Greetings from Newark! The quality of my travel destinations is deteriorating rapidly, isn’t it? Is this what the Jeep was trying to warn me about? At this rate, by next week I’ll be checking myself into accommodations in…well, it’s hard the think of a way to end that sentence that’s worse than “Newark.” “McLean,” perhaps?

To add insult to injury, I’m at an Embassy Suites, which is the absolute worst hotel design concept ever. The lobby is a small, damp water park, with paths meandering through it any direction but direct and an annoying fountain running around the clock. All the hallways are open to public view, there are windows in the rooms that open onto the hallways, and the elevators are see-through. It’s as though the morality police deliberately set out to design a hotel that would discourage indiscreet behavior. Note to self: do not book Embassy Suites for affair.

Tonight, I’ll be heading home for the weekend, and thus have been planning my Aitch-entertainment strategy, which now has a new prong. Two weeks ago, it was extremely hot, and in a fit of pique (because I am forty years old, pay taxes in a reasonably high bracket, and still do not have central air), I joined an outdoor pool. This was no mean accomplishment, because there are few outdoor pools on the North Shore of Massachusetts. Our Puritan forebears did not leave us with a robust tradition of aquatic sports. So we have to travel eight exits down the freeway just to take a dip, but it was worth it.

The center has various pools and a “sprayground,” a patch of concrete with different types of fountains and other water effects. It was worth the cost of membership just to witness Aitch’s glee as he ran through the sprinklers. He was literally dancing for joy as the water jets rose up in a circle surrounding him. He ran, danced, laughed and shouted for about an hour, after which he was content to sit docilely and eat his lunch. After lunch, he quietly explored the principles of conservation by pouring water from one container to another, one container to another in the wading pool as I sat there and watched.

It was brilliant. It was also weirdly suburban. One of the reasons I’m in this boat — the forty-year-old-mom boat — in the first place is that I was so fearful of giving up my independence, my life, myself, AND MY CITY APARTMENT that I was slow to marry and reproduce. I have always wanted to experience marriage and motherhood, but I have studiously avoided the suburban lifestyle that such relationships seem to spawn. I had this fantasy of urban motherhood that could sort of be maintained as long as I was living within walking distance of some sort of downtown and never set foot in a mall. But an afternoon at the public pool with a thousand other parents in the same age and tax bracket has blasted that fantasy right out of the water.

Get it? Water.