All the way to the floor

I watched my mother stroll down 6th Avenue in a Spring dress on her way to the Conan O'Brien show. We had just finished lunch and that morning she had helped me seal the deal on a new apartment, my first in Manhattan. She had been riding the subway, exploring the city, talking to realtors, meeting my coworkers and just generally living it up and getting things done in NYC for a couple of days by then. She looked younger, lighter and happier than I had seen her in years.

This was her second trip to New York. Her first had been about two weeks before with my sister. I was living in Brooklyn with my boyfriend of five years, a guy my entire family barely tolerated but nevertheless supported when necessary. He was one of those people who gets away with terrorizing everyone around him by maintaining an air of victimhood. My mother had had countless arguments with him yet she and the rest of my family still helped us move to New York together.

But that's the way Hartsells are. Once when I was around 10-years-old I was hanging out with a group of my brothers' friends when I happened to say something fairly sarcastic, a skill we all developed at an early age. Someone responded matter-of-factly, "Yep...she's a Hartsell." I didn't know if that was complimentary or critical, but I liked it just the same. Hartsells, as it turns out, tend to be unflappable. This can be both a positive and negative. Sarcasm is our natural response to both attacks and pretension; our smarmy little way of communicating, "Oh, whatever you just said doesn't really matter to me." In moments of great stress or angst, we tend to compartmentalize and focus on whatever it is that has to be done. This can occasionally makes us seem cold and aloof.

However, the good side of this is that in a crisis, Hartsells have incredible focus and flexibility. My sister's friends call my dad "The Wolf" a la Harvey Keitel in Pulp Fiction. He gets things done, solves problems and otherwise ensures domestic tranquility with an almost imperceptible ease. He can also be a stone cold asshole when confronted with irrational behavior; a trait I inherited from him. But that grace under pressure, that ability to look at a problem and see the solution in all of its simplicity is something I have tried to emulate to varying degrees of success.

Sometimes the solution sucks.

Sometimes it means upsetting your entire life and the life of people you care about in order to edge yourself closer, painfully to a better place. When I left my boyfriend and our apartment in Brooklyn I went to my office in Manhattan and slept on the floor. I had been in New York about 5 months, never lived there alone, and the only people I knew were my coworkers. That night I got a decrepit room in an awful hotel and vowed to be The Wolf in the morning and sort my life out on my own. By 11am the next day I was in tears on a payphone asking my mother to fly to New York and help me. She arrived at 9pm that night.

My mother got us into a better hotel, picked up all of my clothes from my old apartment, talked to my ex, found a few realtors and looked at apartments all while I worked from 9-5. Then when I got off she took me to see the places she thought were nice and after a few days everything was settled. She made friends with everyone in my office, took us to lunch and bought me a second beer at dinner one night. For the first time in years, I remembered that my mom was The Wolf in her own way. She wasn't a Hartsell by birth and while she and my dad are incredibly different people, I began to understand their bond for the first time. Very few people are equally good at putting all emotion on hold and taking care of business. My mother and father both have that ability to see a problem first and how it affects them last. It's an effortless selflessness in the face of adversity, and I will live the rest of my life trying to match it. Where my mother differs is on the sarcasm and intolerance. She's endlessly accommodating, something that is both admired and taken advantage of.

But I digress. My mother was off to see Conan. It was 4:30 and the light was beautiful and she strolled away on her own: no one to take care of, no one to wait for, no one to make comfortable at her expense. She navigated the Times Square crowd like a local and disappeared into the din. That night when she returned to the hotel she was beaming. "I danced with Conan!" Apparently, Conan warms the crowd up by trying to get them on their feet to dance. My mom, alone and unashamed, jumped to her feet and started dancing. Conan ran up the aisle and singled her out, "Hold on, I want everyone to see what you can do!" And they danced.

My mom used to tell me about going to clubs with her cousins when she was younger; how she used to be able to do The Twist all the way to the floor. As she walked away from me that day I saw her briefly as the woman she always wanted to be. You could see in her stride a confident grace, a levity with the tumult.

There's a fine line between responsibility and duty, and in matters of love and family one often isn't sure whether they have a made practical choice or a selfish one. All of the difficult choices I've made in my life were in an effort to be bold, to be nothing but what I'm supposed to be as clearly as I can define it. My solutions aren't always correct, or at least, they aren't always permanent. And my ability to accept heartache as a necessary product of never closing the book on self-discovery has a tendency to leave me shaken and those around me cold. Fear, doubt and recrimination are the bedfellows of longing.

To move forward, one must either be truly confident or dupe themselves with the illusion of confidence. And in that, we Hartsells are the masters. When our bravery fails us, our hubris takes over. A little arrogance goes along way and, eventually, the spirit catches up.

My mother was so self-possessed that day because it didn't matter who was looking at her. She was blithely, bewitchingly alone in a room full of people and cameras. And she danced away my worries, even though I never saw her.