Breadcrumbs Across the Midwest
Part II: Iowa, scene of my birth, early childhood, and the best (college!) and worst (middle school!) of adolescence. Iowa is a lot, you guys.
Welcome back! OK, we left off in Milwaukee in early July. Let’s resume our travels, yes? I had two days of padding at home with my girls before heading out for the second leg, which was a long road trip with a LOT of driving. But I’m going to back up for a minute. As a companion to my Substack memoir/travel chronicles, I’ve been recording periodic solo episodes on the Mother Plus Podcast. (Check in Tuesday and I’ll read my most recent post and this one as well. Do I make it through recording without breaking down in tears multiple times? No, no I do not.)
Way back in the early days of the podcast, we talked about something we called “Remember her.” It’s all about giving ourselves the time and space to remember ourselves before we were moms, really see ourselves as we were, try remember what it felt like to embody that variation of ourselves, be inside that old headspace. When I was in Milwaukee, I got a glimpse of that woman in her very early twenties. I remembered her spark and her frailty, her boldness and defiance, her self-doubt and discomfort, the fear and power that existed in equal measure.
And then I went back even farther in time to remember so many different “nesting doll” versions of myself. After two days of recovery and re-packing with my daughters and parents, we all piled into cars and caravanned back to the Midwest, this time with my college best friend in tow (squee!!).
We parted company in Kearney, Nebraska; my parents and daughters drove on to Sioux Falls, SD and my best friend and I drove on to a square of Iowa that contained a handful of disparate years of my childhood and adolescence: Waverly, Iowa where we went to college, Waterloo where I was born, Cedar Falls where I lived until I was five and then again when I was a middle schooler, Iowa City to visit friends and reminisce about wild weekends visiting during college, and the Quad Cities where my friend grew up.
I tracked down three childhood homes: my first ever house—the one I came back to after I was born and have maybe-perhaps-made-up hazy memories of playing on the living room carpet while the aroma and steam of browning beef wafted over from the kitchen, the house I lived in from toddlerhood through early first grade, and the one I spent just two years in during 6th and 7th grade. I found my schools (junior high, shudder, vomit), went inside my old church and tried unsuccessfully to shake off my religious trauma (too soon?), walked through the cemetery I spent hours playing in as a preschooler (yes, I was a creepy child and was particularly fascinated by the mausoleum), and got the privilege of having my college friends accompany on these scavenger hunt stops.
And then came college. We peered inside the actual dorm room window where our dads worked tirelessly (my god, the sweat) to assemble our loft bed, we stood on the lawn where we used to sunbathe while listening to Shawn Colvin, the Indigo Girls, and Cyndi Lauper; we found the um, “party house” where many formative memories (and probably lost forever memories, thanks a lot, Jungle Juice) took place. I found my first ever apartment where I lived with a beloved friend who is still a huge part of my life (my god, the gratitude!), and the building that I thought might crumble to the ground when we lived there 20 years ago and is remarkably still standing, the one that four college senior girls + one patient and brave fiancee shared in 1999. Many bologna slices rolled up with American cheese and pickles were consumed as meals during those days, and an unnamed Subway employee/roommate brought home illegal cookies after midnight. Four more homes, check.
We snuck into the music building (shhh, don’t tell, if you happen to work there) and made our way into the choir room, practice rooms, the chapel (Pavlovian tears appeared; I don’t know if I’ll ever enter that space without involuntarily weeping a little), and other sacred places. We were explorers and time travelers and bad kids with good hearts. And we were together.
Imagine a string of slumber parties with your best friend from college: It’s exactly as amazing as you think it would be. Even though we live less than an hour away from each other, I felt actual grief when we said goodbye at the end of our trip. I had forgotten what it feels like to share your life daily with best friends. We are so far removed from that in our adult lives, and one of my takeaways of the trip was a desperate desire and matched commitment to bring as much of that as possible into my life now.
We got to spend almost a full week together, and we also visited friends I haven’t seen in over twenty years. The most beautiful aspect of the whole week, for me, was being reunited with these women and realizing that the love and connection we had two decades ago was real, that it still existed, and that it transcended one short phase of life. We dumped our emotional purses out on the table and got real—my favorite thing to do with friends. Quickly bypassing the tidy on-boarding process of catching each other up on the daily details of our lives, we dug into the gritty stuff that you don’t always get to talk about. And I realized that, while it’s easy to dismiss our adolescence as an unlikely time to form lasting friendships because who really knows who they are at age 20?, in truth we sometimes know exactly who we are at our core and we are lucky enough to find people who also see that spark of us-ness. And we see theirs.
My friends remembered things that I had forgotten; I poured albums and loose photos all over the patio table; we recreated photos from decades ago; we laughed and cried and laughed until we cried, and I felt something heal in me that I hadn’t known was broken.
Part of me thought that going on this trip might turn out to be unnecessary and irrelevant—like everything I needed to find was actually inside me all along like a Judy Garland situation. But in actuality, I realized that there really was something special and important and irreplaceable about going back to those old times and places and remembering people I had forgotten I loved, and essentially, without trying to tap into one of our podcast mottos, remembering her. Remembering me.
When my adventure ended and I was reunited with my children, I couldn’t stop crying for hours. Partly because I missed them so much and was so relieved and grateful to be with them again, snuggling on the couch and kissing their heads and telling each other all our stories. And partly because I was so goddamn grateful I had the opportunity to go back in time, but as me, and see people who had shaped and continue to shape my life in important ways. I cried because I was sad it was over; and I cried because I was forever changed by the experience, and I couldn’t contain the joy and relief of that feeling. I cried because I knew I would be walking into one of the most difficult trip re-entries I had ever experienced, and I cried because I knew I was stronger and could handle it with more grace for having been in Iowa.
I found that I didn’t write very much while I was gone—I jotted down disjointed notes in notebooks and on my iPhone, but I felt like for six days I simply absorbed and let myself fully occupy that time and space. When I got home, I didn’t want to write about it right away either. There was a reticence and a nervousness and something that felt blasphemous about trying to capture the sacredness of the trip, even though that is literally the only reason I took the trip—to write about it, you know, given that it’s the entire basis of the memoir I’m writing. But it turns out that the book wasn’t the only reason I took the trip, even though maybe I didn’t know it at the time. I got more out of it than I ever planned. And yeah. Now I need to sit down and fucking write it.