Codename: Giant Dipper

In honor of summer, let’s talk about roller coasters, the beach, and spending too much time with your children.

Everyone organizes their writing life differently. My method is codenamed “Giant Dipper.” (It’s really just a big folder in my Google Drive.) Within Giant Dipper, I keep a folder for each year, and within each year, a folder for each project. Every project I have ever dreamed about and every project I dream about now is kept within Giant Dipper. 

I’m not telling you this to talk about organization, though. I’m telling you this to talk about why the big folder is called “Giant Dipper.” What’s a “Giant Dipper”? 

Not a constellation. It’s actually the name of a roller coaster on Mission Beach in San Diego, built in 1925, two years before the Cyclone on Coney Island. I was, for a short period, obsessed with the Giant Dipper roller coaster, for a few reasons. 

Reason One: Whenever I see a trashy human-made thing next to a beach, I am transfixed. Give me Venice Beach, the aforementioned Coney Island, Daytona, Myrtle, even Nice or Mykonos. I’ve written poems about these juxtapositions, and in general I can’t pass a trashy eyesore sitting next to a glorious natural wonder without taking a picture of it or writing something down.

I’m not saying I love it, but that human impulse to build a big, dumb thing next to a beautiful natural expanse has always fascinated me. 

Reason Two: Reason One had led me to noodle around with some research into a very ’90s radio contest called “Whirl til You Hurl,” in which a local radio station challenged 22 randomly selected listeners to ride the Giant Dipper all day and sleep on it all night. The last person standing , the one who didn’t quit, was supposed to win $50K. In the end, five contestants rode the dipper for 14 hours a day and slept on it every night, with only 3 daily bathroom breaks for SEVENTY-THREE days straight.

This story had everything: 

• Culture-making terrestrial radio, now a culturally irrelevant technology on life support.

• A contest that was a canary in a coal mine for our Hunger Games reality show-obsessed culture that loves to gawk at feats of masochism committed for a relatively measly chunk of cash by “average joes” who, like, really need the money. Like the young contestant who wouldn’t quit because he wanted the 50K to pay off his student loans.

• There were other colorful characters, too, like the Eastern-European bar owner who met a woman while riding the roller coaster. They married when the contest finally ended. (It didn’t last.)

• And obviously, it had a lawsuit. 

Anyway, while I was doing this Very Important Whirl til You Hurl (VIWTYH) research in the summer of 2021, I decided to take myself down to Mission Beach one afternoon and ride the Giant Dipper myself. I hadn’t been on a roller coaster in years, not since before I’d become a mom in 2014. I had never ridden the Giant Dipper even though it was a mere 15-minute drive from my house. 

I arrived on an overcast weekday afternoon, the week after school let out, in a year in which school children had only returned to the classrooms in April. The beach was crawling with hyper, horny teenagers. I bought a ticket for the Dipper. I was the only person standing by myself in the long line to ride, which felt awkward, but not witheringly so. At the time, my own children weren’t tall enough to ride, so I had decided to go during the day while they were in summer camp. I was glad not to have them with me, then felt the taboo of the thought. In front of me in line was a mom with her two children: they looked to me about 9 and 11. Besides her and me, the line was devoid of adults over the age of 25 or so. That made me feel a bit more awkward. 

I stared out at the people standing around the carousel and other rides until all the teens leaning against light poles and shouting flirtatiously at each other fell away, and I was left staring at those who remained: the Moms. 

The Moms were all standing, some straight with excellent posture, some slouching with one hip jutting out to steady themselves, the way moms do when we hold a baby. But instead of holding babies, they were holding caps and water bottles and hoodies and bags and balloons and stuffed animals recently won. They had bags slung over their shoulders and clutched in their hands and hugged to their chests. 

They were, as moms so often are, the unseen support that makes fun possible, without also being people who could partake in any of the fun themselves. 

At first, I felt angry with them. Not a single one of you wants to go on any of these rides? I thought. I judged them: What are we teaching our kids here? That we moms are nothing more than portable coat and hat racks?? 

At least one other mom was game, I consoled myself, as the mom in front of me chatted to her two children. But when we reached the front of the line, that mom, the one who had stood patiently in line for 30 minutes, gathered her kids’ stuff—their hoodies, hats, sunglasses, and bags—in her arms and ducked toward the exit. She was just there to keep them company in line. So they wouldn’t get bored. I should have known. 

I was the last grown-up standing. I got on and pulled the safety bar down over my lap.  

The Dipper is a very fun roller coaster. Big drops, twisty drops, drops that make you scream unselfconsciously and shake the pony tail out of your hair. I loved it. I went again. Then I went home. 

I thought on and off afterward for a long time afterward about those moms standing around, holding things. Of course, I was judging the moms at the Dipper because I saw myself in them: holding things for my kids, waiting with my lips pursed while they enjoyed, say, a birthday party or a playground jungle gym. Perhaps the fact that I saw myself in them was the only reason I could see them at all.  

There were other obvious and excellent reasons for the Moms down at the Dipper to stand to the side besides their being resigned to doormat status. Maybe they didn’t like to ride roller coasters. Maybe they had back and neck problems. Maybe their kids were at an age when they didn’t want to be seen riding the roller coaster with their mothers, and their mothers were appropriately sensitive to that. Holding our kids’ shit—literally and metaphorically—is part of the job.

It was not them, but my projection onto them that I was really thinking about. I saw them as human coat racks, backbones, supporting the weight of fun, but never getting any themselves. But why did I see them that way? 

Fast-forward to last week, when I spent a week with my kids, nonstop. We had a lot of fun, but by Friday afternoon, I was really sick of both of them. I was lying on the couch reading a magazine while my older son paced around me, telling me baseball stats. After each stat I grunted but didn’t look up until he said, “Mom, I just want to talk to you.” 

I looked up from the magazine. He had tears in his eyes.

“Aw, honey,” I said, opening my arms and sitting up, “Come here.” 

“No!” he said, angry. 

I paused. I knew I was fucking up, so I blurted whatever felt best and crossed my fingers. 

“See how you’re saying ‘no’? That means I won’t walk over to you and make you hug me anyway. I can hear your ‘no.’ Because…” I hesitated. Usually I lose him by this point, but he was still making eye contact with me, so I pressed forward. “Because you and I are in a relationship,” I said. “And… in a relationship, both people have to want to connect for it to be good for the relationship.”

“OK,” he said, frowning. 

“It feels like I should be available all the time, doesn’t it?” I asked him. 

“Yeah,” he said, nodding. 

“I’m… not like that. I can’t always be available to you, even when we’re together all day. Some moms can do it. Maybe they’re right and I’m wrong, but it doesn’t matter because it’s just something I can’t really do. And we have to figure out how to have a good relationship anyway.” 

That was the end of that. He came over to me and we cuddled for a while while I continued reading the magazine, until it got hot and he got sweaty and found a book to read and sat somewhere else. 

Will he grow up to remember this exchange, as I remember a handful of seemingly random or trivial conversations with my own mother? If he does, will he think of it as proof that I was withholding or distant, a mother whom he had to prod into being present with him? Or will he remember it as one moment among many when he learned that moms—or (crosses fingers) maybe even all women—are not built exclusively to tuck into the negative space around the boys and men in their lives? 

I don’t know. All I know is what I told him. I’m the kind of mom who rides the roller coaster without her kids and feels glad they’re not there. I’m the kind of mom who needs my kids to know that they can’t always touch me or have my attention. 

In other words, I’m the kind of mom who is also a person. Sometimes I will push all that personhood aside to hold my kids’ shit while they go on an adventure. And sometimes I won’t.

What I’m really trying to say is I named the Giant Dipper folder after this whole thrill ride: the little nuggets and doodads that catch my creative eye, the long-term projects that characterize my writerly ambition, the questions I’m asking myself, and maybe most of all my insistence on establishing my self as a writer, as mother, and as a person. “Giant Dipper '' now serves as a code name in my mind for all of it. 

That’s how I organize my writing life. How do you organize yours? Or do you have other thoughts on what I’ve written here? Always up for hearing what you think in the comments.

Maggie

PS: I haven’t written anything about Whirl Til You Hurl… yet. But all the research is in the Giant Dipper folder, just in case I get to it one day. ;)