My Dark Night of the Soul in a Crappy Hotel in Kearney, Nebraska

Part II of The Road Trip, in which I lost my damn mind.

I loaded the girls into the car and we drove away from Ames, a lump in my throat that temporarily melted away with the soundtrack of my Epic Roadtrip Playlist, but returned five hours later as we turned onto my old street in Sioux Falls. The Rolling Stones’ melancholy “Wild Horses” played as I approached our house; it felt like a funeral dirge. 

We hugged Grammy and Papa—the girls with unabashed delight and me with false brightness—and brought our things into the house. These would be my last nights sleeping in my “old bedroom,” and I wondered what it would possibly feel like the next time we came to visit. Would the guest bedroom in their updated home feel like a sanctuary, or would it feel unfamiliar and wrong? We visited the new house, still empty, and I smiled with tight lips as my parents showed the girls around their “new bedroom” and revealed all the hiding places for little girls to explore. 

No tacky wallpaper here, folks.

Over the next few days, I drifted from room to box-filled room with my fancy camera, taking close-up photos of every surface of my old house. The grains of the walnut-floored entryway; seven iterations of gray and mauve wallpaper; the rust colored hotel-style carpet in the basement; the peach curtains in the guest room. Every bedspread, wall, and carpet was captured; I vowed to make a quilt out of the photographs, but I was a working mom of two and that clearly never happened. 

I walked up to my bedroom for the last time, conscious as always of my over-dramatization and theatrics. But I couldn’t help but try to imprint the sensory memory of the grooved wood floor under my feet as I padded to bed, then the dense cushioning of the stairway carpeting. I wrote my brother’s and my initials in the garage under the initials of the teenage girls who came before us.

The next morning, I remember sitting on the front steps with my children, smiling for a photo, but I don’t remember driving away. Any sadness I felt at saying the final goodbye was quickly overshadowed by the disaster to come. 

Prior to leaving Colorado, we had painstakingly searched the seven-day weather forecast all the way from our house through Nebraska, to Iowa, to South Dakota. Any blizzard conditions would render the trip a no-go, regardless of how strongly nostalgia tugged at me. The week ahead had been mercifully clear, but as any midwesterner knows, things can change quickly. And they did. The snow was minimal, but it was the wind, coming out of nowhere, that did us in. 

We were not smiling for long, friends.

My oldest child had a handful of phobias, but none ranked as highly as wind and the potential for weather disasters it signaled to her nervous system. As the wind violently whipped snow and debris across the Nebraska freeway, my co-pilot sat in the backseat with her headphones on, a sensory deprivation tent blanket covering her entire body, and cried. Next to her, my toddler was oblivious, watching a marathon of decade-old Wiggles videos whilst chirping expletives and grinding veggie straws to an organic grimy pulp in her carseat.

After an ill-timed toddler poop request and the utter hysteria that ensued while crossing the rest stop parking lot, I knew we weren’t going to make it much farther. I canceled our hotel, booked another one, and we stopped for the night an hour earlier than planned. We were a ridiculous sight, fumbling to unload our belongings from the car; the wind whipped fast food wrappers across the parking lot; we comically dropped items over and over in an effort to manually close the automatic van doors that were paralyzed by the wind. I needed to make it 50 feet to the hotel entrance with my children, our overnight bag, the bed rail, portable toilet seat, grocery bag of snacks, the laptop bag, and their pillow pets. In one trip, because clearly, we would not be venturing into the wind a second time.

The Family Fucking Circus is real.

When we arrived at the elevator, all three of us were laughing hysterically, overcome by relief and the absurdity of our situation. Unfortunately, the moment of levity ended abruptly when I was unable to unlock our room. It was the dawn of that bewildering era akin to automatic faucet installation when hotels changed their key cards so you could simply hold them in front of the door to unlock it. Kearney, Nebraska was apparently ahead of the times for once in its history—I had never encountered this phenomenon before, and haplessly pried everywhere trying to find the key slider, inadvertently breaking the top of the door handle off.

I dropped the bags on the ground, already irritable and now suddenly mindful of a creepy gentleman, hungover and possibly on drugs, who was staggering around the hall like an extra on the set of The Walking Dead. I quickly realized just how fragile my bravado was, as it shattered.

Finally comprehending the key, I heaved our bags through the door. Shady dude was rapidly approaching and I was sweating profusely. I snagged my shirt on the doorknob and bashed my back into the door frame, as grapes rolled across the carpet. I lost it.

I slammed the door and unleashed what was likely the source of my toddler’s new vocabulary word. Crying uncontrollably, I herded my bewildered children into our hotel room. I stepped over the spilled bags, locked myself in the bathroom, and sobbed with shame at having failed at my effort to be Super Road Trip Mom who kept it all together.

I’d stayed calm during the wind crisis, soothed my anxious daughter, and gotten us into the building, but the stress finally caught up with me, and I had nothing left. My previous confidence and competence vanished. I did the thing I hated most as a parent: I showed my hand. I let them see how hard it was. I exposed my flaws, my frailty, my edges.

After a few minutes, I managed to get myself together and came out to comfort my daughters, who were crying on the other side of the door. Still blubbering, I apologized as my children ran around trying to pick up the spilled grapes and offering me various clothing items off their own bodies to dry my tears. I felt awful; what kind of mother falls apart like this and needs her kids to comfort her? I was exhausted, but sleep wouldn’t come. 

I lay in bed for several hours, trying to come down off the adrenaline rush. I slept for about 90 minutes, filled with anxiety and a running loop of all my failings. I was trying to do too much; my career was a disjointed, jumbled mess and I juggled more gracelessly than anyone I knew. I needed to make some major changes in my life; I couldn’t concentrate; I had stopped exercising; I was tired of feeling irritable and resentful all the time. Every semi-stressful event in my life presented itself to me for examination, every confrontational fantasy I’d ever explored came home to roost. It was a true dark night of the soul, and probably a panic attack as well. Unfortunately prescriptions for Lexapro and Clonazepam were still five years away, and cannabis had not yet been legalized.

I wanted to be serene and unflappable. But in reality I was the most flappable person alive. I was a pearl clutcher’s nightmare, an asshole mom who offered up profanity and a short fuse instead of crafts and creative snacks. 

One thing I do excel at is making reparations and apologizing when I am wrong. I’m not sure that allowing your children to witness you having large emotional reactions is fundamentally wrong per se, but I did feel compelled to make things right and at least acknowledge that I felt bad for having lost my shit. My children graciously accepted my apology, somberly packing up their belongings the way kids do when they know their mom is this close to losing it and they better fucking act right. 

We wearily dragged our belongings back to the hotel lobby, filled up on dry powdered sugar donuts and subpar yogurt, drove through the espresso shop, and hit the road. With calm weather and solemn passengers, our final five-hour leg was uneventful, and we cheered with jubilation out the open van windows as we pulled onto our street. “We did it! We made it!” I crowed, not certain if I really felt proud of my partial success or if I just wanted to talk myself into it. 

I knew I would tell the story over and over. I healed a little bit every time I did, the bitter sting of guilt melting away as I solidified my belief that our children need to see us as people, that revealing our Achilles’ heels does not make us lesser parents. 

The trip ended badly, but it hadn’t been a bust by any means. I spent one last night at my Grandma’s house and made some of my favorite memories ever with her—without my own mom as a middle generation buffer, just as a granddaughter who was now a mother herself. I said goodbye to the home that meant the most to me. Despite the gracelessness, I successfully solo-parented my daughters through seven days and 25 hours of drive time. 

And sometime between photographing the dated wall colors and convincing myself the hotel hallway derelict was going to murder us, I had the best idea ever. I would make another pilgrimage, or maybe two or five, and visit every place I had ever lived.

And naturally, I would write a book about it. Once the initial inspiration struck,  likely during a dream-like state of psychosis induced by too much caffeine, poor sleep, whining children, and the thrum of highway hypnosis via my trashed minivan, there was no way I could resist. I was hooked. My daydreamy childhood practice of writing a book inside my head instead of concentrating on other things came flooding back, reminding me of how strong the pull was—for the last leg of the trip and subsequent weeks and months, I jotted down notes and ideas. 

Going back in time was so me. As a self-proclaimed nostalgia junkie, revisiting every home I’d ever had felt like the equivalent of a methadone clinic. It’s possible that in actuality, it would turn out to be an opium den instead of a rehab clinic. It’s also possible that I suspected that all along, and that the pull of the cozy, hookah-filled den was just too powerful. No matter, I was determined to get clean, or maybe have one last hurrah first? If I couldn’t have the real thing—actual time travel—I could at least return to the scene of the crime. 

But that was the thing: there was no crime. My life was astonishingly average in the way that so many Gen X white girls named Stephanie who were raised in the midwest in the 1980s by Scandinavian Lutherans was. But because I had always felt like something was wrong with me, I had this vague idea that perhaps the trip  would  uncover some memory I had misplaced: maybe there was buried trauma I had forgotten that would explain why I was so messed up in the head. Like, ohhhh of course, the babysitter’s older brother kidnapped you that one time when you were three, no wonder you are such an anxious neurotic mess! That explains the undiagnosed neurodivergence, inner polarization, and general itchiness in your skin!

I didn’t really think by going back that I would remember something shocking—something memoir-worthy—but I did think there was something to discover and at the very least, maybe I could figure out why I seemed to be so preoccupied with the past. Maybe it wasn’t the most embarrassing idea ever. Pointless, perhaps. Inconvenient, yes. I had two small children, a job, and a budget. And even back then, I was fairly confident that writing a book about one’s own boring upbringing smacked of navel-gazing culpability. 

But I didn’t care. I would unabashedly embrace my love of nostalgia and meaning-making and visit every single previous home throughout my life: all 17. I could take a pilgrimage again, dark night of the soul be damned. Just maybe not for a really fucking long time.

XOXO,
Steph

P.S. MORE FUN STUFF! 👇🏻👇🏻👇🏻

• We are four days away from four hours of blissful YOU time! Give yourself the gift of a much-needed battery recharge, community, quiet, and some serious nurturing at Nurture: A Wellcare Marketplace. Learn more and snag one of our last few spots here! Saturday, September 23rd, 11:30-4:00.

• I still want to hear YOUR stories about your childhood homes. Learn how to submit an essay to be featured in the Breadcrumbs Project series here.

• You can listen to me read my memoir excerpt, Gaze At My Navel in this 14-minute episode of the Mother Plus Podcast here. Because sometimes listening is just easier than reading. . . 😉

• Friday’s bonus content for paid subscribers is all about Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy—this is the stuff that has truly changed my life this past year. You can get access for as little as $8/month! Read: My Favorite Kind of Therapy.