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I have had my son, Clyde, for nearly thirteen years. Thirteen years of dealing with crazy boy energy. Thirteen years of dealing with someone whose reaction to falling down and hurting themselves is to fall down and hurt themselves all over again. Thirteen years of finding out that he even got hurt in the first place by following the trail of blood on the kitchen floor. (I never thought I’d have to establish a “clean up your own blood” rule in my house, but there you have it.)

You’d think, then, that after thirteen years, I would be used to all things boy. I would be used to energy levels that ping between “out of control” and “way, way out of control.” I would be used to watching someone vibrate like a tuning fork when asked to, not even “sit still,” but rather to “sit in a stiller manner than before.” You’d think I’d be used to all that. And you’d be very wrong.

The problem is that as soon as I get used to one level of hyper, say the nine-year-old boy version of hyper, he cranks it up another level entirely. Forget “this one goes to eleven” and try “this one goes to infinity minus one.”

Activity only seems to make it worse: how else would you explain someone coming home from a two hour workout session and immediately deciding that the best way to cool down is to chase their sister around the house while pretending to be possessed by a demon. (Actually, we’re all hoping that he was pretending.)

The worst part, for me at least, is that I have absolutely no personal experience with this. Not only have I never been a pubescent boy, I have also never before lived with one. The fights my sister and I got into always involved who got the best spot on the couch, not who could make the other one scream the loudest.

My husband, who has both been a pubescent boy and, having two brothers, has also grown up with pubescent boys, is “luckier” in this regard. His reaction to most things Clyde is to sigh and say, “The only people who can stand twelve-year-old boys are other twelve-year-old boys,” right before suggesting to Clyde that he go hang out with some of his friends.

Of course, he then follows this up by telling me about when he was a twelve-year-old boy hanging out with his friends, and then acts surprised when his stories of bloodshed, destruction, and visiting the emergency room multiple times in one day don’t exactly have a calming effect on me.

In consolation, I suppose, there is always the fact that living with all of this boy energy makes me understand past historical expeditions so much better now. I used to think about the people who decided to ski solo to the South Pole, or be the first to climb a treacherous mountain peak, and think, why? But now, watching Clyde careen off every available surface in the house like a human pinball, I can understand at least the urge the other people around these famous explorers might have had to just get them out of the house, by any means necessary.

It was probably that kind of thinking that made hunting down and killing a wooly mammoth seem like a better idea than simply going out into the forest to collect nuts and berries. At least as far as the moms were concerned. I can just imagine that conversation. “What? You’re going hunting again? For a month? Take the boys. Yes, all of them. No, really: it’ll be good for them. I don’t know: tell them it’s an initiation or something.”

I don’t suppose anyone out there knows where I can find a wooly mammoth these days?

They say that the worst adult/child combination is that of teenage girl and middle-aged woman. There’s just something about one female learning to deal with PMS while another deals with menopause that has been compared to two hurricanes meeting each other across some poor, unfortunate isthmus. There will be plenty of salt water, lots of screaming, and the few wretched, traumatized survivors huddling together in the wreckage. And I guess I can see how that would be fairly awful. For the other people, I mean.

But as far as I’m concerned the very worst adult/child combination is that of preteen boy and elderly man—or at least it is as far as my ears are concerned. I don’t know which is worse: someone who shouts out the punchlines to their own jokes because they are hard of hearing or someone who shouts out the punchlines because they actually think they sound funnier that way, but the end result is the same—there’s a lot of (not very funny) shouting going on.

Look, I never claimed to be an expert on humor, but I do know this: if you have to tell someone your joke is funny, then it probably isn’t. And if you have to shout at someone that your joke is funny, then it definitely isn’t. This means that if your joke didn’t get the reaction you were hoping for the first time you told it, telling it again at a higher volume is not going to make it any funnier. Yes, there are comedians who use shouting in their stand-up routines, but trust me: you’re not one of them. You’re not one of them at all.

Although, then again, what do I know? Twelve-year-old boys are definitely not my target audience, so maybe I am completely wrong about the “louder not being funnier” thing. Maybe, on the twelve-year-old stand-up comedy circuit, louder is way funnier. Judging from the volume they crank each other up to when they are left to their own devices, this certainly seems to be the case. But here’s the thing: I don’t want to attend a show on the twelve-year-old stand-up comedy circuit.

That’s a show I would not only not pay to see, but would actually pay not to see.

Unfortunately, however, I don’t seem to have a choice, since the fact is that twelve-year-old boys tend to hang out with other twelve-year-old boys, and therefore my twelve-year-old attracts other twelve-year-olds to his side like—well, I would say “like moths to a flame,” but considering the subject matter I’m going to go with “like flies to a dunghill.” In other words, there are a lot of twelve-year-old boys hanging around my house. Which means that the volume of shouted “jokes” coming out of the living room can reach levels unprecedented among a group of non-beer-drinking, game-watching males.

In fact, the only time I have ever seen anything even approaching that volume is when I see elderly men trying to to get you to laugh at the punchline of one of their jokes involving either Obama or Hillary—oftentimes both. That’s one of the only ways you can tell an old man’s joke from a young man’s joke, by the way: the political content. That, and the fact that the twelve-year-old’s doesn’t end in a hacking smoker’s cough. Hopefully. Because you certainly can’t tell them apart based on the volume at which they are told. The only thing that could possibly be louder is a jet engine wielding a leaf blower.

Or maybe the sound of those two hurricanes meeting up in the kitchen to argue over who sent who the most condescending text. Yeah, I’ll admit, that was kind of a loud one.

Suddenly I’m beginning to understand why my husband likes to spend so much time in the bathroom.

My son, Clyde, recently took a month’s staycation. He wasn’t trying to save money, he wasn’t trying to get some big project done—no, he just sat in his room and, apparently, did nothing for a whole month. Which sounds incredibly relaxing, and very empowering, and was probably a great exercise in learning all of the super awesome benefits of self care. There was one small problem, however: he’s in seventh grade.

It took me a month to realize Clyde had gone on staycation because he still went to school everyday—it was only at home that he went off duty. Apparently, it was only when it came time to do homework that the Gone Fishin’ sign made an appearance in his head. This was a situation I was finally made aware of when I went to check his grades online and saw that there were so many zeros I thought I was looking at binary code. I immediately called Clyde into the kitchen to explain himself.

“So, uh, how’s everything going at school?” I asked.

“Great,” he replied.

Hmm, I bet I thought. What I said, though, was “What’s up with all the zeros?” Clyde gave me a shrug in reply, as if that answered everything. I thought about it for a second, and then said,“Ah,” in return, because, in fact, it kind of did: Clyde had simply stopped trying. And that was something that I could understand all too well.

Everyone has that moment. That moment where you ask yourself, “What if I just stopped trying? Would anyone notice? Is anyone even paying attention to what I do in the first place?” In Clyde’s case that moment manifested as a case of existential angst, expressed as “If a homework assignment fails to be turned in in the forest, and no one is there hear it, does the zero actually make any sound?”

It’s a valid philosophical question. One that many of us pose in our own heads over the years, with many different trees and many different forests. Sometimes the tree is work, sometimes it is a relationship, and sometimes it is something that we used to do for fun and is now a chore. But regardless of the species of tree, the question is always the same: does anything I do make any difference to anyone at all?

In Clyde’s case, the answer was “yes.” It made a difference to me. And, obviously, it made a difference to his grades. A big difference. Luckily for him he is still in seventh grade, which is well before the time when, in the immortal words of the Violent Femmes, “this will go down on your permanent records,” so he still has plenty of time to recover from this year’s existential crisis and come out the other side relatively unscathed.

Also, luckily for him, he has lots of seventh grade friends who are in the same boat (woods?), as well as having an older sister who went through the same thing four years ago, and so I know that this isn’t a reflection of his moral fortitude (or lack thereof), but rather just another one of those moments when you find yourself needing to see if gravity still works.

Gravity, in this case, being me, and my insistence that homework is almost always done. I say “almost” because there are some homework assignments I cannot even pretend to agree with, and I think “This gives my mom a headache” is a perfectly valid reason to skip out on those assignments.

Because if there is one thing I know for sure, it is that when a wordfind falls in the forest, nobody notices anything at all.

Have you ever noticed that the more prepared someone is to compromise their way out of a disagreement—the more willing they are to say, “Alright, alright: we’re both wrong,”—the more likely it is that, in all actuality, all of the fault lies with them? Or maybe it just seems that way because I’m living with a teenager.

In many ways living with a teenager is like living with an insurance adjuster: there is no tragedy that can befall you that is not, somehow, just a tiny bit your own fault. (Or, as is more likely, 51% your own fault.) Just like my mother once had an insurance adjuster tell her that she was ten percent at fault for being rear-ended, since the accident “would have never occurred if she hadn’t been driving at the time,” a teenager can never quite accept the idea that, sometimes, there are things that are entirely one person’s fault.

Well, no, that’s not quite true: they can easily accept that sometimes things are entirely your fault: the tricky part is getting them to accept that things are sometimes entirely their fault as well. Oh, sure, they’ll admit that something was a little bit their fault. They’ll take a fraction of the blame—just as long as you are there to willingly pick up your “share” as well. The other day my son called me from school to ask me if I could come pick him up, which I thought was a little odd, since his sister was supposed to give him a ride both to and from school that day. He assured me, however, that neither her nor her car were anywhere to be found. Confused and a little worried, I called her to find out what was going on—remarkably, it only took three phone calls and two texts for her to answer her phone and explain the situation to me.

She was on a field trip.

“Oh”, I said. “That certainly would have been a useful piece of information for me.”

“I told you last week I was going on a field trip,” she replied.

“Did you tell me what day? And that it meant you couldn’t give your brother a ride home from school?”

“Well, no, but you should have known. I mean, this is partially your fault, too, you know.”

No, actually, I didn’t know. I didn’t know how “failure to develop, hone, and implement psychic powers in a timely fashion,” was even a category of fault. But I did understood a little better how the person who is denied full compensation on their homeowner’s insurance because, “After all, you did build your house under a meteor shower” felt. Or the woman who was denied treatments for breast cancer because “Having breasts is considered a pre-existing condition.”

Still, I suppose I should consider this progress, of a sort. At least she is now willing to consider giving me a mea culpa, even if it is more of a mea (a little bit) culpa. That’s better then before, when she could have stood over a corpse with a bloody knife in her hand and said, “What? It’s not my fault.” Or worse yet, pointed to the body and said, “He did it.” Now at least she might admit, “I may have played a small role in this,” before tossing the knife aside.

Of course, she would probably still add: “But I wouldn’t have been able to stab them if they hadn’t been here for me to stab,” or some such variation on the theme.

Oh well. To paraphrase Ted Knight’s immortal line from Caddyshack: “The world needs insurance adjusters, too.”

The other day I had an epiphany at the grocery store. Well, actually I had two. Three, to be exact. Yeah, I know that’s a lot of epiphanies for one day, but let’s just say that, for me, ghetto Bashas’ is a place of magic and wonder—even without saviour faces appearing on the tortillas.

My first epiphany was that it is now okay for me to go to the grocery store with my children. Well, no, actually, it’s still bad, but it’s bad in a different way from when they were little. At least nowadays they don’t beg me to buy them expensive junk food. Okay, they do still do that, but they don’t whine while they do it. It’s more like evil manipulation than actual whining, and I’m okay with that. Whining is an annoying irritation, but manipulation is an important skill. You know, for when they become politicians and stuff. Hey, don’t look at me like that: technically either one of them could still grow up to be President (juvenile records are sealed, right?) and therefore the manipulation could just be considered practice. Good practice. After all, how are they ever going to get votes out of Iowans if they can’t even wheedle a frozen pizza out of me?

So, okay, epiphany number one: my kids don’t embarrass me at the grocery store anymore. At least not with their whining. Which actually leads me to epiphany number two, and, no surprise, this involves the new way my kids have found to embarrass me at the grocery store: their dancing. Or at least what they consider to be dancing. Because the sad truth is that my kids have absolutely no ability to dance to 80s music. None. And their attempts to try are downright embarrassing.

Look, all I wanted was a moment in the bread aisle when the three of us could dance like Axl Rose when “Sweet Child O’ Mine” started playing. That’s it. It’s not like I was asking them to Moondance or break out some Paula Abdul style moves. Just a little Axl shimmy. But clearly it was not going to happen.

They were terrible. Like they’d never even seen a Gun’n’Roses video terrible. Or maybe like they’d never even seen dancing. Seriously, I’m sure that my daughter, Clementine, knows that there is such a thing as “dance”, and that when people engage in what is known as “dancing’ they tend to do it rhythmically, but you would never know it from the moves she was busting out. She looked more like someone trying to put out a trash fire then someone getting their groove on. And Clyde, the boy who has had dance lessons for the last four years—well, he was dancing, but he wasn’t Axl Rose dancing. He looked like he would have been more at home auditioning for a Michael Buble video than a Guns’n’Roses one.

But at least he was having fun. Which is more than I can say about the totally grumpy guy who was not only not trying to dance the Axl Rose shimmy in the bread aisle along with us, but actually seemed aggrieved that we were blocking his path to the 12-grain. (I assume he was going for the 12-grain. If not, then he should have been: dude clearly needed more fiber in his diet.) Which brings me to epiphany number three.

Yes my kids still beg for junk food. No they wouldn’t know who Slash was if he bit them in the, um, Axl. But by gosh at least they still know when it is time to have fun. And that time is always when your mom suggests an impromptu dance off in the bread aisle. Even if she does have to promise you frozen pizza to get you to do it.

My daughter, Clementine, has recently been very hard at work coming up with new flavors of potato chips. No, this is not her job: this is a hobby. That’s right: she names fried foodstuffs for fun. Hey, it’s not quite as weird as it sounds—lots of kids are doing it. You just go to the Lay’s website and enter in your idea for a new potato chip. ANY kind of new potato chip. Then once your flavor is entered they pit it against flavors other people have submitted and determine the winner through online voting. This means that Clementine gets to see her creations, such as “Teletubby Slash Fanfic,” go head to head against creations such as “Cruel Intentions” and “That Worrisome Itch.” Okay, scratch what I said earlier: this is just as weird as it sounds. And did I say that lots of kids are doing this? What I meant to say was that lots of teenagers are doing it. And by lots, I mean “almost everyone on the website.” Which is why you can’t find one single “normal” potato chip flavor on the entire page.

I’m not sure if it makes it better or worse that there are teenagers in bedrooms all over America subverting the dominant snack foods paradigm, but there it is none the less. And it just goes to show that there is literally nothing that you can invent that a teenager can’t ruin.

Remember Chat Roulette? It was such a nice idea, a way for lonely people who were interested in chatting with other lonely people to connect online, and then, within days it was all hello penises! Same with the new SnapChat, an instant photo messaging system that seems like it was designed solely for people who needed a *safer* way to text pictures of their genitalia to their friends. And then, of course there’s instant messaging, the best friend of teenage bullies everywhere.

Still, to be honest, I’m not really sure that you can say teenagers ruined any of those things. More like exploited their weaknesses. Which, no, isn’t the same thing at all. Think about it: the term they use for the people who are the most willing to try new technology is first adaptors. These are the people who, willingly or not, help find out the flaws in new systems, and, as such, are very useful to the industry. However, I think that what is probably more useful then finding a flaw is finding a weakness, and that is why teenagers are even better.

Think of them as first exploiters.

After all, only a teenager could tell you how vulnerable your great new internet app is to perversion by other teens. And this could be vital information: the lack of embarrassing press conferences in your future could depend upon it. I mean, I’m sure that the makers of Chat Roulette and Snap Chat could probably see their troubles coming, but I’m willing to bet that Lay’s was completely blind-sided. (Although, with a name like “Lay’s” you’d think they would already be a little more vigilant).

Actually, this may be an opportunity for unemployed teenagers everywhere. Maybe industries the world over should start having at least one teenager on staff to run ideas by, so that they can save themselves the embarrassment of having to explain to a confused public why “4-20 4-Ever” was the overall winner of their potato chip competition.

Or who knows? Maybe Lay’s did receive some kind of expert teenage advising already. After all, they didn’t allow people to submit photos with their flavors, did they?

Ugh. Thank God for small mercies. Having already seen the things that teenagers love to photograph so much, I’m not sure if I ever would have been able to eat another potato chip again.

I once had a roommate who refused to do his dishes. Ever. He’s leave them to fester in the sink, and when he needed a plate or a fork or a frying pan he would simply pull whatever he needed out of the cold, greenish water, give it a cursory scrub, and then use it. He said it worked for him, and I’m sure it did.

It did not, however, work for me. It didn’t matter that we each had our own dishes. (This was his argument). It didn’t matter that, technically, he was only using half of the sink, and that, theoretically, half that sink belonged to him. (Another argument). It didn’t matter that he had grown up with a strict, over-bearing mother, and that leaving dishes in the sink was his way of reclaiming his own sense of self (the weakest argument by far). None of that mattered, because his leaving dishes in the sink for days upon weeks drove me crazy, and that was a place he probably should have encouraged me to stay far, far away from. Because every time I go crazy I remember how much I really like it there.

I remembered as I stood in the front yard flinging his dirty dishes out into the night. I remembered as I stripped the sheets off of his bed, poured in the fuzzy silverware and remade the bed as I had found it. And I remembered as I took every one of my clean dishes into my room and hid them like Bluebeard hiding his dead wives, chortling maniacally to myself as I stashed them under the bed and in my sock drawer.

My roommate started doing his dishes after that. And looking for a new place to live, which was fine with me; I got a new roommate, one who also drove me crazy, but in different, less psychotic ways. But still, I learned a very important lesson with that first roommate: no matter what, always be the craziest person in the room.

This is a lesson that has served me especially well when it comes to raising children. I don’t care what discipline method you swear by, nothing, and I mean nothing can trump crazy. You think hell hath no fury like a woman scorned? Try hell hath no fury like a mother who has to leave the house in the middle of the Downton Abbey finale. Jesus and the moneylenders in the temple didn’t have anything on Mom and the beer bong at the kegger. Yeah, never underestimate the power of crazy to clear out a room. And even if, by some chance, crazy doesn’t work, well then, it’s still just incredibly freeing to be able to let go of the pretense of not being crazy for five minutes. Because it’s not like I go into those situations and turn the crazy on; on the contrary, I go into them and turn the sane off.

Of course, it’s hard to keep being the craziest person in the room when one of the people who is constantly in the room with you is a teenage girl—in other words, a smarter, stronger, crazier version of yourself. But it can be done. After all: it still takes years of practice for the student to best their master. Plus, middle-aged women have one distinct advantage over teenage girls when it comes to the crazy: we don’t worry about “everyone looking at us.” In fact, we’re just starting to get to that age when it is becoming clearer and clearer that less people are looking at us every day, and are also quickly realizing that the day will one day come when no one will look at us at all.

Unless you can get some seriously good distance with those first few dishes, that is.

The other day I took a six-year-old to a movie.

It’s been a long time since I took a six-year-old to a movie. Since my youngest child is now twelve, I’m guessing that’s it’s been at least six years. Which means that there were things I had clearly forgotten about. For one, I had forgotten that when you take a six-year-old to a movie you are essentially hand-cuffed to that six-year-old. They need to pee, you get up to go to the bathroom. They drop their straw and need another one, you both get up and go back to concessions. They get restless and fidgety, you get restless and fidgety trying to calm them down.

And then there’s the narration. Six-year-olds should come with *SPOILER ALERT* stamped on their foreheads, because if they know what is going to happen, then soon you (and everyone around you) will know it, too. This isn’t really a problem for the surrounding adults; after all, if you have reached the age of majority and still can be surprised by the plot twists in a Disney film then you probably are dealing with bigger issues than spoilers. Issues like wondering how long until that Nigerian prince gets back to you with your seven million dollars.

It is, however, a problem for other six-year-olds, and that’s why I attempted to keep all impromptu reveals from my accompanying six-year-old as sotto voco as possible. Which means there was a lot of shushing on my part.

Unfortunately, there was also a lot of shushing on the part of the also accompanying seventeen-year-old, which meant that our corner of the theater soon began to sound like it was filled with pit vipers. The only thing is that the seventeen-year-old wasn’t shushing the six-year-old—she was shushing me. Which was ridiculous, because I wasn’t the one narrating the film. I was just commenting on it. There’s a difference. At least, I think there is.

It all started with the opening cartoon, a “retro” short that combined stalking, abduction and psychological torture with a little impaling, crushing and garroting. Basically, it was an animated snuff film. And yeah, I know that it was no different than the Tom and Jerry or Roadrunner cartoons of my youth, but there was something about it that bothered my adult sensibilities in a way those cartoons never did before. And so I leaned over the six-year-old to say as much to the seventeen-year-old (who just happened to be my) daughter, Clementine.

“Geez, it’s like the Disney version of Saw,” I said. “It’s freaking torture porn.”

“Mom! Shhhh! What is wrong with you?”

“What? I’m just saying.”

That’s when the six-year-old spoke up. Loudly. “It’s okay. They’re not really hurt.”

“Shh!” I said. “And are you crazy? He was just stabbed with a pitchfork. Twice.”

“Shh!” Clementine said.

“What? They’ve done everything but waterboard that poor cat.”

“I like water,” said the six-year-old. “All the water freezes in the movie.”

“Shh!” hissed both the seventeen-year-old and I at the same time.

Like I said, it’s been a long time since I took a six-year-old to a movie. And it will probably be another long time until I do it again. But it might be an even longer time until the seventeen-year-old goes back to a movie with either one of us.

I have a confession to make: I never taught my daughter to cook. At all. Of course, in my defense, she doesn’t actually eat, so… Okay, that’s not quite true: she does, occasionally, eat things. But she doesn’t have nearly the appreciation—or, as some would say, obsession—for food that I do. This is the girl who ordered jello for dessert at an ice cream parlor. The girl who once ate one bite of whipped cream from the top of a piece of cheesecake and then declared “I’m done.” The girl who always ended up throwing out most of her Halloween candy because it got old and stale.

Of course, part of the reason she never actually eats is because she discovered the joy of coffee at age twelve, and has since seemed to survive on it like a hummingbird on nectar. All I can say is “thank God for lattes,” because without them I’m sure she would be the first child in Flagstaff to be diagnosed with rickets in a very long time.

But then she went to Ireland for five months, and maybe it was the switch away from coffee to tea, or maybe it was the fact that she was living with the kind of people who actually expected her to eat, but she came back not only eating, but cooking, which, really, should be all kinds of wonderful, but in all honesty, isn’t at all. And that’s because the truth is she came back knowing that there was such a thing as food, and knowing that that food needed to be cooked before it could be eaten, but without knowing any of the skills necessary to put those two things together.

Not that she hasn’t tried.

You know how when your kid is three they have a tea party with their stuffed animals and they hand you a tea cup full of what you hope to God is just muddy water and you lift the cup up to your lips and make drinking noises until they finally look away so you can dump the whole thing in a potted plant and ask for seconds? Yeah, that doesn’t work so well when your kid is seventeen and has just cooked you dinner. And by cooked I mean put in a frying pan and then taken back out almost immediately afterward.

I suppose at this point I should be thankful that Clementine is still mostly a vegetarian, because if that’s all she thinks you need to do to kale to make it edible then I can’t imagine how she would serve me a hamburger. No, actually, I can imagine how: it would probably still be attached to the cow. The living, breathing, mooing cow. Because if kale had a pulse it would have still been beating when she put it in front of me. And no, it was not a kale salad.

Actually, it was not kale anything. It was kale. Slightly warmed, barely chopped, kale. Which I know is all the rage right right now, but seriously? It was like trying to eat a green dish scrubbie, but less pleasant, because at least the scrubbie has been used on plates that once held actual food.

But still: this was my child, and she had made me dinner. Ish. And so I dutifully folded up a piece of kale the size of a dishcloth and shoved it into my mouth, where it promptly unfolded into something the size of a tablecloth. I chewed as vigorously as I could, not because I was enjoying it but because I was afraid that if I stopped the kale would get the upper hand and grow yet again.

Meanwhile, my daughter waited expectantly for my reaction.

And waited.

Something tells me it’s time to start buying more plotted plants.

My daughter, Clementine, spent this last Christmas and New Year’s traveling Ireland and the U.K. To her great credit she only had one breakdown. This, I think, is pretty much average: everyone has that one moment when they are traveling when everything just falls apart. When despite all of your hotel reservations, All-City Passes, and money pouches that force you to duck inside the bathroom every time you need to get out change for the bus, you still absolutely lose it. Mine was in a cafe in Glasgow, when my request for a latte was met with so much swearing and hostility that I ran outside and had a breakdown on the sidewalk. A girl I remember from college had hers when the giant lollipop she had carried all the way back from Disneyland fell and shattered on the airport floor. And Clementine’s came when she had to push an overladen luggage cart with a wonky wheel through a rainy parking lot in Shannon.

Clementine will kill me when she finds out I am telling this story, just like the aforementioned college friend (her name was Rachel, by the way) would kill me if she ever discovered I was sharing her lollipop story. Because our first instinct is to feel intense embarrassment when these moments happen. I mean, it’s just a cup of coffee, right? It’s just a luggage cart. It’s just a stupid lollipop, for crying out loud. It’s not like getting caught smuggling hash over the Turkish border. It’s not like showing up in Russia without the proper visas, because—ahem!—you thought you didn’t need Visa since you already have a MasterCard (truly one of my favorite travel faux pas stories of all time). It’s not that big of a deal. And it certainly isn’t worth standing on a sidewalk, or in an airport, or in a parking lot crying your eyes out over.

Except for the fact that, actually, it kind of is.

Look, there’s something about travel that just absolutely breaks you. And that’s good. That’s why you do it. Or at least it’s one of the reasons why you do it—although that might not be so obvious when you’re the one stuck with the wonky luggage cart. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

I once read a great piece of advice about creating fictional characters that also applies to real people. “Characters,” it said, “are like geodes. You have to break them to see what they’re made of.” Of course, characters in books are lucky (or, if we were honest, unlucky) enough to have all of their breaking take place during Very Important Events. They break on the way to Mordor, or in the middle of the Tri-Wizard Tournament, or when their boyfriend’s cancer comes back again.

In real life it doesn’t always happen that way. We break in line at the grocery store when someone calls us out on having too many items for the express line. We break when we miss our exit on the freeway. And we break, a lot, when we are trying to do normal things in abnormal places. (Or at least in places that are not normal to us.)

But that’s okay. Because after the breaking comes the good part. The part when you get up, spare a few choice words for rain, luggage carts, and wonky wheels, and keep going. When you walk away from the broken mess that was your (in all likelihood truly disgusting) lollipop. When you decide that, actually, a beer sounds way better than a coffee anyway.

When Clementine was traveling she learned where to find the Rosetta Stone in the British Museum, Eamon de Valera’s jail cell in Kilmainham Gaol, and Platform 9 ¾ in Kings Cross Station. But perhaps most importantly, she learned to find her fortitude in an airport parking lot in Shannon.