Unreasonable speed

(I've seen better days)

(for example)

Have you ever been holding yourself together as best you can, and then out of the blue the perfect trigger cracks opens your personal box of Pandora?

To frame what happened yesterday, I should start with the fact that it’s May.

May is my month of big trauma and loss.

May 15, 2009; May 5, 2016; May 7, 2017; May 15, 2023.

My dad, my cousin Travis, Pat, my other mother., and my beloved mama. In the beginning of May 2023, Betty fell in our home, broke her hip, and never left the hospital. Or rather, she left her body behind in the hospital.

I think about this every time I go down that flight of stairs.

So May begins, and I hunker down, checking off dates, waiting for the 15th to pass. I now also wait for Mother’s Day to be over. I’m glad they’re not the same day this year.

And both my kids are going through really high stress times. There are SATs and AP exams and it’s just hard being a teenager.

As a parent, it turns out, you have to just let these pieces of your heart go out into the world and be who they are. They have to learn their own lessons and feel their own pain. We can’t do it for them. But their hurt is mine, and I can’t fix it.

The scene is set.

Now I get into the car.

To be fair, I was in fact speeding yesterday, trying to make a light.

And all of a sudden, there were sirens behind me.

I’ve gotten camera tickets, but I’ve only ever gotten one policeman ticket. On a highway in Indiana, with my mom and kids in the car.

The thing about that was that we’d just gotten a much nicer car than I’d ever driven. My old cars would shake when you approached 80. You really knew it. Not this one. And I had to vroom vroom to get up speed. This one is fast out of the gate.

On that highway in Indiana, I saw the policeman with the speed gun, but too late. I saw him pull onto the highway behind us, lights on, siren going. I knew.

So when he was like, you were speeding, I was silently all, yeah, I really was. And actually, I’m glad you didn’t get me 10 minutes ago, when I reeeaally was.

Not ideal, expensive ticket, but fair enough.

But yesterday.

Oh. Wait. The fascism also figures in. I know I’m a middle-aged white lady in a nice car, and this inures to my benefit. But currently, we’re living in a police state. (I mean “police state,” because of course DC doesn’t get to be a state.)

The police cars here no longer have the message, “We are here to help” on the sides. Not that DC kids believed it.

When India was six or seven, she and Jordan and I were walking in our neighborhood, and a police car rounded the corner. I said, “It’s the po-po.” And India immediately said, “Act natural!”

I did not teach her that. Hand to god.

Anyway, I can’t remember what the cars say now, but they’ve dropped the slogan of being here for the community.

So I pulled over, opened the window, and waited.

The officer—young, muscular, very policey—identified himself as Park Police. Much later, I thought of Kathleen’s and my experience in Glacier, when we learned that Park Police are really police types, rather than National Park types. When I learned the bars are not for the bears.

(I’ve since googled, and in cities like DC in particular, they function as general police on regular streets. Who knew? Now we know.)

He asked me if I knew my speed and the posted speed limit. The discrepancy was…not good.

I started to cry. Not, like, crying for sympathy. Trauma crying. Everything I’ve been carrying just started flying out of my eyeballs.

He asked where I was going. I said a doctor’s appointment, which was true.

He asked for my license and registration.

At that, I started sobbing. Truly, loudly, actually sobbing. I put my hand to my mouth to try to stop it, to no avail.

With great difficulty, in bits and pieces, I choked out that the car is registered in my husband’s name, and I don’t have the registration. I think I wailed the word registration.

Reh-heh-gis-tra-a-a-a-a-a-a-tion!

At that point I started hyperventilating. I couldn’t catch my breath.

He asked if I was OK.

I didn’t say: Mother’s Day is Sunday. When I lost my mama, I lost the person who loved me most in the entire world. India misses her Nana so much, and it hurts my heart. I wish my kids had known my dad. He would’ve been such a good grandpa to them. I know suicide took him, he didn’t choose to leave us, but still, it hurts. I hate being an orphan. I miss my brother. I had breast cancer. The medication ruins my sleep. I’m worried about my children’s mental health. The Supreme fucking Court destroyed the Voting Rights Act. We’re in a war. We’re complicit in genocide. People here and around the globe are starving. People are dying. Americans are being put into concentration camps.

Und so weiter.

I whimpered, “I’m fine, thanks.”

He said I wasn’t being arrested, and he was going to run my license. And to put on the AC and roll up the window and calm myself down.

I called Nick, still absolutely hysterical. He said he’d stay on the phone if I needed him to. He texted me the registration.

The officer took a while, and I was like, oh my god. He’s going through political donations and surveillance of protests and I’m going to wind up in some terrible detention center in Texas.

I was still weeping when he returned, though by that point I was able to breathe.

He said he’d written my ticket as “unreasonable speed,” which was not as bad as it could have been. And that I could be five minutes late for a doctor’s appointment, and to drive carefully.

I have no idea what he anticipated when he pulled me over. But utter hysteria from a middle-aged lady was perhaps not it.

With some distance, I can see the humor in my completely disproportionate reaction.

On a different day, in a different week or month or year, I might’ve behaved calmly and contritely, like I did when I was pulled over in Indiana. This sucks, and that’s a big ticket, but man, you got me fair and square.

Yesterday was not that day.

And the bars are not for the bears.