So the long haul drive has become at least a biannual ritual with me and my family for almost 20 years since I left for college in Atlanta. (Man! I feel old writing that!) I've got many stories and have had many adventures on these trips, but the one that really stuck was pretty minor in actual action. I think it goes to the heart of male/female interactions and caused my family to coin a phrase that I still use to this day, "Sometimes its just a bad cup of coffee...."
Though I'm not married now, I once was. I could (and often do) say a lot of bad things about my ex, but one great thing I about him was that he'd travel to North Carolina with me on these trips to visit the family. On this trip, we only had one child, Grace. She was very small at the time, probably less than a year old.
It was the road trip from HELL. It was a few hours into the drive, far to late to turn back, but nowhere near the end of the drive. Grace, who'd seemed perfectly fine earlier on, started to throw up. Babies amaze me, especially when they vomit. They are so small and sweet smelling and make such gurggly wurggly sounds normally. They'll turn on you at the least provocation, though, and unleash a stream of upchuck that seems entirely disproportionate to their internal volume.
We'd stopped at one truck stop and cleaned up pretty well. We changed clothes and washed off in a relatively clean and well lit rest area. The car was in pretty good shape and we had spare clothes and blankets. Soooooo, we decided to press on - through the night and the dark and sparsely inhabited North Carolina mountains.
Now, this was quite a while ago and GPS wasn't a standard feature on every car and cell phone. In fact, I don't even think I HAD a cell at the time. Anyway, once you hit the mountains, cell phones didn't work anyway. It was dark and lonely, without many exits or gas stations or restaurants.
Before we started out, my ex, his father and my ex-brother in law had plotted out the course we were planning to take with military efficiency in Don's (my ex-father in law) study. And I DO mean military. My ex-brother in law was some sort of military person, a SEAL or Ranger or something of the sort. My ex-father in law was CEO of a large textile company with operations across the Southeast. And my ex-husband, as I realized much later, was just a bat-shit crazy control freak. So the three of them retired to the study, which was hung with swords, guns, and maps of military campaigns and huddled around the computer with several roadmaps as backup to map out the campaign. A perfect setting for planning a simple family trip, no?
I sat at the kitchen counter with my mother in law, Diane and a paper road map that you get at a gas station. With a magic marker I drew a line from Chattanooga, TN to Raleigh NC. Almost directly straight on HWY 40E. It took about 5 minutes.
I was a little new to the family so when the sound of shouting reached the down the hall and into the kitchen, I looked over at Diane in alarm. "Should I go in? Its really not that difficult, we just pick up 40 in Knoxville and then its a straight shot." She looked at me with a sad, tired, pitying expression that said, "Honey, you just don't understand."
"I wouldn't do that if I were you. They'll work it all out." About an hour later, they emerged with a map marked up with a route that led through National Forests and seemed to avoid any major highway completely and a page long list of printed instructions. I just didn't say anything. Even when I was told we'd be leaving at around 10 pm "so the baby could sleep through the night." OK, "the Baby" doesn't sleep through the night now, so I didn't see the point in THAT comment but I went along for the sake of family unity. Any disagreement at this point would be equated with a full-fledged secession from the Trotter Union.
So that's the backstory which leave us driving through a two lane windey road through the middle of a forest which would do the Brothers Grimm proud at 2 am in the morning with a tiny baby who had just had her third or fourth bout of vomiting. When FINALLY saw some sort of civilization again - a Motel 6 sign or something of the sort, even my ex had to admit defeat and pulled over to spend the night. Luckily the place had a laundry room, so I stayed up to wash out all the blankets and baby clothes and adult clothes that were reeking of vomit. Grace, as soon as we were settled, quieted down and literally slept like a baby, as if none of this had taken place.
The next morning was grey and cold and drizzly. Absolutely abominable and depressing. My ex was up super early to hit the road. I was exhausted, even though he'd driven the whole way. I had NO energy left.
At this point its only fair to mention my coffee addiction. I drink coffee like its water. I have since I was about 12. Its an Allred family thing. We drink coffee at 10 0'clock at night, with every meal, with popcorn when we're watching movies. Like a long time heroin addict, I'm kind of immune to the effect coffee would have on a normal person, but suffer SEVERE withdrawals when I have to go without.
My ex-husband, bless his soul, knew this about me. He didn't drink coffee, but when we awoke, he offered to go out and forage some for me. There were not really a lot of options, in fact only one. He walked a great distance to a roadside truck stop or gas station to get me some coffee.
When he returned to the room, he handed me the styrofoam cup. I took one sip and without thinking said, "Ugggh, that SUCKS!" I could see he was absolutely crushed. I was completely surprised and dismayed. You see, to him, my rejection of that cup of toxic, been sitting on the burner all night, truck stop coffee was a rejection of HIM personally. His whole body radiated disappointment and FAILURE.
I tried to apologize. He called me ungrateful. Accused me of not appreciating his effort. Said it made him feel worthless. Said he'd done his best.
Since we were driving, we were forced to spend several more hours in the car together so we talked it out. I told him that I realized that he'd been thoughtful and had anticipated my needs. I felt lucky to have him. BUT I said, that sometimes in life you just can't control all the elements of a situation. He did all the right things and I appreciated that AND him greatly. But that still didn't make the coffee good.
But the ultimate takeaway from this story was that even though I was criticizing the coffee. I WASN'T criticizing him or saying he'd done anything wrong. "Sometimes its just a bad cup of coffee....." That phrase stuck and we used it time and time again to explain situations where we were disappointed with outcomes, but were pointedly NOT criticizing the other party.
