I'm traveling this week to #BlogHer15 in New York City. Packing always reminds me of the combined apprehension and freedom I feel taking off on my own. Knowing there will be no one to watch your bags while you use the facilities changes your suitcase strategy.

When I was a senior in high school, I'd sometimes drive the four hours from my hometown to The University of Iowa to visit friends. The closer I got to exit 242, the more nervous I'd get. I'd be lying if I didn't admit on every solo trip I've ever taken, starting then, there's a moment I consider chucking it all and turning around.

After college at Iowa, I moved to Chicago to sublease a room from a friend in an apartment I'd never seen. I thought the slowdown in traffic coming into Chicago proper was caused by an accident. I'd only previously driven into the suburbs by myself when I moved there.

I developed a taste for airplanes after embarking on a series of solo weeklong business trips for my Chicago PR agency job to exciting locales like Cincinnati and Duluth. I starting visiting friends everywhere I could and spent all my money on United Airlines, hoarding the ticket stubs as proof to myself of my ability to deliver on promises I made. Yes, I said. I'll come visit.

The scariest of these trips took me from Omaha to Chicago to LA to Sydney in one heady, 24-hour journey. There was a monitor on the plane that showed the plane relative to land. It was comforting until we passed Hawaii and I learned how big the Pacific Ocean is.

On the day after I returned from Australia, I boarded a plane alone to head to Florida to train for my new job in Kansas City. Jetlagged, I passed out on my backpack in the airport. My new co-workers found me at our agreed-upon meeting spot. Hi! I'm Rita!

I almost missed a flight doing that on one of the legs of my SLEEP IS FOR THE WEEK book tour. I visited most of the cities by myself, hooking up with my contributors at some point. In New York I Pricelined a room in what I thought was a convenient hotel off the east Brooklyn subway. When a cabbie refused to drive me back from a trip to meet a friend at MoMA, I realized once again how naive I am even after wandering so many cities alone. That same trip I also discovered gypsy cabs and had to talk myself down the whole way from my sketchy hotel to the signing while trying to ignore the driver's lack of credentials. In the end, I made him promise to drive me back, remembering the Manhattan cabbie. That night I slept in my ground-floor room with a chair in front of the door.

It was fine.

The most annoying travel hang up happened the night before the little angel's fourth birthday party. My Friday night flight out of Boston for a business trip got cancelled, and I rerouted through St. Louis, certain I could make it. Standing outside waiting for the rental car shuttle at 3 am, I reconsidered my plan and slept four hours at the cheapest airport hotel I could find before speeding four hours home.

I still missed the party. Sometimes my emotions override my reason, especially while traveling.

Now in my forties I understand the world a little better and my iPhone means I no longer carry a compass on my keychain or beg strangers for directions. Still, preparing to get myself halfway across the country on my own brings back that mix of nerves and adrenaline.

What adventures will I have this time?

Last week, BlogHer Co-founder Lisa Stone talked to President Obama about women, wages & the future. Here are the highlights, along with commentary from members of the blogging community. Pretty cool, eh?

After our family visited Grant's Farm last summer, we fell in love with the Budweiser Clydesdales. My husband tried to surprise us with a stop at Warm Springs Ranch one weekend as we puttered east back to Kansas City after a writing conference in St. Louis, but alas, it was a no-go.

Warm Springs Ranch is where the magic begins: Clydesdale foals. Unfortunately for us that day, the gates were locked. You have to make an appointment to get a tour, which we didn't know. But now we do, and so do you. And we got invited to go! So here are all my pictures.

Sorry, folks, park's closed. Moose out in front should've told you.

This time, the park was not closed. BABY CLYDESDALES FOR EVERYONE!

I learned some things about Clydesdale birth. Mares are pregnant for eleven months and give birth in 5-25 minutes.

(!)

Because the labor happens so fast, the man in charge (John Soto) has an alarm that goes off when the foal's hooves break open a special device installed in the mare's birth canal. Once it starts, it goes fast because the foals weigh about 150 pounds and gravity exists.

Look closely. There's 150 pounds of foal in there that will be born within six days.

Once the mares get within thirty days of their due dates, they get beautiful, huge stalls in the special foaling area and are only taken outside to the exercise paddocks instead of the full pastures. Everything from breeding to foaling happens in this big, red barn in Boonville, Missouri.

I don't know how much time you've spent in barns, but most of them do not look like this.

One of the foals we saw was less than twelve hours old. When they are first born, the staff shave part of their bodies because the foals can't regulate their own body temperature very well at first.

This little guy is brand-new. I stared at his hooves, which have never touched dirt. Wow.

The mares kept trying to give us the 2,000-pound paparazzi block, but this little one wanted to play kissy-face with the little angel.

I'm a sucker for all horses, but the sheer size of these beauties is really something to behold up close.

SWOON.

The end.

Yesterday, Kizzy took the last of his Prednizone. It's been almost a month since he almost died again, and it seems like we got another reprieve.

He's on a new kind of even more ridiculously expensive prescription cat food. This one is supposed to also help with stress, as stress apparently increases the chance he'll get blocked. Beloved and I avoid talking about a relapse even as we watch his litter box like parents of a newborn watch diapers.

We made a barely spoken agreement that if the little black cat makes it a year without a blockage, he gets a medical expenses reset button even though he is working on being our most expensive cat to date, and that is saying something after adopting a Manx with megacolon.

The hair is growing back on his front legs where they shaved him to put in IVs. He begs to be taken outside on his harness every morning the minute the birds start singing. He spends his afternoons, when it is nice, lying in the sun in his playpen outside.

It is so hard not to worry constantly about him, since getting blocked is a) something that comes on suddenly with absolutely no warning and b) not something I can control, other than giving him the prescription food and nothing but the prescription food. Oddly, it gives me comfort to remind myself I could die tomorrow, too, and all we can do is enjoy the purring, velvety bundle of fur in my lap every night.

What we have is today.

What girls had to say about people who insult them ... and then pretend they didn't really.

We need to let kids know it's okay to be upset. I'm going to show this to my daughter right now.

I drove her to school yesterday, because it was cold.

She hoisted her backpack and saxophone out of the trunk that she didn't used to be able to open by herself. It is a heavy trunk door and the struts to keep it open don't work anymore.

I see her every day, but something about the way she flipped her hair back and blew me a kiss reminded me of the way she looked when I dropped her off in first grade. But this isn't first grade, it's fifth grade, and she's told me next year she will rule the school.

Something about the way she flipped her hair and blew me a kiss nailed my gut to the back of my seat, and I actually couldn't move for a breath.

My mother told me about this love, but I didn't understand it.

Every night she says she loves me more. And I say no, that's impossible. I don't even make a game out of it. I know now it is impossible to love your mother more than she loves you, at least in my family.

She saw a while back that I was serious, and she stopped trying to win the argument. I wrap her in blankets and the promise that there is no way that I could not love her the most.

She clomps off toward the school in her winter boots, the backpack and the saxophone trying to drag her down but her long hair promising to catch the wind so she can fly.

It's a normal school day, but it's not.

Just like every day.

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I like to write about young people. Enter a Goodreads giveaway now to win a copy of my young adult novel, THE OBVIOUS GAME!

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The Obvious Game

by Rita Arens

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Her hair flies back in the wind because the motor's almost shot in Vicki the convertible so the top stays down now. It has to be helped up like an old man out of a chair, and most of the time, we don't feel like dealing with it. We leave ourselves exposed to sun and sky and wind because the sun feels good when it's not raining.

We are talking about growing up, and I tell her the thing my dad told me about SEEs, Significant Emotional Experiences, the thing I put in THE OBVIOUS GAME, how you have to have two SEEs before you can really contribute to society, how some people go their whole lives without having two. You need two to understand other people's anger.

"You've had your two already," I say. "When Grandpa died and when Bella and Petunia and Buttonsworth died."

"Did you have two when you were a kid?"

"Yeah. When Grandma got cancer. And then when it came back. And then when my gran died. All that happened before I left for college."

"I've had more than that," she says, and her hair whips again around her face, her eyes shaded with sunglasses.

"What was the other one?"

"When Ka'Vyea got shot."

Oh. Yes.

I've been wondering how that affected her. We haven't talked about it. I've been waiting. She was such a trooper every visit to the hospital, and I have never been so proud of my daughter as when she walked into a room to see her friend with a feeding tube in his nose unable to sit up in bed and act completely natural, to play Connect Four instead of staring in shock at the machines surrounding him.

"Yes. That was really scary, wasn't it?"

She nods. There's more to say, but neither of us knows how to say it now. He's back at school part-time. He didn't die. We're very glad about that. But it's still not fair he can't walk. None of this is fair, and we are both gobsmacked every time we start to talk about it. So we stop.

I keep driving. Her hair streams out behind her.

Beloved informed me this past week that he will only be gone three of the four weeks in May. 

He is home for one week and two weekdays in April. He was home for two weeks in March, one of which was our vacation and the other of which his father died. He was home for no weeks in February. I wrote about it on BlogHer when I was really in the abyss, then the sun came out, and the time changed, and the days got longer, and the little angel started to play with the neighbor kids after school again and it seemed a little better. 

It is better, but it's not. Yes, he's home on weekends, but when half the family unit is gone five out of seven days, the two days he's home becomes crammed with yard work and housecleaning and laundry and errands and thinking gosh, I really like this person and everything is better when he's home and oh, shit, he's leaving again tomorrow. It's nice to see him, but it doesn't make it all better to have him home on the weekends. And the worst part is that I don't really know when this will end. The little angel doesn't have childcare the week of BlogHer, and he doesn't know if he will be home or not. I throw my hands in the air like I don't care because I am so tired of thinking through all the scenarios and how I will address them on my own. (He would say it's not on my own, and he would sometimes be right, but sometimes he would be wrong, because only the person in the situation knows the myriad things that come up and must be dealt with over the course of the week, most of which I don't even tell him about because pfffft.)

My friends ask if this is normal for his job, but he's only had it for a little over a year. The first project only had him gone for one month, not this never-ending cycle of early Monday flights and late Thursday or Friday flights, of trying to squeeze in Facetime twenty minutes after I wished the little angel had already gone to bed, of trying to explain why he's gone again and remembering to do everything that needs to be done to keep the house running after a full day of my own job and sitting down with my novel at 10 pm and crying because I don't have the mental energy to do anything I want to do by 10 pm and there is no other time in my day because all the things take twice as long when there is one person doing them and that person doing them is also the person explaining to the ten-year-old why she can't have four desserts and how to convert things to the metric system.

I try to do little things to make up for him being gone on these weeks alone with my daughter. It sucks most for her. She adores her father and by the third night is always in tears over why he can't be there to put her to bed instead of me. So I try.

Yesterday, for instance, she asked me to make her pancakes. Wednesdays are late-start days at her school, so the bus comes an hour later than usual. I didn't know where the pancake mix was, so she showed it to me. I added the water. I found the skillet. I greased the skillet. I tried to remember what temperature the skillet should be at. Super hot sounded good to me. (queue ominous music)

The first pancake ended up in the sink after I couldn't flip it at all. I remembered you are supposed to flip them when they bubble, but my pancakes bubbled instantly. I ended up scorching a spatula trying to flip my bubbling masses of chocolate-chipped destruction. 

On the third pancake, I turned down the temperature, but it was too late. I started using the scorched flipper plus a second flipper to try to get the burning even on both sides of the pancakes, adding extra chocolate chips because, you know, as long as there is enough chocolate involved, my kid will eat anything. I flung the unsalvagable pancakes in the sink or really just anywhere on the stove that was not white-hot because time was of essence. I could melt polar icecaps with these pancakes, but at least they weren't burning. At last I had a plate of four kind of normal-looking pancakes, which I served my daughter.

"Um, Mama? These aren't cooked in the middle."

"Well, yeah. Maybe I should microwave them."

"Maybe."

*ding*

"Better?"

"Yeah."

(chewing)

"I'm not very good at pancakes, am I?"

"Maybe we should leave that to Daddy."

Oh, well. I'm trying.

"Mama, why does heat make you so tired?"

We crossed the street and headed into the art festival. We're heat-hardy, my daughter and I, indiginous to the sultry Midwest summers like goldenrod and cone flowers. The 105-degree temperature didn't stop us from wanting to look at paintings until we hit the pavement, where temperatures had to be even higher. And the humidity, thick like a washcloth, making it hard to breathe.

"I'm not sure, exactly. Maybe so you'll be forced to slow down and it will be harder to give you heat exhaustion. It's probably your body's way of protecting you."

Each step seemed a little harder. The heat wrapped around my body. I could feel the air molecules pressing on my skin, heavy and saturated. I looked over at my daughter. Her pale cheeks had a high flush with beads of sweat hanging above her lip, unable to evaporate in the thick air. 

"I don't feel good," she said.

My head swam. "I don't, either. Let's get out of here."

I had to pull her by the hand the two blocks back to the car. I actually felt a little dizzy as I squealed onto Main Street and directly to the QT, where we stumbled into the delicious air conditioning and gasped for filtered air. We bought a huge bottle of water to share and hung out for a few minutes by the freezers, alive in our skin in the way of extreme temperature relief -- those first few moments when the cold limbs tingle with warmth or the icy air hits hot skin and you think, in that moment, everything is right in the world, there is nothing better than having this need fulfilled, the return to equilibrium.

We piled back into the car and cranked the air conditioning, turning back toward home. 

"My head hurts, Mama." 

I dropped her off at home to cool down and rest, and I drove to the grocery store to get food, finding myself still wandering a little awkwardly amid the rows, my head achy. 

I don't often have extreme reactions to heat, but when I do, I'm reminded I'm a mortal, that life is delicate and beautiful and to be examined while I have the chance. 

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In something less heavy, I reviewed lice prevention products on Surrender, Dorothy: Reviews, because that is life I want eradicated.