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How long could it last? The first night you'd find yourself in a cold stucco motel, in a room with stained carpets, thin orange and avocado green bedspreads and cigarette smoke clinging to every surface. Lying there watching an "NYPD Blue" rerun on TV would make you so lonely that all you'd want to do would be to call home and ask how everyone was doing: Did everybody eat all their dinner?

I'd be home the next day.

Why is it that I can't bear to be away from the people who make me want to run away in motorcycle boots?

If I had the boots I wouldn't have to dream of leaving my family. I'd just feel like a different person. It would be enough. I'd be shopping in Lucky but I'd be two-stepping to the twang of a different fiddler. You'd see me and think I was just picking up a couple of things to throw in the back of my pick-up before heading out of town to my ranch in Bolinas, where I play music and paint all day. You'd envy me like I envy that Victoria's Secret model. You'd never know that my real grocery list was turkey dogs, wipes, Rugrats macaroni and cheese, baby Tylenol and that clear liquid you give kids when they barf too much.

I just can't see the motorcycle boots in the minivan.

The minivan is marriage, two kids, life insurance. The boots are the past. They revive the me that stayed out late, hung around with bad boys and swallowed stuff that I don't think I would swallow today.

The boots are freedom. They are the time I didn't worry if there wasn't enough food in the fridge or enough money in the bank. No one depended on me or clung to me and no one peed on my office chair because they forgot to go to the bathroom. My thoughts percolated and bubbled uninterrupted. Sometimes I was quiet for an entire day.

Motherhood is a gritty ordeal that would be made significantly worse by a minivan. That Victoria's Secret model wouldn't know where to begin with the stuff that goes down in my house. Could she fathom waking to her baby's cries every single morning for two years -- at 4 a.m., then again at 5 and again at 6? And each time, could she blindly shuffle into her child's room, patiently coaxing her back to sleep?

She could if she had the boots. And so could I. I need strength. Not ordinary cup of coffee strength, but motorcycle boot strength. This is strength that a minivan will not give me.

I really need those boots.

What is a fight over Barbies, a trashed makeup kit (soaked and in the bathtub) to a woman in motorcycle boots? Nada. Bootless, these are soul killers, events from which one takes time to recover. But with the boots, I would power through, laughing in the face of "she pushed me!" snickering at the trivial filth in my path. I would arrive home, on foot perhaps (no need for a minivan here), scoop up my children with a big brawny laugh and bellow: "Mama's home!"
salon.com | Feb. 9, 2000

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