used to it, buddy, that’s life. You’re going to feel crappy
sometimes and people can’t put everything on hold to pay attention to you every
time you’re grumpy. Deal with it.’”
    “ Ummm , no,” she said, clearly
making a mental note never to ask me to baby-sit. “It makes me want to pick him
up and comfort him.”
    No, I don’t feel ready for kids yet. I don’t have that
powerful soul-deep hunger to be a mother that I hear some of my girlfriends
talk about. I’m not sure I ever will. But I am starting to catch myself wondering sometimes, in a much more abstract fashion,
whether I’m going to miss out altogether on those beauties and struggles
peculiar to parenthood or on learning how to be genuinely vulnerable in a way I
suspect that only the bond of marriage allows. And whether, if I do, I’ll wake
up in fifteen years and still believe that it was worth it – this choice that I
have made again and again throughout my twenties to pursue adventure and
novelty and helping people in faraway lands rather than stability and
continuity and helping people in a land I claim as mine.
    These are melancholy moments. These are days when I wake up
and wonder whether I wouldn’t perhaps feel happier, more fulfilled or less
restless on a radically different path. When I would really like to come home
to someone who’s vowed to be interested in how my day was. When I just want
someone to bring me coffee in bed or rub my shoulders uninvited.
    Yet, right alongside these wonderings that sometimes
dead-end in visions of my dying alone at ninety lie other wonderings, other
fears.
    After a nomadic life that has been largely defined by coming
and (always, inevitably) going, am I even capable of the sort of commitment
demanded by marriage and children and a place called home?
    I touched on this confused tangle of longings recently with
a girlfriend for whom I was a bridesmaid a decade ago. Jane is now living on a
verdant pecan farm in Australia ten miles from my parents’ place, complete with
a sweet prince of a husband, two little girls, a dog, two cats, a horse, and a
veggie garden.
    “You know, I want your life sometimes,” I confessed near the
end of our conversation.
    Jane laughed. “My brain is turning to mush with no one but
the kids to talk to all day, and when you say that you spent – Eloise, I told
you to stay at the table while you finished your milk! Sit back down please –
when you say that you spent last week in Boston at a conference and you’re off
to New York next week, I want your life.”

 
 
    * * *

 
 
    “No,” I said to Travis in our kitchen in Los Angeles that
night after thinking for a minute or two about his question. “I don’t often put
a brave face on acute pain. I’m happy by myself. Mostly. It’s just that sometimes I wonder about a different life, you know?”
    “Yeah,” Travis said, doubtless wondering whether he would
ever achieve his dream of making it big as a Hollywood director and be able to
quit his day job. “I know all about that. Write about that.”

 
 
 
 

Los Angeles – Accra –
Washington, D.C. – Sydney – Zagreb – South Bend – Nairobi – San Diego – Atlanta – Madang – Kona – Canberra – London – Baltimore – Itonga – Vancouver – Harare – Dushanbe – Lira – Petats – Port Moresby – Brisbane – Ballina – Malibu

 
Alternate Lives

 
 
    Los
Angeles, USA

 
 
    When it comes to wondering about a different life, mine is
not my parents’ story. Both of them