That Time We Baked Bread in a Public Bathroom

Roadtripping & the Big Existential Stuff

Hello Friends!

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Portions of the following story are from my memoir-in-progress.

Hi from the Grand Canyon, 2001

With the hurricane shutters down at noon,

our house was dim but not night-dark. The South Florida sun shone through the cracks, giving everything a greenish underwater look I’ll always associate with hurricane preparations. But we weren’t getting ready for a storm.

Our little one-story cement house near the beach was secured and shuttered and we were leaving for a trip. A long trip with an uncertain route. Eric and I were saying three months, because anything longer sounded crazy. But we both knew, if we could make our savings last, we’d be in no hurry to come back.

As I walked through the house, taking my last look, I felt a preview of nostalgia for the life we were leaving. We’d lived there for seven years. I’d felt safe in that house. We’d had enough money, we’d had good jobs and friends. My parents lived nearby. That house was where Kiki had grown from newborn to three-year-old. It had been everything I’d wanted.

But we’d begun to want something different. Eric had quit his breadwinner job and we’d renovated an old camper. We were about to take off on a low-budget cross-county adventure.

I stood in the watery green light of the living room. Eric was already at the wheel of the truck, Kiki strapped in her carseat. I just needed to walk out and lock the door.

I wanted to freeze that moment. The moment before we would stop being our old selves.

Who would we be when we returned?

How would we change?

I knew we’d be different. The next time I entered that room, I’d be a different person. I knew that much.

Then, the scary, unsayable thought:

What if we don’t all come back?

I wasn’t always a worrier.

But once I had something to lose, really something, really everything to lose, I couldn’t help myself. I’d dwell on the worst possible outcome of any situation.

When I met Eric at seventeen, I fell for him with a desperate passion and the stakes felt scarily high. What if I lost him? At that age he was a wild punk rock boy, which of course was part of the appeal. It was only realistic to be worried.

He didn’t stay reckless. We both grew up. But I never quite got my anxiety level back to normal, after those early few years.

Later, after we had Kiki, my fears shifted.

Keek was diagnosed with severe food allergies when she was two. Twenty-five years ago, serious allergies were much less common. Some doctors – the ones we saw –were dismissive of food allergies. Epi-pens were not mentioned – we were just told to use Benadryl if she had a reaction, and take her to the ER if she had trouble breathing.

In that moment before locking the door, I pictured Eric and me returning without Kiki. Or just me, alone. Stop it! You have to stop thinking this way, I thought. But by then, that’s who I was. A mother with a constant fear that something terrible might happen.

And as it turned out, something terrible would happen, but not on that trip, not for twenty-two more years.

Maybe I was predisposed to be a worrier.

My mother had honed catastrophizing to an art. If you’d met her when she was alive, she would have been happy to tell you all about plane crashes and sharks and carbon monoxide and the San Andreas Fault. Plus, having Eric as my teenage boyfriend had primed my cortisol levels for overreaction.

But my fears were bigger than the common “what-ifs.” Studies of parents of food-allergic children show sustained stress levels equal to those of professionals in high-stress occupations, such as police officers and first responders. Other studies show parental anxiety comparable to people with cancer or recent heart attacks.

People often assume that we got into RV travel as a way to protect Kiki. We didn’t, but it did turn out to be a great solution to the problem of finding safe food on the road. We had our little home on wheels, with our own kitchen.

Dinner at the picnic table, Petit Jean Stat Park, Alabama, 2001

Our first trailer had a tiny fridge, 12 inches of counter space and a small oven where we made everything from roast chicken to birthday cake. We talked about Keek’s allergies in a positive way, like how making all our own food was healthier, and more fun, and better than what you could get in a restaurant. Making everything from scratch was actually not always more fun but it was part of life with allergies. We didn’t have extra money for eating out anyway, so it was easier not to have the choice.

In late August, three months into the trip,

we’d made it all the way to the Pacific Ocean and were slowly heading back East. When we crossed the Idaho border into Wyoming, we drove through groves of shimmering golden aspen. We’d seen the Rockies and the Sierra Nevadas, but the sight of the jagged Teton peaks did something to me. Was that what rapture felt like? After checking into our campsite, I took a quick break while Eric worked on setting up the camper.

I walked to the edge of a glassy lake. The shore was not sand, like I was expecting, but a beach of smooth pebbles in shades of brown and grey. I was the only person there, and I sat down on a log at the water’s edge. Only three months removed from suburban life, I still was wary of wild places, and unused to the silence and sounds of the wilderness.

I noticed a hawk, so high above he was practically a dot, yet from far below I could hear the sound of his wings moving through the air. I felt something shift inside me. The wings, the silence, the pebbles… maybe for a few seconds I was fully observant, more animal than human, senses flooded by the texture of the natural world.

That moment was when I understood we would never go back to our old life in South Florida. We’d return home, but only long enough to leave for good.

We had four idyllic days

in the Tetons. Fall arrives early there. We slept in our beds with gloves and wool hats on, but the midday sun was still hot. Eric and I both wanted to do some big hikes – too long for Kiki – so we split up each day, and one of us would stay with her.

Kiki and I were into a game then, where we’d stick a stuffed animal into the waistband of our pants like a marsupial pouch, and walk around the campground pretending we were in the dinosaur era. It was a game with an endless story and we’d walk and chat for hours, with the “babies” in our pants, and the backdrop of the Tetons, and sounds of birds and wind. We had nothing else on the schedule. I had nothing else I needed to do.

On that trip, Eric invented “Peter Pancakes” because Keek was obsessed with Peter Pan. They were just regular pancakes, but with that name, and cooked outside on a camp stove, it was an exciting breakfast. We ate next to a crackling morning fire.

We made our own allergy-safe bread in the bread maker we’d brought with us. At our Tetons campsite, we didn’t have electricity. By day four, we were running low on groceries and needed bread. Eric plugged the bread maker in at the campground bathroom, with a note begging people to please not mess with our bread. It baked safely, unmolested.

For years I’d thought I needed to live within ten minutes of a Whole Foods, and then somehow, on that trip, I’d turned into a person eating Bathroom Bread at a picnic table in the woods.

One of those four days at Grand Teton

Leaving the Tetons,

we were on a winding two lane state highway heading towards Yellowstone, towing our trailer through a landscape of forest and ranch lands. Our route followed a river that came and went from view, glittering and swollen to the top of the banks.

It was a short travel day, only three hours, but when we came upon a tourist shop, seemingly not attached to a town but just there on the roadside, we pulled over. Kiki was a great little traveler, but at three, trapped in a car seat, she needed a steady supply of rest stops and distractions to keep her happy on the road.

We were excited to find Rice Dream pops in the store’s freezer. It was 2001, before dairy free treats were common. Rice Dream was the only kind of ice cream she’d ever had, and she was excited to climb in her seat and get to work peeling the paper off the pop.

A few minutes later she started coughing and wheezing. Right away, I assumed the pop was cross-contaminated. “Pull over” I said to Eric, trying to sound calm. He quickly found a turnoff and we jumped out of the truck and pulled Kiki from the back seat. I held her on my hip as Eric helped me get two teaspoons of Benadryl into her. I stood there on the bank of that river, the crashing water so loud that Eric and I were practically shouting. The flat sandy area where we parked ended at a cliff several feet away and thickly forested hills sloped up both banks. I tried to remember the last time we’d seen a town. A hospital could be hours away. This is it, I thought. This is the end.

It wasn’t the end, of course.

The relief of that day in Wyoming would continue to reoccur, paired with the fear and helpless panic that always preceded it. When the deadly enemy is one of the most common substances in daily life, when the enemy is food, there is no way to not be always on alert.

In a study of anxiety in food-allergy parents, people who did better are those who are more comfortable with uncertainty. I don’t think I started out as one of those people but now I see that accepting uncertainty is a superpower. I don’t have any advice on how to get to that acceptance though, as it came to me in the worst possible way.

After Kiki died, my relationship with fear and anxiety changed. I was confused to discover that after the worst happened, my life still continued. I suddenly understood how little control I have over the things I used to worry about.

I still feel stress, and I still have my neurotic fears like thunderstorms and heights. But worry has flipped off like a switch. The big existential fears – death, meaninglessness, whether cancer will return – those fears are gone and I don’t lie awake worrying about what might happen. I now know it doesn’t do any good.

Yesterday was a hard day.

I missed Keek with a terrible ache. I wished it could be a day when she and I had a plan, a day when I was going to pick her up, and we’d drive to Mass MOCA, the art museum in North Adams, but first have Japanese lunch and maybe get something at the thrift shop; she was always so good at finding the hidden treasures.

I wished there would be a day, someday in the future, that we might have a plan together. We were supposed to go to the movies at the Amherst Cinema, the Monday after she had her final allergic reaction. But she was in a coma that day. We were supposed to see Eo, the film about the donkey. I don’t think I’ll ever see Eo now.

Today was a better day,

it just was. That’s the thing, there’s not always a reason for a bad day, or a reason for a better day. Eric and I played Scrabble this morning. I didn’t win but I got a really high score. It was rainy and windy so I didn’t walk on the beach, but at dusk I took a bag of garbage to the dumpster on my bike. I like to see the raccoons and possums and feral cats that lurk around there.

Stormy sky at Hunting Island State Park, SC

I decided to ride farther, and looped around the campground and past the beach. The wind was wild, palm trees flailing and sand whipping up onto the road. A storm was coming, and I got that old familiar pre-hurricane feeling from our Florida life. Warm rising wind and crashing waves. That feeling when you know you’re insignificant in the face of nature’s force.

In that moment, my life felt inconsequential. Not unimportant, but just a small part of some unimaginable whole. I felt light and something close to happy. I thought, I’m just here for a minute, I might as well enjoy the wind.⁜

News, Links and Other Stuff:

We’re still at Hunting Island State Park for four more weeks, then back on the road and heading west in December.

I’m getting my tattoo soon!

I am so excited. I get to see the artwork in a day or two, and then Friday is the big day with Lauren Damon at Nomad Society in Savannah. There’s a good story behind the tattoo, and you can read about it here: A Chicken From a Past Life

If you love someone with food allergies,

or you have them yourself, you know about the stress it adds to daily life. For years I thought I was at fault for feeling afraid and anxious. When I finally learned the statistics, it didn’t alleviate the stress but it was validating to find out I was not alone. Has food allergy stress impacted your life? Let me know in the comments.

For further food allergy perspectives, I recommend these posts by Substack writers

Zoe Elisabeth

and

Cindy Kaplan

:

Food Allergy Awareness Week Meets Mental Health Awareness Month

The Problem with Food Allergy Stereotypes

Thanks for reading or listening! 💛 Love, Tina