I am directionally challenged.  I will freely tell you this. And even if I tried to hide the fact, everyone who knows me will tell you that I am. I believe it’s passed genetically from one generation to the next (fortunately for my daughter, she takes after my husband). I got it from my mother. Much to my embarrassment and regret, I now experience déjà vu moments that throw me back across the years where, playing the part of my mother is—me. My children have taken on the roles that my brothers and I had originally assumed, namely, on any so-called field trip (we grew up in New York City where every outing beyond going to the corner grocery store could be viewed as a field trip) whenever the time to pick a direction arose (and you would be surprised how often that occurred) we would watch which way my mother began to walk and instantly take the opposite direction (at which point, not wanting to undergo separation trauma, my mother would quickly turn around and follow us, all the while saying,  “Dis time I am right, you will see!”  She never was. And in case you’re wondering “Dis” is not a typo. My mother, the master of approximately seventeen languages, could not manage to utter the “th” sound to save her life). 

 

Now, however, without Mama to act as my touchstone, I am left only to my own devices to figure out which direction to take—and inevitably, I take the wrong one (much to the amusement of my children). Unlike what happened to me, I have no fear that Jessica will someday find herself veering off into the wrong hemisphere. As mentioned, she takes after her father (who seems to have been born with a compass in his head). I call her Squanto, the Pathfinder, and in the days before GPS (something God invented just for people like me), relied on her heavily. Although I find it frustrating to make this admission, I know that if I had been Daniel Boone, Kentucky would now be approximately where the Gulf of Mexico is.

 

I have had my moments of break-through, though (we do not speak of the time that, as a newly transplanted resident, I lost Disneyland despite the fact that its big, white, tall mountain was right out there for the world to see and navigate toward). I had finally gotten the New York City subway system downpat—just before we moved cross country. But for the most part, I rely heavily on that huffy GPS glued onto the dashboard of my car (it sighs when I miss a turn, much the way my son used to). And if, on occasion, the little device sends me off in the wrong direction (as it has been known to do), it just proves that it, too, has its human moments.  And who am I to throw rocks?  Without that device I’d still be lost in my own closet.