The day in question started off with an early morning check of my BlackBerry and the upsetting news that a family history of breast cancer had caught up with a childhood friend. My heart sank. I looked outside at the dark morning. It was mid-June and the rain poured down. I tapped off a quick email of support and tried to stay positive about how the rest of the morning would unfold. But something in my gut told me this day was already shaping up to be what my kids would call “a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.” The apt description comes from the title of a classic storybook by Judith Viorst. My mother used to read it me. In the story, a young boy named Alexander endures a day in which nothing goes right from breakfast till bedtime. It never occurred to me until I read aloud from it to my twins recently that its message about facing down adversity could resonate with anyone of any age.
We tried hard to turn the day around. After their usual eggs and toast and some coaxing to put on their Thomas the Tank Engine and Hello Kitty raincoats, my son and daughter climbed into their stroller and we set off for the ten-block walk to their nursery-school summer program. For weeks, the weather in New York City, our new home, had been uncharacteristically soggy. More than once, I heard people on the street complaining that it felt like we’d been transported to Seattle. Still, rather than take a taxi or try to find one in the rain, we saddled up the stroller with our wet weather gear and set off into the gray day just like every other mom, dad and nanny, hoofing it in the elements. If this is what it means to be a New York City mom, I thought, then I’m tough enough to handle it. Bring it on.
By 8:45, I thought the rain might have lightened up enough so that I could get the kids to school mostly dry and still walk back up to the gym to catch a 9:30 exercise class. But that was before we hit The Hole.
No sooner than the moment we left the safety of our lobby, the rain started coming down in sheets. I was completely drenched. My daughter whined that the clear plastic cover shielding she and her brother was ugly and she furiously tried to kick it off. My power walk picked up speed. I wasn’t going to let this unrelenting shower keep us from staying on our schedule.
With two three-year-olds in the double stroller, it was tough to push in the wind. I pulled my baseball cap down low and threw all of my body weight into a furious effort to move the thing down 2nd Avenue, zigzagging around those lucky enough to have hands free to carry an umbrella.
Then, without warning, we slammed to a halt. The front wheels had hit a deep groove in the middle of a crosswalk and the entire stroller flipped over, almost taking me with it. I screamed and pulled with every ounce of my strength to right it before the light changed. People rushed over to help me. My children thankfully stayed strapped in their seats but they were terrified. We all were. I wheeled them on to the sidewalk and pulled up the plastic and scanned their tear streaked faces and shaking bodies for signs of injury.
A fellow mom rushing somewhere with her own toddler stopped to ask if I needed help. “No, no,” I said and waved her off. But then in shock, I guess, I started to gush about how we just moved from California and we’re just not used to this weather and dealing with the potholes in the streets. There, in the downpour, she kindly offered that she, too, was a recent transplant from Alabama and that she completely understood. That’s when I started to cry.
