I've had it.

We are not gridlocked, not quite yet, into the northbound rush hour traffic out of Albuquerque. Although I expect to be momentarily.

My ten and eleven-year-olds--who've just had to spend three whole excruciatingly boring hours with me in the overcrowded ballroom of a downtown hotel at a job fair (I'm a recruiter, and not for high-end corporate executive or techno-savvy types, just to clarify the reality of the situation), necessitated by my lack of scheduling capabilities--are hunkered down in the cushy seats of the SUV, complaining loudly that what I do for a living is awful.

Just awful.

How can you stand it, Mom, they ask?

Good thing I'm beyond getting my feelings hurt.

Well. Almost.

They are pulling their MP3 players out of their coat pockets, preparing to check out on the long ride home, and here it comes out of my mouth. "Well, you can just think about me talking about a million miles a minute and passing out crummy photocopies (instead of the nice glossy brochures all of the other recruiters seem to have) to the unwashed masses in the ballroom of some hotel when you are enjoying that super expensive private school we bust our butts working to send you guys to."

They are speechless.

Sometimes I wish I had a time-out button for my mouth. So I could push it and get ten seconds of silence to consider my words before they've escaped, run off like unruly colts.

Sometimes I wish I had a panic button for when the real oddballs show up at the recruiting booth. Something hidden under the table that I could just push and the cavalry would come running. Heck, maybe they'd just carry me right on out of there. All the way to a sunny beach in Mexico. Or to a job as a stay-at-home mom.

But I'm not holding my breath.

Like when an old cowboy--as skinny as a rail, ragged blue jeans pulled up nearly to his chin, belt buckle up to his bloodshot eyeballs--sidles up a little too close and begins complaining, before I've even had a chance to greet him, that we wouldn't hire him because he's sixty four years old, (goddammit.). I begin to explain about EOE, but he's already embarked on a loud and lengthy explanation of the time he spent in prison. As a convicted felon. A convicted felon, he says it again. There's a hard edge around his eyes as if he's almost daring me to get concerned, real concerned, but I hold my ground until he turns his attention elsewhere.

Or when the sullen young men draped in more gold than Midas himself and sporting cubic zirconia earrings, the really nice ones from Wal-Mart, show up. They don't take their sunglasses off to talk to me in what turns out to be essentially a series of grunts and monosyllables. I try my best and hand them a photocopy.

Then there's the misplaced looking man from some far away African country, in his immaculate pressed white shirt, with the lilting accent, a face as round as the moon itself and cheeks like apples, who blathers nonsense from one table to another, his eyes like glass. While I'm listening to what he's trying to say, I imagine him as some tribal king, stalking a lion on the African plain. I find out during our long and uncomfortable exchange which he seems to have no intention of ending, and in which I am smiling so hard I'm hurting myself with my own cautious politeness, that he works at the salad bar. Although he can't say where.

Or when that stupid woman thinks that my two well-tended-looking children who are watching Scooby Doo on my laptop behind me are part of the child welfare system for which I am recruiting ...

That's when I could use that button. A button to keep it at bay. A button for the madness. A button for the sometimes middle of the night middle-aged terrors. The breathless, heart racing, is this it?.

Sometimes you do what you have to do to make a living. Especially in a small town and in a state that's at the bottom of the socio-economic heap in this country, I tell the kids. But they are only half listening. I tell them that if I had another job, a more glamorous job, let's say, that we might not have the flexibility for me to spend as much time with them with I do. Like, they might wind up spending all of their free time in after care.

That gets their attention.

And then as we break out of the traffic quagmire, and head up the highway towards the Sangre de Cristos, I see it. Just peeking at us over the horizon. Over there at the very edge of the earth the lady makes herself known.

Look! I tell the kids. Jessie removes the earbuds from her ears and gives her brother a thump. He sits up, startled eyes reflected in the rear view mirror, in the cool glow.

The new moon is rising. She spills her radiance out like water sloshing over the sides of a bucket. Plays hide and seek with us on the undulating highway. Softens the hard edges of the traffic lights with her glow.

She shines her light on commuters, recruiters, kids, moms, and stark raving lunatics.

I figure we're all just trying to make it home.