Dispatches From A Displaced Mama: (part 12)
One Mama's Experiences After Katrina Before Hurricane Katrina my family and I had planned to spend Thanksgiving as we traditionally do: at the track. Every year Thanksgiving Day marks the opening of Horse Racing Season at the Fairgrounds in New Orleans and people gather, in their finest wear and fancy hats, to eat turkey and bet on the ponies. Dylan, who loves animals, was especially fond of the ritual. After the storm, we learned that the Fairgrounds had been flooded and destroyed. Thus, after a three-month stint in exile, we found ourselves headed north to Wisconsin, where my husband was born, and where much of his family still resides, to celebrate a more conventional family holiday and negotiate a refreshingly normal set of challenges.
The first challenge we had to meet was the plane trip itself. In my formerly childless life, flying was always something to which I looked forward—packing my bags and driving to the airport, waiting at the departure gate before embarking on a plane, staring intently out the window with anticipation as it sped down the runway and rose steadily into the cloudy heavens, symbolizing to me adventure and freedom. I loved to travel, to escape routine, to savor the fresh difference of other people's customs, comforts, and routines. After Dylan was born, plane travel was still an adventure, but one that involved markedly less pleasure; plagued by the ever present threat of a meltdown, the trip would, invariably, prove exhausting and nerve wracking to both me and my unfortunate co-travelers. When Dylan was an infant and his needs comparatively basic, I was able, simply, to nurse him to sleep. As he grew into toddlerhood, however, the cost of flying for the three of us, added to the ongoing task of keeping him simultaneously entertained and quiet, made the prospect of flying daunting and prohibitive. This year we made the smart decision to buy several new books and a portable DVD player, all of which transported us northward with comparative ease; only towards the end of the journey, when we were forced to turn Bambi The next challenge was the weather. Where temperatures in Texas had, in the past couple of weeks, finally cooled to a perfectly spring-like range in the lower and upper 70's, when we arrived in Wisconsin, we were hit by highs in the low teens. For Dylan, who was born in Louisiana, such extreme cold was entirely unprecedented. For Chris and me, it was a reminder of why we had both chosen to live in the south. Still, the three of us bundled up in warm layers and trudged bravely through our first frosty gray day. A bustling and warm Thanksgiving meal with four of Chris' five siblings and their families helped us to forget the alien climate. By the second day, the shock had subsided, and we were genuinely excited when it began to snow, at first lightly and then in a thick wall of flakes, laying a frosty white blanket across the ground. It was Dylan's first experience of snow and he could not wait to bound out and around the yard with his two-year-old cousin, Emma, and her chocolate lab, Boo. What was more challenging for me, perhaps because less familiar, was the culture of rural Wisconsin. I have been here several times, before and after Dylan was born, in the summertime—a time of year that always afforded me welcome relief from the unbearable humidity of New Orleans. The state's hilly and green pastoral landscape and numerous lakes provided us with infinite opportunities for outdoor activities during a time when, in the south, everyone was confined to air conditioned cars and buildings. Wintertime in Wisconsin, at least in the countryside, where Chris' parents live, is more savage and not just because of the cold. Here one of the primary outdoor activities, or the one of which I felt suddenly and acutely aware, is hunting. Chris himself grew up hunting, and a few of his relatives still engage in the sport. In contrast, while I am not theoretically against the pursuit, I am also not at home with it. Driving from Madison, where we had spent our first couple of days, we saw a car with a deer carcass strapped onto the trunk, bleeding from its hindquarters. Thankfully, Dylan was asleep, and I was spared the task of explaining to him what had happened to the "sick" deer. Dylan has shown no signs of readiness to assimilate the meaning of death at this point in his development and perhaps, in a sense, what I was most uncomfortable with here in the rural Midwest, the alleged "heartland," was the nakedness of death and what Freud would call the death instinct at the heart of community life. Hunting season had opened the week before Thanksgiving and during the day you could, upon occasion, hear the crack of a rifle. Other than this sign of "life," the countryside seemed silent and heavy, as if in anticipation of this season of killing. I felt thankful, nevertheless, just to spend time with family—however different our cultural orientations—to be reassured of their constancy and support through dramatic physical and spiritual changes. To eat food, to converse, to rest, all of which would be necessary fortification for our return to New Orleans in December. But I did hope that someday I would once again find myself on Thanksgiving at the Fairgrounds, watching a muscular parade of horses as they rounded the track. And I did vow not to allow Dylan to finish Bambi...at least not for a while. |
Laura Tuley
 Laura Tuley is mother of one and teaches English and Women's Studies at the University of New Orleans and does graduate work in Counseling at Loyola University. She and co-editor Jessica Nathanson, are in the final stages of their anthology called Mother Knows Best: Talking Back to Baby "Experts." Read more of Laura's Dispatches From New Orleans column. search mamazine:
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