Looking back with Lot's Wife

Will We? My tombstone will say: HERE LIES OUR BELOVED MOTHER IN HER LAST REST ROOM. Does no one realize that I “go” so often to get away from everyone? That my kidneys have been trained to a hair-trigger sensitivity so that I can lock a door somewhere and not feel guilty? I recently read that the great thing about being a parent is that you find that you can be hated for long periods of time and not be bothered. Think of what a character builder that is! I have just stopped defending myself as a parent. I think the most effective thing to say when someone tells me what a terrible parent I am is, “Absolutely. You are absolutely right. You have no idea how completely right you are.” However, we are now entering into the quasi-empty nest years. The years when they go, then come back, then go. Clay and I veer back and forth between exultant freedom and this illusion that we’re still young if we have kids at home. We’ve lived so long that we’ve now become the heroes of the stories of what w...

Yesterday my husband and I were on our way down I-15 to the Shakespeare Festival in Cedar City. We were late, as usual, and we were supposed to meet our very anal son who starts complaining that we’re going to be late the minute we make plans to meet anywhere. “I KNOW you’re not going to be on time.” He says this to set me up so that I make all kinds of ridiculous promises about being early so as to be ultra-prompt—as if there is such a thing as “more than prompt.” I was dozing, my usual method of dealing with boring situations when I can’t stand in front of the fridge and wonder what I can eat. Suddenly Clay slammed on the brakes and said, “I saw a body.” I started up thinking for a minute that he must have hit some crazy person who’d decided to run across the road. Then for some reason I worried that he’d hit a porcupine. A huge cloud of dust lay across the median. We parked on the left side of the road on the median and started racing across the road, Clay explaining as we ran that ...