Often, when I am too tired to go through with the bedtime or naptime ritual, I drive my son to sleep through Rock Creek Park (luckily Sami transfers very well). Rock Creek Park is one of Washington, DC’s best-kept secrets. The streets of Rock Creek Park snake through the city in strange and unfathomable ways, suddenly switch directions at rush hour, and are never included in Mapquest directions. Yet it is invaluable to know the twists and turns of this scenic route. Not only do you get through the city avoiding traffic lights all together, but you are blessed with the most lush and peaceful greenery on all sides.

My favorite place to drive Sami to sleep is back and forth along Beach Drive, one of the park’s main arteries. The peaceful thoroughfare winds along the creek itself, and I always feel a sense of relaxation as I drive along it. Tonight as I was driving, we saw some deer grazing on some grass along the road. “Look at those deers!” Sami shouted, and then promptly fell asleep.

I myself was too intimidated to drive through the park until about five years into my residence here, and even then I usually relied on my on my ex to navigate the park, especially at night. Now I am an old pro, having explored my way around maybe a hundred times as I drive my son to sleep. I know all the shortcuts; all the back-roads, all the time-saving ways to get from here to there through the park. It has been worth the effort.

Beach Drive seems like a metaphor for the way I have approached life. Although I’ve always liked to think of myself as a feminist in theory, because of my fear of getting lost, I have allowed the men in my life to do most things for me, even many things I could have easily taken on. In the process, I have missed out on the experience of discovering uncharted territories for myself.

These days, I like to imagine myself as Rosie the Riveter with child.

My new motto is, “I can do it!” I am strong and nurturing at the same time. I haul a 38 lb toddler-almost-preschooler around and I have the biceps to prove it.

I don’t need a man.
I repeat:
I DON’T NEED A MAN.

I want to shout it from the rooftops. Now this sounds like something out of the fifties, but it is a revelation for this girl, who married at 23 and who has always had a boyfriend. I have literally never been on my own. Like women in the fifties, I married straight out of university. I went pretty much straight from the care of my family to the care of my husband. Our relationship really was like that. He took care of me, and I allowed myself to be taken care of.

It has been an intense winter and spring, but as summer approaches, I feel myself mastering my own personal Beach Drive. Mastering the initially intimidating twists and turns of this life. Appreciating the beauty of these efforts. Today as I drove, my IPod blasting Lee Ann Womack’s “I Hope You Dance,” (a very sappy but inspirational country ballad) I was surprised by happy tears.

It has been such a long journey, this agonizing, roller-coaster separation, such a long, dark night of the soul. And now the home stretch is finally in sight. I’ve truly come a long way, baby, from the perpetually frightened mother-child I was when he left in September 2006.