Diana Rojas

Hot Air Balloons

PUBLISHED IN FOLIO 2026: VOL. 41.

I think about the empty nest often. The house is quieter; cleaner, for sure. But it will never be empty, no matter where I live. Our children will never really leave because they occupy prime real estate in the nest of my mind. They are noisy and messy up there in the same way they were noisy and messy in the living room (and every other room) back in the day.

We describe kids going to college, later taking up their real lives, as freedom. We love them, we say, but we’re glad they’re off on their own now. We raise a glass, we’re so proud of them. We’re happy for them. It’s a trope, though. I will never be free of them, the worry of them, the weight of them. They worry me endlessly, these humans I brought into the world. No matter how well they do in life, they worry me because I’m responsible for them. I can’t shed that duty; I don’t know if I should even try.

I have long been haunted by the hot air balloon accident in Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love. I read that book when my youngest was four (making the older ones nine and seven). I had dropped them all off at school and had returned to our London home-for-the-year to sit in the sunny conservatory with my third cup of coffee and this paperback I had picked up at the bookstore a week prior. The book opens with the scene, and I couldn’t get past the first chapter that day. I read, then kept re-reading it, the horror of it deeply etching the nest of my brain. The inability to keep the improperly tethered balloon from floating away. The child in the basket. The bodies falling from it in a belated effort to bring it back to the ground.

I feel the weight of responsibility for keeping my children tethered to the world. For making them feel that this life is worth living. When they confide in me their existential doubts, when they tell me of worries, griefs, problems in their young lives, I catastrophize. Unable to imagine them soaring freely, worried that the balloon will hit a power line and their little bodies in the basket will be electrocuted, I feel myself holding on to the ropes with all my weight. I feel my feet lifting off the ground, and my all-body effort to pull it back, to let go one hand to hammer the stake back in the ground, to keep them grounded a little longer. Because if I can’t, we both will perish. I will not let go of the ropes as they ascend beyond the safety of the earth. And then I’ll fall from way up high, like the man in the book, when my arms give out, when I realize that nothing I can do will bring them back.

I may not have been fully aware of it, but on a cellular level I knew this from the minute I entered motherhood. That I had to hold on, that I could never let go. The incident in the book just painted a picture I could use as my bugaboo from thenceforth.

When they were little and their world revolved around their home life, I was in charge of the routine I kept for them, for my own sanity, and theirs. My motherhood role could best be compared to Julie, the Cruise Director: encumbered with sorting their worries to ensure their total enjoyment of the journey of life. No one told me when I first took the job that, at some point my house would be cleaner, but that it was a role I could never retire from. Ever.

When my father died, one of my children was in crisis. The task of grieving was compounded by the need to direct this child towards happiness. I was overwhelmed. I went to a therapist, first and only time, and heard her ask me the only thing I needed to hear: “Do you think maybe you’ve put too much on your plate?” I ditched therapy, jumped on my bike and on the ride home told Dad that I’d be pushing grieving him off my plate to make room for dealing with the living matter at hand. I checked George Saunder’s Lincoln in the Bardo out from the library around that time, and those fictional ghosts comforted me into accepting the truth that I would have to move forward forever carrying the burden of sorrow that is motherhood. Because, despite the joys and the fun and wonder of it all – and I really, truly, loved motherhood – it is a vocation that calls for a state of perpetual grief. You grieve for the beauty and joy of memory while needing to advance into the uncontrollable unknown lest you be trapped in that grief, incapable of accepting that they grow, that you lose control. The ghosts lingering in the in between in that novel, they keep replaying their regrets in slow exposure, freeze-framing on the could have, would have, should have’s. They can’t move on. But seeing that Lincoln’s sorrowful visits that are keeping his son, Willie, from passing to the next stage, they rally to get the father to release his son because children should never be freeze-framed; they must keep moving.

I would never have described myself as a control freak, but reflecting on motherhood from the latter stages convinces me otherwise. If I ever took one of those tests, I’m now pretty sure I’d come out as a Type A personality, the label affixed to me in aggressively blinking neon lights. Motherhood is my own bardo, and I’m supposed to be moving through toward acceptance that I do not control their lives, and yet, I hold on tight to those hot air balloon ropes. In Lincoln’s grief, in his refusal to let go, I saw myself. I hold on for dear life, because if I let go, I perish.

This is egomania, I know. I’m not always the most rational (probably because I fire therapists in favor of fiction books). But the rational me recognizes this sometimes (and for all those irrational moments, there’s my loving husband who makes sure to remind me that it all isn’t always about me). Have I always been an egomaniacal control freak, or is this a byproduct of giving birth? Perhaps this is a good place to insert that my adult children are mostly well adjusted, mostly happy, mostly independent. They’re having a mostly good time of this thing called life. They don’t know the weight of their burden on my psyche. We should never let children know how heavily they weigh upon their mothers; ours is not their burden to bear.

Every so often I look through our family albums and happen across these blurry, grainy, bad pictures of my youngest in a giant plastic bubble in the middle of a pond at a roadside fair in Coimbra, Portugal, taken during a long-ago vacation.

A good summer fair was always a draw for my family, especially when the kids were little. We’d see one or hear of one wherever we were traveling, and we’d pull right on in to catch dinner and some fun. Each kid could pick one or two attractions, that’s it. Just one or two. At this particular fair, the youngest was drawn to the pond and its giant bubbles. I can’t remember the mechanics, but somehow the bubble was inflated around the kids’ bodies and the giant plastic balls were gently tossed across the pond, the kids rolling around like hamsters on a wheel. It was weird. And hilarious. Her brothers had no interest in jumping into the clear plastic balls, so we all had to wait along the water’s edge for her to have her turn.

Her ball would float around us, and we’d all wave at her, her little arm moving up and down, almost frenetically. The attendant would use his long pole to give her ball a push to the center and again, we’d wait for the slow movement of the water to bring her back to us. Wave, wave, push.

We got bored watching. Her brothers whined to move along. But we didn’t want to spoil her fun. Finally, I lost patience and told the attendant to bring her in because we needed to leave. Was it 15 minutes? 20? Half an hour? I can’t remember. All I know is that when she floated back our way, and he pulled her onto the shore, our little girl was hysterical, crying.

“Why didn’t you help me?” she sobbed. “I couldn’t breathe! I kept waving at you to get me out of this thing, and you did nothing. You didn’t pull me out.”

She was indignant. We had done nothing in her time of need. She was scared. We watched, but didn’t comfort her.

I believe we laughed as we hugged her. We weren’t being cruel. There was humor in the whole scene. We didn’t believe she had been in any danger. Sometimes on vacations we were horrible parents. The Girl in the Plastic Bubble incident would become just another tally on our scoreboard of Terrible Moments in Parenting.

It would join:

• The time we took the kids to see the sea turtles laying eggs on a stormy night in Costa Rica, when the lightning illuminating the horizon was the only light we had to see the surf rapidly and violently eating into the narrow spit of sand we were standing on, the hard rain pelting our faces with sand, holding tight onto the kids hands lest they be swept out into the black ocean.

• The time we hired a local boatman hanging out on the dock at Sal, Cabo Verde to take us out snorkeling and getting to a spot in the wide-open ocean and obeying when he suggested we jump in while he free dived to corral the sea turtles towards us, the boat bobbing at ever more distance. We all struggled in the waves,, my non-swimmer husband encouraging the boys to use brute force doggie paddle strokes to get back to the craft; me pulling my youngest by the arm in a modified tandem crawl stroke so she could make it over the choppy surf. Realizing upon our return that our boatman was high as a kite.

• The time we let the baby eat small fish fried with their tales tucked into their sharp teeth until a bone caught in her throat, tearing at the tender tissue, and her wheezy screams causing waiters and diners to spring into action to save her from the pain.

• The time we encouraged the teenager to sit in a waterfall, to feel the beautiful force of nature, then watched a huge rock tumble down upon him, missing his head by millimeters.

We laugh nervously, my husband and I, when re-telling these and other stories, giving each other sidelong PTSD-drenched glances when we realize just how close we came to extinguishing their little lives in the pursuit of fun. The truth is that I shudder as I write these words, from the distance of time, even knowing the children survived. They humor me less the older I get. More than our carelessness, what horrifies me most when I think about these incidents is that, in the name of adventure, I nearly let go the vice grip I, as mother, was supposed to have on them. That I almost let them float away from me.

It’s the latter that keeps me up at night. “The past has a way of hijacking the present… Time has a way of compressing.” (Ta-Nehisi Coates). When I fret about their chosen hold in this realm, I wonder if our playing loose and fast with their lives when they were unaware affected them, altered their wills to live. Have I doomed them?

When I think of my own childhood, the memories play at the speed of our Super 8 family films, jerking from scene to scene. All the movements seem light, almost comical at that speed, editing out the imperfections, issues, tears. Perhaps that’s just the vantage point: I made it through to middle age and I believe I didn’t burden my parents. The memories of my children’s childhood now play through my mind in slow motion, like I’m examining a contact sheet with a loupe, studying each picture, trying to pinpoint the mistakes. Even lighthearted moments are weighted in this quest for the perfect shot, staring blearily as if life depends on my understanding all the details, absorbing the nuance.

During times of child induced stress, my now non-religious brain ventures often to the Magnificat, in which Mary praises God for knocking her up. “My soul glorifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in my savior, for he looked upon me in my lowliness, and all ages shall call me blessed.” Replace lord and savior with “the universe” and follow along: I was a nobody and the universe gifted me with life, before I even understood my own place in it. I was #blessed with three relatively easy pregnancies, three healthy babies, three infancies, then toddlerhoods, then childhoods that I adored every minute of. No exaggeration. (Notice I left out teenagehood. All things being equal, they weren’t awful but to say I loved every minute of it would be a bald-faced lie). Like Mary, I was surprised by my first pregnancy, this burden I was being given. I cried a little, a lot, and then I accepted. He rocked my world, the little creature I birthed. I wanted to squeeze him every day, express the goodness from him, drink up his unsullied human beauty. All three of them; I wanted their essences to be the elixir that would teach me who I was. I wanted it to teach me who they are.

We still don’t know each other fully. We never will. But we love each other. Is that enough? Is loving each other enough if I can’t penetrate their brains and know what makes them tick, who they want to be, what burdens their innermost thoughts? Is loving them enough to keep them tethered to this world, to achieve the awesome job of nurturing a life that I was gifted?

Do you know what happened to Mary in the years after her baby was murdered? She supposedly ascended body and soul into heaven. She floated up, and up, and up until she was no longer of this Earth. She couldn’t let go of the ropes that dangled from that hot air balloon that Jesus was in, the one that floated away too soon, when she was incapable of holding it down. When she failed to keep tethered.

🙢🙗🙠

Diana Rojas is the author of Litany of Saints: A Triptych (Arte Público Press, 2024), the forthcoming novel, They Hold Grudges (Arte Público Press, 2026), and the forthcoming children’s book, Clara’s Big Green Coat (Piñata Books, 2027). Her essays are featured in Grit & Gravity, The Washington Independent Review of Books, Latino News Network, and the WWPH anthology America’s Future, among others. A onetime journalist, she lives, taxed and unrepresented, in Washington, DC.