The Planets and People We Love

When I was little, I wanted to be an astronaut. I was enchanted by the cosmos. When we were told to write a report, I would write about the stars. I loved science and thinking about the future of mankind. As I grew older I continued to love reading and writing science fiction.

When I was an adult I met the son of the man I would marry. His name was Jack. He wanted to be an astronomer. He had memorized facts about all the planets and he could draw detailed shuttles and ships. Jack was diagnosed with a form of high-functioning autism called Asperger’s. People with Asperger’s tend to have highly analytical minds and a singular, life-long passion. Jack’s is for space.

I became Jack’s mom. And I love the idea that I harbored an affinity for the planets so that one day I could identify with this special little boy. Over Jack’s bed, we’ve pinned detailed images of all the planets, in order of course. We’ve made necklaces of the planets. I’m even working on a design for a solar system tattoo. Around Jack’s room are copies of the latest Astronomy magazine, a couple of telescopes, and ticket stubs from when Neil deGrasse Tyson came to speak at my college and Jack was first in line to ask questions.

When I was a kid we took a road trip to the Meteor Crater, and it was the first time I had seen a place entirely devoted to space. It made such a strong impression on me that I convinced my family to take us again when I was a young teen. That time, I purchased a white and red NASA patch and sewed it to the pocket of a white button up shirt. When people asked me if I worked for NASA I beamed with pride.

The Great Science Adventure

Two years ago I started planning our first family vacation. It would be 100% dedicated to Jack’s overriding passion for astronomy. Before sitting him down to have the polyamory talk and introducing the idea of more partners into the picture, I wanted him to have a solid experience with just Mom and Dad to reaffirm his sense of being loved and having a special place as an important member of the family.

I spent weeks, maybe even months, charting out the road trip. I knew the Mecca for the trip needed to be the Meteor Crater. And since the Meteor Crater and the Grand Canyon are only two hours apart, we could plan to see both marvelous marks in the earth’s surface.

With the end goal in mind, I researched far and wide for attractions that would be specifically geared toward my little scientist, Jack. I started mapping out science centers, planetariums, and aerospace museums. Five hours from our house was the Science Museum Oklahoma, a huge kid center with a special dome theater. About half the place was dedicated to space, the rest to other science topics. And of the two movies showing in the dome, one was a film about space. I’d found our first destination.
I plotted the course, bit at a time, through hours of internet research and phone calls, until every detail was down. I hung the finished plan on the bulletin board in the dining room, and slowly cultivated excitement in my husband Doug and my son Jack for the upcoming trip. My childhood contained countless such road trips, and I wanted to share that with both of them, my family.

One year ago, we were supposed to make that trip, but for a number of reasons, none of which I can recall now, we had to gently ask Jack if it would be okay to postpone until the following summer. It was probably money problems, the poor health of family members, or some combination of the two. Jack agreed, and I took the trip off the bulletin board and back to the honing process, for further scrutiny and fine-tuning.

At some point I completed an even better version of the trip. Seven stops on the way there! Eight stops on the way back! The Great Science Adventure of 2015. Instead of returning it to the board, this time I put it in a fancy purple folder, and set it aside in an upstairs room that didn’t see a lot of foot traffic for safe-keeping.

An Addition to the Family

Six months ago, my husband Doug and I started dating Adan, and when they needed a place to stay, we welcomed them into our house. Adan moved in, and while they searched for a new job, they helped out by babysitting Jack during the day. We all grew to know one another better. Jack knows that Adan, unlike our other roommates, is a member of our family. He knows that we all exchange I love you’s and alternate who sleeps where.

At some point we realized that Adan would be coming along on the trip with us. I mulled it over and I felt good about the inclusion. Sometimes it’s okay to update the plan to improve it.

We did some fancy math and figured out when I would have enough PTO to take the trip, and further determined that if we departed on a Thursday morning, we could have 12 days travel time using only 7 days PTO: Thursday Friday PTO, weekend, week PTO, weekend, and I could take a Monday off and work a Saturday instead.

It got down to the last shopping trip to get swimsuits. The last grocery trip to get sandwich supplies. My long distance boyfriend Christopher mailed us a tablet just in time when Jack’s laptop suddenly died. Adan kept asking me the details of the trip, but I just sort of put them off, waving my hand vaguely in the direction of a purple folder in a room where no one went.

On the eve of our trip, we finally reviewed the details of our itinerary—Adan for the first time ever, the rest of us for the first time in a long time. And there on the pages were no fewer than FIVE destinations in the state of Colorado, Adan’s home state. Adan’s excitement was infectious. They called family far and wide—their mom, cousins, aunts and uncles. “I can’t believe you’ll get to meet my family.” Doug’s sister Jessi called it fate. Because two years ago I planned a trip to include the home state of a significant other I wouldn’t meet for another year and a half.

On the Road Day 1

On a Thursday morning we packed bread and lunch meat and mustard; peanut butter and honey; soda and chips and fruit snacks. Our main method of saving money, since gas and hotels would cost, was to eat grocery store food as often as possible instead of splurging every meal for fast food or restaurants. I had gotten a new-to-me car not long before the trip because the transmission in my old vehicle was going. And it just so happened to be an ideal vehicle for road tripping, with a spacious back seat and a good-sized trunk.

We put three hours behind us then stopped at a Sinclair’s gas station for our first meal: sandwiches made on the surface of our ice chest. We packed a variety of electronic devices to hold our singular attentions and audiobooks for shared entertainment, but as captain of our ship I also pointed out the beautiful countryside as we drove. Oklahoma is so green, and with the exception of Oklahoma City itself, 40 West is a smooth ride.

After lunch we packed up and drove the remaining two hours to our first destination, Science Museum Oklahoma. It was incredible. If I could recommend only one stop to other families, this would be the one. Even with parts of the building closed for renovations, it was huge, engaging, and completely interactive. The space movie that played in the dome theater was narrated by Patrick Stewart, and told the story of how the international space station was built. Then it went on to explain new NASA projects for manned missions to Mars. It was so inspiring.

We explored the museum for a good two or three hours before we were ready to move on. Jack got a button with Charles Darwin on it, Adan bought me a sparkly pink unicorn stuffed animal to be my new buddy, and I picked out a bumper sticker for the car: I heart Science, where the heart is anatomically correct. I insisted Adan also get some cute butterfly stickers and smash a penny in the machine.

Then we hit the road for the last hour to our next stop, but we were too worn out from all the excitement of the first day, so we went a bit farther to book our first hotel room—with two queen beds, an outdoor swimming pool, and continental breakfast. Score. Everyone ate pb&h for dinner and then the boys went swimming, leaving Adan and I to catch up on some much needed lounging, stretching, and internet use before we all turned in for an early night’s rest.

Expenditures for the day included ice for the cooler, gas, admittance tickets, dome movie tickets, gift shop, and a night’s stay at the Days Inn in Clinton, OK.

On the Road Day 2

Our first day we put in a total of 6 hours of driving, ate all grocery meals, and hand-washed our clothes in the sink and hung them to dry. I felt proud and excited of all our little successes.

On the morning of our second day I found that my family was unclear on how to hang clothes for maximum air drying—not clumped together, and not dripping well. I laughed nervously as I scooped up their still wet clothes (and my dry ones) and bagged them up, wagering we could likely find a laundromat to dry them somewhere nearby.

Then we walked to the front of the hotel to find that the continental breakfast advertised through Expedia was a myth, and we were not the only customers who had been duped. Not wanting to cave on adjoining restaurant breakfast for only our fourth meal, we ate grocery store breakfast and headed straightaway to our destination of the morning: the Stafford Air and Space Museum of Weatherford, OK. It was also awesome, and in a completely different way than our previous stop.

This place was something like a giant warehouse, full of actual and replica air and space craft models and parts. Where Science Museum Oklahoma had been full of rowdy families and student groups, we’d arrived to the Stafford Air and Space Museum at the very start of their day and we were the first ones in the door. The stillness made it feel like we were special guests at a pre-showing.

Adan and I climbed into an actual cockpit and pretended to be pilots while pushing buttons, flipping switches, and sliding gears with abandon. Jack identified missiles and ships without reading the tags. And Doug bought a lime green soda, the only special thing he picked out for himself the whole trip, I realized later. There was a replica of Mission Control in Houston I had everyone sit at so I could snap some shots. There were various space suits that had been worn. And there was a miniature display of all the rockets sent up during the Space Race.

The great unifier of the trip so far, I realized, was that we were all experiencing it together for the first time. We were forging memories, and it didn’t matter that Jack had less life experience or Adan had less space knowledge. We were all feeling excitement over the same new things in front of us. And I’m not usually someone who goes in for overt patriotism, but it did make me feel proud to see the United States flag painted on our space shuttles. I think that’s another one of those factors that bands people together, feeling some stake in it—that’s our ship up there; those are our astronauts.

After we’d toured the museum itself, the gift shop where we got Jack an awesome solar system poster to frame and I got some NASA pencils for my desk at work, the play room where Jack built a ship and Adan and I test drove aircraft on a flight simulation computer program, and Doug and I stuck our heads into the obligatory Astronaut photo pose, I took a look at the various inspirational wall hangings in their meeting room. This one was my favorite, “To explore is human destiny” – General Thomas P. Stafford.

Adan’s friend Elena had offered to drive an hour and a half from her Oklahoma abode to treat us to the best Italian in Weatherford, so we hung around the parking lot of the museum, paying bills by phone and drying the damp clothes on the roof of the car, after wiping it down, of course—I knew bringing those Lysol wipes would come in handy. I’d misplaced my sunglasses but couldn’t find them even doing a sweep of the museum twice, so I gave them up for lost and borrowed Jack’s until I could buy another pair.

Elena called to let us know that she was in town so we loaded up and were driving to the restaurant when Doug got the call. One of his oldest friends, Jimmy, had committed suicide. We couldn’t begin to understand how to process this, so we continued with the meal as planned. At lunch we gorged on free bread, appetizers, and huge portions while getting to know Adan’s friend Elena. Doug had to step away several times to receive calls. Our friend Liz, who had been married to Jimmy until very recently and who shared two sons with him, had been the one to call Doug and ask him to please bear the responsibility of spreading the word.

After the meal, we were all in a kind of food stupor and grief shock, and we weren’t sure what was the best way to proceed, so we talked it through and decided to continue driving to our next destination.

We reached the Don Harrington Discovery Center to find that the exhibits, while all science, were none of them about space. This at the end of such a weird day triggered confusion and a rising tide of panic.

“We’ll just chock it up to easy mistakes and keep going,” Doug encouraged me. After all, he’d been tricked by the false promise of free continental breakfast at the last hotel. But I wasn’t ready to give up. I’d spent two years planning a trip. I had not made mistakes.

“Your website says you have a planetarium and space programs,” I pressed the staff attendant.

“Yep,” he agreed cheerfully, “But you’ve missed all the shows for the day. See,” he handed me a brightly colored schedule. “Solar System movie at 11am, Sun and Stars at 12pm, then live Q&A w an astronomer at 2pm.”

I tried to keep the tremor from my voice. “But we drove. All the way. From Little Rock.”

After a few more quiet, controlled conversations, I was able to ensure that our payment for tickets purchased today would be honored tomorrow. I went back to tell everyone the good news to find Doug in rising confrontation with another parent.

“He keeps looking at me!” A woman with near Jack and some other kids said angrily, addressing the plain clothes guard who’d stepped between Doug and the woman.

“Don’t parent my child,” Doug said, with steel in his voice.

I tried to ascertain what had happened. Apparently Jack had been playing with the woman’s children and she’d been displeased by some of his autistic idiosyncrasies. She had told Jack that he needed to “get an imagination,” presumably for some strict adherence to a perceived rule about how the toys were meant to be used.

Normally Doug keeps his cool in much more stressful situations. He works as a drug and alcohol substance abuse counselor at a lock up facility. He knows how to avoid conflict. But do not pick on his autistic son the day he’s been told one of his high school friends has shot himself.

I knew we needed to get out of there without incident if we intended to return the next day, but part of me did want to punch that woman in the face. She was loud and abrasive and refused to back down, running her mouth even when the guard tried to talk her down. I asked Adan to stand with Doug for solidarity while I was trapped on hold with the fourth or fifth booked hotel. Luckily the facility announced the first warning for closing time, and I got my family out of there.

We’d only driven a paltry three hours for the day, but given the circumstances there was no need to stress the distance, and I wasn’t willing to give up on our whole reason for traveling to Amarillo, TX. We finally found a hotel that wasn’t booked, was an ok price, and had our two requirements: pool and breakfast.

On the way to the hotel we got lost – there being a North Such-and-Such Rd and a South Such-and-Such Rd, in different parts of town – and when the alarm went off for regularly scheduled Jack medicine, we couldn’t find the pill bottle. We got to the hotel room and shared a communal panic as we searched bag after bag, recounting.

“I saw it next to the cooler this morning,” Adan said hopefully.

“I put it on the cooler so we couldn’t forget it,” I bit my lip.

“I don’t remember it being on the cooler when I loaded the cooler.” Doug looked pained.

As we continued to search we tried to figure out how we would even proceed if it was indeed left behind at the last hotel. It was the weekend so our doctor’s office would be closed, and any pharmacy here would need confirmation from back home—the thought of trying to coordinate our Arkansas pharmacy or doctor over the weekend was almost too much to bear. But surely we couldn’t be the first parents to ever lose a bottle of meds on a vacation.

And then we found it. Thank the Powers That Be. I had absently slipped the
bottle of Jack’s pills into my own little bag for the medicine I take.
And that was all the stress we could handle that day.

Expenditures for the day included ice for the cooler, gas, admittance tickets, gift shop, and a night’s stay at the Days Inn in Amarillo, TX.

Road Trip Day 3

We returned to the Don Harrington Discovery Center with our hard-won still-good tickets so we could watch the movies we’d missed before. We had no problems with re-admittance and we got Jack’s pick of seats for the first movie. Which was unfortunately geared toward much younger children. Parts of it were ok, but parts were very babyish. It let out and we had 30 minutes until the next one, so we set Jack free to play.

Then Adan, Doug, and I discussed that the funeral has been tentatively set for Wednesday and Liz had asked Doug to speak. Doug’s mom and sister had suggested Doug fly back solo so the vacation wouldn’t have to be cancelled, but I wasn’t sure why anyone thought I would want to continue without him, or even that I would be capable of it without his calming influence. Doug has always been the steady rock to my chaotic storm.
I had tried explaining to Doug just a few nights before the trip how I viewed his presence in my life.

“You’re my everything,” I told him. “You’re my universe.”

“But I’m not,” he said gently. “We’re poly. I can’t be your everything when you have other people you love too.”

I scrunched up my face, trying to put it into words. “You’re… the linchpin. Without you, everything else falls apart. You’re the sun of my solar system.”
And more quietly I added, “You’re my north star.”

And just as my relationship with Doug was at the core of my potential success in any additional relationships, Doug was why we had a family.
“Doug is my family,” I had texted his mom.

So we agreed that we would do whatever it was that we were doing with the trip and the funeral together. We reconvened with Jack for the second movie, which was way better and talked all about the life and death of stars. Then we went out to the car to make sandwiches for lunch before the live Q&A with an astronomer. During lunch we tried to talk to Jack about the trip.

“Hey, Buddy,” Doug asked, “How upset would you be if we called this the end of the trip and headed home now?”

“Not very.”

“You would not be very upset?” Doug asked for clarification.

“Nah. I’m kinda museum’d out.”

“So you don’t want to stay for the live Q&A with the astronomer?” I asked.

“Nah, I’m good.”

I turned back to see him clicking away at his tablet, only half paying attention. I decided we’d better start over.

“Jack, pause.” I waited until he had. “Is it ok if we skip the rest of this trip and don’t go to the Meteor Crater right now? Maybe go see it on a different trip sometime later?”

Comprehension was dawning. “But that’s the point of the trip. Can’t we just
skip all the museums and go straight there?”

Now that was an idea. We did some calculations. It could be done. If we skipped every other destination and just drove straight to the Meteor Crater, we would still have time to drive home for the funeral on Wednesday. Oh it was hard. So hard. To let go of everything I had planned, everything I had pored over and charted and lovingly organized.

I slowly turned the pages of the printed itinerary and looked over each destination that would be crossed out.

“Ok. Let’s do it.”

That day we splurged a lot. We were running low on supplies, so we made a grocery run, and that wasn’t cheap, but it turns out that Texans are really friendly! It was a nice surprise. We bought ice and gas, and postcards for our friend Fiona. We bought Wendy’s for dinner and Dairy Queen for dessert. We even grabbed candy from a Dollar General. But we put miles on the road and six hours behind us, kept our spirits up, and stayed the night at a Days Inn in Gallup, New Mexico.

Road Trip Day 4

Our fourth day of the trip was spent doing, and as a result I waited too late to jot much in the way of notes that evening before needing to sleep, but it was pretty memorable. That morning we washed all the dirty laundry in the bathtub with shampoo, and I was irrationally elated by the whole affair, singing made up songs and declaring to the world, “I’m a washing machine! I’m a washing machine!” Adan could not stop laughing at me.

After washing everything we squeeze-dried our belongings and loaded them up into one of our bags to take to the laundromat to dry. Jack and Adan stayed at the room to play and relax while Doug and I sat sweetly side-by-side reading our books at the laundromat, occasionally recalling to each other a movie that featured the unlikely laundromat date.

We drove the remaining two hours to the Meteor Crater. There was a long and winding road where the speed limit was greatly reduced, and Jack kept trying to predict which crested hill would reveal our coveted prize. We parked and climbed the outdoor steps to the museum. Tickets purchased, bathrooms visited, and we rode the elevator up to the outdoor lookout. I caught my breath when I saw the brick cut-out wall where I’d taken a photograph with my family over half my life ago. A stranger offered to snap our shot and now I have a forever-treasure picture of my family there, too.
We did everything there was to do. We watched the movie, we took the tour, Jack questioned and discussed in-depth his theories about the meteorite with our tour guide, much to the amusement of people who’d come from all over the world.

“You must be a scientist,” our guide noted keenly.

Jack shrugged modestly. “Aspiring,” he corrected her.

After the end of the outdoor tour, were we also had our picture taken, we walked through the museum together and checked out all the exhibits about meteorite make up, past scientific research that had been done here, and so on. Rather than walk back out to the car we decided to splurge on lunch on site at the in-house Subway.

Then we explored the huge gift shop with reckless abandon and I insisted that every get everything they wanted. Adan picked out a worry stone and special bracelet. Jack picked out an impressive quartz paperweight and two rings, one hematite and the other a mood ring… He proceeded to explain to us, for the rest of the trip, his scientific theories on how a mood ring functioned, including a detailed reference to the color assignments from the kids movie Inside Out, much to our increasing displeasure. But it was worth it. Because he wears them every day.

I found a Meteor Crater sticker for the car and a model space shuttle for my desk at work. And Doug picked out trinkets for his family back home—a little something to know we were thinking of his mom, dad, sister, brother-in-law, niece, and nephew. There was also a penny smashing machine here, so I made sure Adan did this one, too. When we’d had our fill of the wondrous Meteor Crater, we headed back out to the car.

New Mexico, we found, was full of great black birds, and we took pictures of them whenever we saw one. Outside the hotel we’d seen a few, and near our car there was another. It didn’t feel like a bad omen, more a reassuring presence.

Then we drove the two additional hours to the Grand Canyon. Tickets could be bought per vehicle instead of per person (less costly), and parking wasn’t as awful as we’d first worried. We walked the paths filled with people and arrived at the first lookout point. We peered out over, wondered at its majesty, and… desecrated it by spitting gum over the edge. (I won’t tell you which of us it was. It isn’t who you might expect, either.) Some areas were highly fenced and others less so, so we tried out courage and got as close to the edge as we dared—Doug facing it down, Jack a little further back, me a little further back than that, and scared-of-heights-Adan giving us a firm, “No. Way.” From a safe distance.

We didn’t feel the need to go in for all the crazy tours and hikes and rides. We just asked politely for a map at the visitor center for my scrapbook, got a sticker for the car at the gift shop, and called it a day as the park was closing for the day.

I tried to see if there would be any way to still fit in a visit to Adan’s family in Colorado Springs, but it was ten hours out of the way. I felt bad that they were getting cheated out the part of the trip that might’ve been most important to them.

“It’s really okay,” Adan assured me. “We can plan another trip. Getting to the funeral and being there for Liz is what matters now.”

We put in one more hour of driving that day for a total of 5. And we stopped to stay at our fourth consecutive Days Inn. This one I couldn’t resist because the building was bright yellow, my favorite color. Over the hotel stays I also accumulated a small collection of yellow capped Days Inn pens for my desk at work.

Expenditures for the day included tickets and gift shops at both attractions, lunch, gas, and hotel.

Road Trip Days 5

We were so intent on making good time we packed up and hit the road without checking out from the hotel! We remembered about three hours out, and had a big laugh about it, until we realized we weren’t even sure what address or town it had been. Unlike the others, which we’d found online and called, for this one I’d just taken the exit I saw for it. So we had to do a bit of detective work to track it down over the phone and make sure we didn’t get charged for more than one night.

We had figured out we would need to drive a solid eight hours each of the two days home to arrive Tuesday night before the funeral on Wednesday. It was a lot more stressful than breaking up the driving with fun distractions, and for the first time I asked Doug to help with some of the driving, which he was happy to do. Even so, my mood had completely ruined by the time we reached our hotel for the night—not a Days Inn, so I was automatically sour about that, too. Even though it was way nicer. I sent my family away to the pool so I could stew in my foul mood without taking it out on them too much, and I wrote:

Everything breaks down. Seams strain and burst. Good moods turn to bad. It is impossible to share a vehicle with someone for innumerable hours without finding things about them which irritate you.
Then there’s real imperfect life colliding with perfectly laid plans. You make a pattern of sleeping at only Days Inns until the night you can’t find one, and a pattern that shouldn’t mean anything breaks apart, and it hurts you, even though you know it shouldn’t.
And someone decides to kill himself and leave two young sons and their mom, as well as his own mom, behind. And you don’t know what to say when your son asks you why, because the truth is that no one understands it. We can all look at it from the outside and see he made the wrong choice. And no one can say why he couldn’t see that, and stop it from happening.
And even though it’s selfish, you’re exhausted and worn down by the fact that what should have been a week or more of easy driving punctuated by precisely selected destinations for optimal fun has instead been compressed into two nonstop days of driving home, to arrive in time for the funeral.
And you know the inconvenience of a long drive is nothing in comparison to the endless hurt one hopeless man has caused his entire family. But it still makes you weary, and pained, and irritable. And the best you can do is write about it in the hopes that you can then let it go. Away. Into ether. Where bad moods need to be cast while in the close proximity of your family who has, in fact, done nothing wrong.

Expenditures for Day 5 included gas, ice cream, and hotel.

Reflections

On day 6 we got an early start despite Doug getting sick—we aren’t sure if it was the breakfast he ate or his congestion acting up, but he did not feel good. I apologized to everybody for being sour, and thanked them for letting me get the extra sleep I apparently needed (I went to bed super early that night). We made really good time throughout the day even with stops for gas, lunch at Mazzio’s pizza buffet and, of course, ice cream. We got home much earlier than we originally expected, around 4pm instead of closer to 8pm, so we were able to unload the vehicle and collapse into much needed restfulness in our own familiar spaces. And we made the plan to visit Kohl’s the next morning to make sure everyone had black to wear for the funeral later than day.

All along the way on our road trip I kept wanting to record my thoughts as they came to me, but I was usually the one driving. And the Svbtle blog platform did not feel like one which lent itself to snippets and blurbs, so I kept it to an evening update. Even so, I was struck by how Oklahoma looked similar to Arkansas, and how both OK and Texas had a plentitude of windmills. There was one spot driving between OK and TX that reeked of cows and cow waste, and it hit on the way there and on the way back. We pointed out to Jack in New Mexico how the landscape had changed. Pale hills covered in dark round bushes, and striated red rock replaced the foliage and kudzu he was used to seeing, and hills gave way to plateaus and even the distant view of mountains.

“I missed the mountains,” Adan said, and it made me remember how much I’d missed the mountains and the ocean when I first moved to the Midwest. Doug and Jack, meanwhile, had grown up all their lives in The South.

I hated that we missed so many potentially awesome stops, but I loved that we spend under $1,500 for four people in six days of travel. And because we didn’t follow my original plan—a different path each way—we were able to take I-40 all the way there and all the way back. I liked having that familiar constant.

If I have learned anything from this trip, it is that life does not go as we expect it to. Sometimes life turns out much better or much worse, but we often don’t have a choice in the matter, except how we handle our responses.

At the funeral, Liz and Jimmy’s best friend Chops spoke first, followed by a slide show of photos of Jimmy accompanied by music, and Doug spoke last. And Doug told funny stories about how weird and awesome his experiences with Jimmy had been, and I was so glad they asked Doug to speak last, because people need to be able to laugh, even when things are hard.