DON'T MAKE ME TURN THIS CAR AROUND! (On being and doing in sticky situations)

I saw it first. 

Nutmeg brown and pear-shaped, the droplet rested menacingly on the canvas of my six-month-old's leg. We were on our way to the trailhead for the second time—we’ll come back to that—and there RTG and I sat, he warmed by the chaos erupting in his diaper, and me heated by the fact that I knew I hadn't brought the wipes. 

It wasn't as if I had forgotten the wipes. No, no. I thought about the wipes, I looked at the wipes, I had the wipes in my hand, and I decided, "Nah. Why bother with the extra weight?"

(Future self: bother.)

But here I was, driving along the dirt road, wondering what RTG's diaper held, rather perturbed at myself for having parked at the wrong trailhead, and embarrassed because, well, I was revisiting this particular hike to share the location with others and I didn’t even park in the right place.

It’s one of the few trails we go to that has an entire parking lot devoted to it, so when the baby was fussy in the car, I was happy that we’d arrived at (what I thought was) the trailhead. I’d soothed RTG, gotten him out of his car seat and into his pack, gathered all we needed, and was ready to hit the trail when I fielded a call from Ben.

“You said you were at the trailhead?” he inquired, “So am I, and I don’t see you.”

Sensing tension, RTG started fussing in his pack, and I instantly realized my parking mistake. Embarrassed, I tried to cover my tracks: “Why is Ben being so rude to me?” turned quickly into a defiant  “Whatever, I’ll just walk to the real trailhead.” 

“Down the two-mile dirt road? With the baby?” Ben questioned.

It was hard to appreciate the voice of reason while looking for a person to blame for my mistake, so I got into the car and drove, finally pulling into the correct parking lot – the one that was indeed 1.9 miles down the road from the other one, just as the sign that I overlooked clearly noted – and pulled RTG out to do damage control on his diaper.

The more I investigated the situation, the more evident it was that the little guy, in cahoots with his introduction to solids, was playing his first trail joke on his parents, and he was being quite thorough about it. Almost as if he knew we had no wipes, he had silently been working his magic.

His clothes. His pack. His shoes (since I didn’t see the puddle of poo in the bottom of the pack until after I reinserted him in said pack). My water bottle. Ben’s shoe. My shirt. Sweet nectar of the potty gods running everywhere, and the rising sun rooting the smell in the things it touched.

As we cleaned up the mess with a dirty diaper, a water bottle and a rag, there was a part of me that wanted to load up again and drive home. I had tried enough. “Don’t make me turn this car around,” I had told the circumstances, and now they were just piling one thing on top of the other.

But.

There was another part of me responding in that moment that I knew rather than felt. I knew all the times I’d pushed through my frustration and been rewarded. When I went running in the rain and received refreshment. When I went for a ride even though my riding buddy had other obligations and discovered that I was the company I needed that night. When I signed up for the race knowing I’d come in last – and came in last – and that was enough.

Even though I’d never been in this precise situation before, I’d been in the situation. We all have, really. And if these situations teach us anything, they teach us that we are always choosing two things: what we do and who we are.

I stood, with my bad attitude and gracious boys, smelling like poo and recognizing what I wanted to do. I wanted to turn the car around and try again a different day. But when I thought about who I wanted to be, my answer was quite different.

Did I want to be a person who let frustration turn me around? It’s one thing to stop an adventure because it’s wise to do so—the baby needs a break, you need a break, etc.—but was this really that time for me? Or was I just frustrated and embarrassed?

Wearing poop-stained clothes and watching my boys that day, I had a brief moment of clarity that reminded me that the choice was mine. That days that go according to plan are rare, and our adventures would be rarer still if I always chose to turn around.

I guess this is the part of the story where I say that because we kept going, flowers sprung to life with each step we took, RTG said his first word AND learned how to clean his own diaper, and fireworks broke through the sky when we reached the lookout; but that’s not quite what happened. 

And that’s okay.

Sometimes the practice of being makes for pretty ugly doing.