I’m loving the respite from hot-and-sunny, but of course context is everything: by this time of year in the States, I’m always craving sunshine.

At that rainy practice the other day, I went for a run (yet another strange event) and afterwards walked by the Grand Mosque, which is just down the road from the sports complex where the boys play soccer.

While friends were working on a second house, or a vacation house, or a condo somewhere spiffy, we were renting an apartment in Manhattan (which we moved out of when we left for Abu Dhabi: now we got nuthin’).   We felt vaguely smug about it, too: instead of lying awake at night wondering which creak or drip was going to cost us a fortune in repairs, we knew we could just call the building manager and someone would show up to fix the problem.  Equityshmequity, we figured.

Other people had a car, maybe two cars if they lived in the ‘burbs; they had mechanics and garages and lube jobs. (Is there any way for that not to sound obscene? Methinks not.)  Long before Husband was Husband, he owned a succession of incredibly beat-up cars, each more decrepit than the last, but by the time he became Husband, we were firm Manhattanites: car-less.  We rented cars when we needed them and–again–felt smug when we returned them to Messrs Avis and Hertz.  A few years before we moved out of New York, my mom “sold” me her old Subaru for about a dollar: it had more than 100K miles on it but it got me back and forth to my job in Westchester, and in a way that perhaps only another mother could appreciate, I started to think of my drive home in thick traffic as “me time,” even if those precious private moments occurred while I sat bumper-to-bumper on the FDR.

When we moved to Abu Dhabi, we tried to go car-less at first: taxis here are easy to find and not very expensive, but after a while it got tiresome trying to flag down a cab while hauling a week’s worth of groceries.  So we rented a Toyota Yaris, which was a bit like driving a golf ball.  Fuel efficient, sure, but puttering down the road while the Armadas and Land Cruisers and Denalis thundered past made driving a white-knuckled, sweaty-backed experience.  So we went up a size: Tiida, or Tilda, as I liked to call it. Tilda made us a little bit more visible, but she accelerated about as quickly as you might imagine someone named Tilda would, and she wasn’t very big. I got tired of craning my neck around the wheels of the huge SUVs that rule the roads.

Driving, you see, has become a part of my life. I have to drive somewhere almost every day; the errands that I could get done on a long walk in New York are impossible here. It’s sort of like Los Angeles in that regard, except that gas is a helluva lot cheaper–and there’s only one brand of gas: the government-owned Adnoc.  As a result of all this driving? I know the names of cars–I can distinguish between an Armada and a Land Cruiser at thirty paces–and my ass has come to resemble the seat cushions of the Rav4 that we started renting after a near-miss in Tilda.

The Rav4 at least got us into the sight-lines of the lumbering SUVs; I felt a little bit safer as I carted children hither and yon (mostly yon, alas), as I shlepped groceries around, as we went up the Zayed Road (aka the death highway) to Dubai. True, the sightlines for me were crappy–I had to constantly hitch up in my seat when I wanted to change lanes–and, of course, there were all those car-rental dirhams sliding out of our bank account into Mr. Thrifty’s coffers.

So we did it. The grown-up thing.

Dear reader, we bought a car.

A Serious Car. An Officially Fancy Car.

Seems there was a fantastic financing offer, seems there was an amazing warranty offer (five years: everything free, from oil to brakes to, I don’t know, touching up the highlights in my hair? Who knows).  Seems that the car salesman, a lovely man named Alaa (pronounced like…yep, that’s right: it’s as if I bought my car from god), really really wanted to make us happy; he wanted to treat us like Very Important People (to which I wanted to say “gosh, I bet you say that to all the customers”) and my friends? His blandishments worked, although I like to think that my talk about being immune to Prestige Cars and the fact that I started to walk out of his office when he wouldn’t meet our price, may have had something to do with things. Husband also invoked his dear departed mother, who, when hearing that Husband had declined law school in favor of a literature PhD, bemoaned the fact that he’d never drive a nice car.

Her ghost is smiling now.

This car? It does everything. It does everything so cleverly, in fact, that the day after we bought it, I got in to do some errand or other, stared at the dashboard for a while, pushed a few buttons, and then had to call Husband to ask how to turn the damn thing on.

Well. It doesn’t do everything. The German engineers forgot to install a bicker button, which would silence backseat bickerers by sliding a piece of soundproof glass between the drivers and the squabbling passengers.

I tootle along feeling pretty near invulnerable, I have to say: I can see everything; I can stop instantly when the guy in the far-right lane decides to make a left turn; I can see to change lanes as the Armada comes barreling up behind me, flicking its brights and honking because it needs to get to the red light up ahead really really fast.

After a few days on the road, however, I have to say that I don’t feel quite so fancy: when you’re flanked in the parking lot by one of these:

 and one of these:

It puts things into perspective. My fancyshmancy is someone else’s Lumina.

Nevertheless, Husband and I are settling into our new life as owners. When we leave Abu Dhabi, we’ll sell the car, but until then, the half-hour drive out to the boy’s soccer practices seems a little less painful.

Husband, in fact, has been exploring a solution to the missing bicker button in this car. “I was looking at a convertible the other day,” he said. “A two-seater.”

Liam indulging in a little automotive fantasy at the car showroom

Then we came back to Abu Dhabi and the boys were on vacation for two weeks. Two weeks plus one day (their school apparently has a sick sense of humor. I called that extra day “twist the knife” day.)

During those two-weeks-and-a-day, one child had strep, the other child had a weird fever, Husband went to Shanghai for four days, and I tried to go to work.

Then, miraculously, the day came when the children went back to school.

At 2:30 that day, the nurse called. Liam had come into her office with a raging headache, in so much pain he could barely open his eyes.

He came home. Lay on the couch. Then on the other couch. Then on his bed. Then on the couch again. He slept. He woke up. He slept some more. He woke up at midnight; he woke up at 3AM.

Took him to the doctor: no strep,  no infections anywhere, just a headache, a lot of aches and pains, and a very small fever.

He came home. Lay on the couch. Then the other couch. Then on his bed. Then on the couch again.  The entire apartment was strewn with discarded blankets and pillows, abandoned glasses of water.  He slept. He woke up in the night in pain and feverish and feeling like he was going to vomit.

Here’s what happens when you sit with your twelve year old, who does not subscribe to the suffer-in-silence school, on the cold floor of the bathroom at 3 in the morning, waiting to see if he’s going to upchuck.  He moans and cries, he says he’s never ever going to survive.

I pat his head with a cool cloth and say it’s going to be okay, it’s going to be okay.

I think could this be meningitis, or yellow fever, can you get yellow fever here? malaria? Maybe he has malaria. Or a brain tumor.

He decides he’s not going to barf, so we adjourn to a couch so that he doesn’t wake up his brother. Liam wails because NO ONE HAS EVER FELT SUCH PAIN.

I pat his head, I tuck a blanket around him, I give him yet another tylenol.

I think oh for the love of all that’s holy please stop crying and go the hell to sleep, and then promptly berate myself for being such a cold-hearted mamma.

Liam falls asleep, finally, on the couch, and I doze next to him.

In the morning, Liam feels fantastic, miraculously cured.  I, however, am walking like Quasimodo, as a result of a night spent wedged into the corner of the couch.

And then Boston explodes. And then Iran implodes, with an earthquake that measures 7.8 and after-shocks that were felt here, almost 400 miles away. And then the U.S. Senate, in a truly stunning display of craven self-serving lies rhetoric, refuses to pass common-sense gun reform legislation.

The world, it seems, is sick. And I am tired, so tired down deep in my bones that no mere nap can cure me.

I think we classify this image under “the new normal.” (Plus that little kid in the jacket looks like he’s developing some mad skillz)

When I wasn’t standing on the sidelines watching Caleb play, I wrote a post for the World Moms Blog about female heroines in YA literature.  Which is to say, the surprising lack of female heroines in YA literature, relatively speaking.  What heroines come to your mind? Leave a comment and join the conversation.