Mothering Without a Map

In 1990, I circled back to Boulder, Colorado, my hometown, the place where all my family stories begin. I’d left in the seventies, after attending the University of Colorado, vowing never to return here to live. Boulder, then, represented all that I wanted to forget and leave behind.

Now, I live in my old neighborhood, in a house that lies between the one my mother died in when I was a girl and the cemetery where she, my father, grandparents and great grandparents are buried. Truly, this is home, and now I can’t imagine wanting to live anywhere else.

During the years I lived away from Boulder, I went to graduate school at the University of Kansas in journalism. From there I moved to New York to pursue a career in magazines. For almost ten years, I worked as an editor for Woman’s Day and Better Homes & Gardens magazines, and then moved to San Francisco and began freelance writing. There my first marriage dissolved. I began to write about my own experiences, in books and articles; I went into counseling for the first time to sort out the trouble in my upbringing.

A new life for me began after 40. I remarried, this time to a man I’d gone all through school with and who also had worked through early sorrows. Together we had two children. And now, here in Boulder, in an old house in our old neighborhood, we’re giving our children the rootedness we hope will allow them to fly freely when they grow up. In doing so, we’re also giving ourselves the security we missed out on as children. Day by day, we become ever more firmly planted in this place we call home.