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Beach Days

Beach Days

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Art Beach Days

By Sarah Bousquet

In July I take my daughter to her first swimming lesson. We walk from our house down to the beach, where a young instructor and a few other neighborhood 2-year-olds meet. Tiny feet trod the path of my youth, hedge-lined, the bricks sprouting crabgrass. It’s the same beach where I spent every summer of my childhood. The same beach where my dad grew up. A history stretching back seventy years. I never expected, after all this time, to return to my hometown, but here we are, in a house that wakes to salt air and birdsong, a stone’s throw from memory.

My daughter is a little fish, just like me. She runs into the waves unafraid, despite encounters with small crabs, barnacled rocks, slippery seaweed. She is at home in the water, splashing with delight. Plops down on the sand and lets the waves roll over her. I can feel that feeling, when she accidentally gulps a mouthful of seawater. Sting in her sinuses, briny taste on her tongue.

There in the waves, on the ripple-patterned sandbar, I find myself inside my own childhood, a feeling truer than an echo, more vivid than a dream. I am my small self standing under a strong sun, fair skin turning pink-brown, freckled nose peeling. The beach stretches itself out familiar and changing, low tide, high tide, choppy water, water smooth as glass. Blue sky bunched with cottony clouds, seagulls diving at spider crabs, the rock jetty harboring mussels, Charles Island in the distance.

Inside this memory, I see my sister and I running over the hot sand to meet our friends at the water’s edge for swimming lessons. We race each other on kickboards, cut freestyle through the waves. I practice limp-limbed back-floats, water lapping my head, filling my eardrums, soundless, staring into the sky. Lying buoyant, body held in the water’s embrace, I drift into daydream, never hearing the instructor’s call. Eventually, I kick myself upright, unable to touch bottom, surprised at how far the current has taken me.

Midday we flock to the cooler for sandwiches, egg salad escaping the bread with each bite. The juice of plums or nectarines dripping down our chins while we bury the pits in the sand.

At low tide we run Red Rover on the sandbars, build drip castles from the black mud, dig moats, construct tiny bridges from reeds. We inspect razor clams, collect sea glass, bury our legs and wait for the tide to wash us up like horseshoe crabs. Sometimes we find chunks of red brick, wet the surface, and use sticks to draw tattoos on each other’s skin. We stab purple jellyfish, but handle starfish with care. Venture up to the seawall and crouch beneath the sailboats, ready-made forts.

On high tide days we swim. We are dolphins, mermaids, sharks. We swim until our skin is pickled, fingers and toes translucent and puckered; the whites of our eyes pink from salt.

At the day’s end, we walk up the road barefoot, hurrying over the hot pavement, pausing to cool our feet in the shady spots until we reach my grandparents’ house. Then we take turns peeling off our sandy suits and washing up with Ivory soap and Prell shampoo in the outdoor shower, run naked through the grass until we’re captured with a towel. Occasionally, my grandmother puts a bowl of goldfish crackers on the table that we eat one after another while my mother brushes our wet, tangled hair.

Memories roll in like so many waves. Less nostalgia, more a conjuring, a visceral recall that resides deep in the body. Watching my daughter repeat these routines on the same sand grants me sudden secret access to these other versions of myself, the sensation of experiencing new textures and tastes, color and light, learning the rhythms, the ebb and flow. They say you can’t go back, but as my daughter repeats these patterns, I return.

When my daughter’s swimming lesson begins, she clings to me like a koala. The other kids take turns with a kickboard, but she resists. Refuses to dip even a toe in the water. The instructor is cheerful and encouraging, but my daughter is not charmed. In the end, it proves too much, performing in front of strangers, an expectation imposed on her fun. It occurs to me I didn’t begin swimming lessons until I was four. I recall that tentative feeling, the fear and hesitation before trying something for the first time.

That weekend, I show her how to scoop water with her small hands, the first step to doggy-paddle. I hold her in the waves, kick kick kick. We search the tide pools for hermit crabs. Dig in the sand. She sees my dad on the sandbar, shouts, “Papa!” and breaks into a run, that waddle-run particular to 2-year-olds, arms out, sun hat flapping. He catches her and swings her into the air before lowering her into the water. She splashes and paddles and kicks. Little fish. These are all the swimming lessons she needs right now. The wonder of the water, the body becoming buoyant, held by strong hands. In my dad’s smile, I see the same joy reflected, and I know, he feels it too. The repeating, the return.

Headshot Sarah BousquetSarah Bousquet is Brain Child’s 2016 New Voice of the Year. She lives in coastal Connecticut with her husband, daughter and two cats. She is currently at work on a memoir. She blogs daily truths at https://onebluesail.com. Follow her on Twitter @sarah_bousquet.

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Nudists in the Afterlife

Nudists in the Afterlife

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Tropical beach at sunset - nature background

By JoAnna Novak

My grandma and I are meeting at a nudist colony in the afterlife. The sun is scorching, the beaches are sandy, the waves are plashing, we’re naked.

Not a stitch—that’s something other grandmas might say: not mine.

“Look for the lady with one boob,” says my grandma. This is our plan: her mastectomy scars will help me find her once we’re both dead and reborn.

Before this conversation, I didn’t know she believed in reincarnation. Or rather, I hadn’t known what she believed for herself. Though she still spoke to my deceased grandfather (he’d encouraged her to renew her driver’s license), I didn’t know my grandma considered where she would go—let alone where she wanted to go—once she was gone.

“One boob,” I say. There’s nothing to do but to laugh. To lop off the conversation. Before I was born, lopping was what doctors had prescribed for my grandma’s cancer. Mother, are you decent? my mom would shout when we visited my grandma, who wore yellowed undershirts that my grandfather had fatigued. It wasn’t until I was an anorexic teenager, committed to bandeau bras for flattening my own meager bust, that I noticed the sagging emptiness on my grandmother’s chest.

“Well, I’ll be the girl looking at people’s breasts.”

“No left, Joey,” says my grandma. “I got rid of the left.”

***

I don’t mean to eulogize my grandma. She’s alive; we talk weekly. But I’m afraid. In April, she became my last grandparent, and her survival stands as undeniable proof that one day she won’t be a telephone call away—that I, too, am getting old.

Her phone number is the last I know by heart: I learned it twenty-five years ago. Unlike my height, weight, or favorite food, it’s never changed. I can still remember being four and chanting that number to the tune of “The Mickey Mouse Club” theme. I can remember learning that the same number could be reached by dialing Memory One.

Memory: a button on a cornflower blue phone, mounted on a wall papered with bonneted geese, near a shadowy watercolor of chickens pecking for feed. I’m five in this kitchen: on nights the power went out, my parents lit a kerosene lamp with a droopy cartoon hound on the hurricane, and I sat at the table, eating ice cream.

***

Now I press the Home Button on my iPhone, and speak: “Call Grandma.”

I’m on Interstate 91 in Massachusetts, 908.09 miles away from her kitchen. I can hear it, Barefoot Contessa on the Food Network, and I can smell it, crisp bacon and the acridity of a sponge-bathed body, and I can see it, my grandma’s table: yellow butter softening on a chipped china saucer; dinner rolls, smothered in plastic, leftover from Bingo; brown calico placemats, grainy with salt and pepper; phone numbers and bank accounts Sharpied on envelopes; back issues of Women’s Day, recipes snipped and paperclipped for me; a 4″ x 6″ of my grandpa, smiling, IV pole in the background.

I can picture the entire room. What will happen when, one day, she doesn’t pick up? What will I forget first—her house or her voice?

The sun sets, exploding over the Holyoke Range, as I drive. I hold my breath as the phone rings and rings, knocking my heart around my throat. And then, my grandma answers.

Before she speaks, I know how her hello will sound. The inflection is as familiar as pulling socks onto my feet. Where will those sounds go? Where will our memories reside when we die?

“What are you up to?” I say.

“Close your eyes and tell me what you see,” my grandma says.

***

I picture my grandma’s wink, and I know my lines—haha, nothing—but they take a moment. I am grateful to hear her, to know her words transport me back to her, to her house—Pat Sajak gabbing on Wheel of Fortune; alley traffic; on the carport, wind chimes ringing above a yellow banana chair cracked with dust.

Here is the cuckoo clock, brown gabled and white trimmed, watching the years count down by meals I’ve eaten in my grandma’s kitchen: Orange pekoe tea and white sugar cubes. Saltines and that soft yellow butter. Fried chicken and hush puppies dusted with powdered sugar, vinegar coleslaw and stewed apples. Potato kluski fried in bacon. A jar of Peter Pan peanut butter. A tarnished spoon. A leftover piece of Greek toast. Crumbs of crumbs.

Today, almond croissants and salted caramel cupcakes I bring from patisseries.

A small McDonald’s coffee—from the one on Harlem, not Ogden.

Hulking in the past, a hearty Bohemian meal: pork, dumplings, and sauerkraut—ordered and consumed in one muttery breath. Muttery, mothery: my grandparents were my godparents; my grandma, always mothering me.

She told me toast crusts would curl my hair—and then told me that was an old wives tale; what I needed to know was one hundred times—that’s how many strokes she brushed, every night, with a soft bristles, like Jackie Kennedy. She told me my husband needn’t know everything about me—and she told me that was something she couldn’t tell my mother.

There was a lot she couldn’t tell my mother.

My grandma, unlike my mother, demurs in person and slanders in private.

What does my grandma say about me?

Joey, her food thing, according to my mother.

“What are you having for dinner, Joey?” my grandma asks. “Kale?”

***

Between the two of us, my grandma says. She likes conspiracies. She likes aligning us, the way when I visit her and we go out for breakfast, she says: “Joey, we’re not big eaters.” She likes that we’re bonded together, that I’m the oldest grandchild, the one who sat beside her in my grandfather’s truck, sharing roasted peanuts, fidgeting with the beaded mahogany-and-mustard seat covers, mornings when my grandparents drove me to school in second grade when I was afraid to ride the bus. I was fat. Mean to other children, who didn’t like me to begin with. And why would they? I was a know-it-all—who professed to prefer adult company. I was a tattletale, a reader, and a weirdly reverential eater: my second-grade diary is devoted solely to English toffee cookies.

Now I realize I learned some of this particular criticalness from my grandma: she would drive two hours to buy eggs from a particular woman’s—Peggy’s—farm; she would slander the kolacky of every Bohemian restaurant in town.

Still I am ashamed of the ways I am not my grandma. I do not keep secrets and, though I am not a big eater, I am not frugal with food. For decades, I have made anorexia, purging anorexia, an epic show of denial: how much could I withhold from my body? How showily could I starve? I could reject my grandma’s kluski at dwindling family dinners or purge caviar; I could run twelve miles on a fasting stomach or eat only the “white chocolate” coating on Peppermint Stick Luna Bars. I could dispose of candy corn by garbage disposal or by wrenching it from my gut with two fingers.

***

My grandma remembers when movies cost five cents—and how, when she was twelve, she skipped the flick and used the nickel to weigh herself at a pharmacy. My grandma remembers wrapping meat in newspaper and throwing the parcel into the basement for the family cur. My grandma remembers the first outfit she bought from a store—a maroon skirt, a pink blouse—in sixth grade.

What my grandma tells me, I try to record. I want to keep her, her past, her nude beach dreams. There is this benefit of purging less: my brain has energy. Now I am the one who remembers: Until sixth grade, my grandma’s mother sewed her wardrobe; after high school, my grandma modeled for a photographer boyfriend. I have pictures: Harriett “Pin-Up Kid” Hanek, long legs tucked underneath her as she sits mermaid style on a rock, in a high-waist bikini.

Today my grandma is tired of clothes. She’s 95; can I blame her? Arthritis erodes her right shoulder. She hobbles, she stoops. With Chicago’s heat and her cranky carriage, she fantasizes about the nudist colony, where she wouldn’t have to argue her arms into a flowery blouse.

“What’m I getting dressed for?” my grandma says. “Lunch? At Bingo?”

(She never takes the meat.)

“Be comfortable. You’re just eating.”

“See so. That’s what I say. Let them talk. What do I have to show off for?”

“Nothing. I mean, no one. I wear shorts in summer.”

I am like my grandma: I could never tell her that her shabby closet and corroded body have driven me to spend, sweat, starve, to stave away what’s coming. And I could never tell her that my mother attributes that shabby closet to the radical mastectomy. For what? I can’t tell her that I’m terrified of winding up like her—in gray rubber shoes and poly slacks and a fleecy Chicago Bears sweatshirt, approaching death, or at least obliged to feed a body I no longer know.

Maybe age will reason me. My grandma, despite her wardrobe, is beautiful. Her hair is downy and argent, like ice cresting on a lake. Her ears are delicate, her nose triumphant, her mouth full. Her hands are big, knuckly, and knit with veins.

Once, before my wedding, she handed me a pair of tweezers and asked me to pluck the hairs from her chin.

Once, she led me to the bathroom, where I ignored the stacks of newspapers in the tub. The room smelled like urine and Yardley lavender. She asked me to help her put her earrings in.

They were hoops, the size of quarters, the gold filigreed. Her skin was tender and soft as I struggled with the clasp.

***

At a nudist colony, my grandma wouldn’t have to think about what sweater would go on easiest and best combat the air conditioning at Bingo.

It was so cold in Chicago last night that my grandma moved two potted plants—tomato starts—from the kitchen window sill to the warmer bathroom, where the steam heater sings. In the morning, the tomatoes were perked up, and my grandmother waited for the municipal bus. She stood under the carport, at her walker, more than an hour, waiting for that goddamn bus.

“Next time, I’m driving,” my grandma says. I wish I could be there with her, that I could take the wheel. I would leave Bingo for another day. I would get us McDonald’s coffees, pastries we could testily taste, and zoom us onto the interstate. I would roll down the windows and let the air, thick with Argo cornstarch from the Summit plant, muss our hair. We both still have nice hair, somehow. I would drive my grandma downtown, past her old house and the old streetcar stables and the old Campbell Soup factory that once sold her father stumpy tomato plants, to Oak Street Beach, where we could spread out a towel and strip and blouselessly arrive at the nudist colony, the place where our spirits will convene, denuded, stitchless, on an endless tract of sand, surrounded by scarred, naked women.

JoAnna Novak is a writer of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. Her debut novel, I MUST HAVE YOU, will be published in 2017.

 

 

The Decision

The Decision

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mother and two daughters playing on the beach at the day time

By Francesca Grossman

My childhood stairs were carpeted red with little black flecks. The rug was threadbare in places, and I spent hours every day pulling the little wiry strings back to reveal more wood. The stairs always squeaked as they do in old houses, so that later, as a teenager, I knew exactly which side of which step to avoid when I snuck out to meet my boyfriend in the dead of night.

I felt most comfortable on those stairs, perched on the small landing exactly three stairs from the top, where upstairs became downstairs and daytime became nighttime.

I floated down those stairs once; I can still feel the flight in my flesh, the ultimate little girl freedom dream when life had yet to leaden me. That night of the floating dream, I ended up pouring a glass of milk in the kitchen, the cold white liquid overflowing the tall glass, spilling on my hand and then the linoleum floor, waking me up.

One winter afternoon when I was about seven, my father came back from the hospital after having surgery on his hands. He had arthritis, and it was bad enough that he had to “fix his thumbs” in my mother’s words. All I remember was he disappeared rather suddenly, and was gone at least a week.

It was a Saturday morning, and I wore a flannel nightgown with a lace collar and elastic wrists I would pull until they ripped and stretched. I wore my nightgown all day on the weekends, feeling the freedom of a day without pants.

My father was a gorgeous man. Still is. Tan, thin, one part Cary Grant, one part The Man with the Yellow Hat. His mole, black and distinctive, sat right on his cheekbone, below his left eye. When he walked in the front door, which was directly at the bottom of the stairs, my mother had to help him take off his coat. She had driven him home. His thumbs were wrapped in white braces wrapped in Velcro to render them immovable.

“Hey, CiCi,” he said.

“Hi, Daddy,” I said, and came down the stairs from my perch, not knowing whether to hug him in case I would hurt him.

“Miss me?” he asked.

I nodded.

“I missed you,” he said, and ran one finger under my chin, feeling the soft skin there. The Velcro scratched my neck, but I kept that to myself. He kissed my head.

He went into the kitchen to talk to my mother and I stayed in the foyer, the black marbled linoleum cold under my feet.

A little later, after he went upstairs to rest, I crept up after him and sat again on the stairs, slowly inching my way toward his room. The door was closed and no light shone through the crack at the bottom. I reached the doorframe and sat outside. The old floor was hardwood and splintery, and I arranged my nightgown so that I wouldn’t sit directly on the prickly bits.

At first, I thought my father had the TV on. Long low moans punctuated by hiccupping sobs filtered through the doorjamb.

Then it hit me—my father was crying.

I had never heard my father cry before, though I would hear it again in the years to come. But on this day in my childhood, I had never even considered my father crying a possibility. He was a mostly happy man who only seemed to ever get upset when I woke him up from a nap, or when my sister and I would pretend to run away, filling our knapsacks with stuffed animals for dramatic emphasis.

My mother was always the anxious one, the rule maker, the one who checked the stove twice before we left, even though she hadn’t used it that day.

I didn’t know what to do. I scooted closer to the white, peeling door and held my arms wide and flat. I pressed my face up against it, and closed my eyes, smelling the old paint. I stayed there, hugging that door, for a long while, knowing that I couldn’t go in, but not willing to leave.

My narrative on love, marriage and parenting was tight and exact. Everyone in my family met young, married young, and stayed together until they were old. I grew up with parents and grandparents all who were still together and (mostly) happy. The people in my family loved their children fiercely. There was never a doubt in my mind that my parents would do anything for me or for my sister, anything at all. I never wondered if they wanted me, I never felt as though I didn’t fit in the family. There still is no doubt in my mind about that. If I call, they come. It has been tested more than once, even in my darkest days. That’s it.

I think, as a child, my understanding of this kind of love made me feel protected and safe. As I grew up and moved away, I set a goal for myself: give myself to other people, especially my future children, with a feverish protection of love.

So when I heard my dad cry from pain, or I saw my mom anxious and worried, or any sliver of doubt made its way under my fingernails, it unwound me. It shook me to see them shaken, and I didn’t know how to deal with that. What I decided on was probably the worst way to deal with anxiety: stomach it all and not let the unraveling show.

In a sense, it was this self-magnified promise of parental love and safety that rooted something in me that was both good and bad: a deep need to echo my childhood, and an even deeper fear that I wouldn’t be able to.

As long as I can remember, I have been a hopeless maternal. I would mother my friends, my pets, my sister and my stuffed animals. I wanted to be able powerful, multitasking, strong. Like my own mother.

My mother put us before herself at every instance. There was never any doubt in my mind that my sister and I were the best things that had happened to her. There was never any competition with friends, or work, or life, really. As I look back, I realize this may not have been the healthiest reality for her, but for us, it was paradise. And it was the way I learned what motherhood meant—giving everything, all of myself, to everyone else.

Every summer, still now, my family rents a cottage on a beach in Cape Cod. The house is tiny and sparse, but the beach is expansive, spectacular, ours.

Almost every day, we would walk down to the completely desolate part of the beach, about a half a mile from the eighty stairs that took us up the dune and back to our cottage. There was clay that made itself from the water and the sand and the wind and we would paint it on ourselves with our fingers, sure it would do something magical to our skin and soul.

My mother, sister and I were painting with the magic clay when a gust of wind blew by, whipping sand into our faces. My sister got sand in her eyes and she burst into tears. Later in life, my sister’s eyes would get her into or out of anything she wanted, but back then, a child of four or five, they got in her way. Catlike, huge, taking up half of her face, they were quick to catch pinkeye and seemed to always be irritated by something.

“Get it out, get it out,” my sister shrieked, holding her little balled-up hands against her eye sockets, hopping on one foot to the other. I had closed my eyes in time, my seven- or eight-year-old self much more sandstorm savvy. Plus, my eyes were a much smaller target – relatively normal sized, and plainer than my sister’s.

“Stop, wait, stop!” my mother exclaimed as my sister jumped around in agony. We had nothing with us, no towel, not even a tee shirt.

“It hurts,” my sister cried.

My mother paused.

“Ok, hold on.” She kneeled on the sand next to my sister. Her red bathing suit wedged up her bum but she didn’t move to pick it; she was working. The tan line on her rearend made a perfect “V.”

My mother pulled my sister’s head close to her face.

“Here,” she said. And she put her lips right up against one eye, and then the other, licking her eyelids.

“Ew,” I said, but quietly.

She did it again, slowly, making sure to get the sides of the eyes too.

“Ok, now try to open.”

My sister opened one eye slowly, blinking rapidly, then the other. She looked around.

“It’s gone,” she said.

The awe I felt watching my mother lick the sand out of my sister’s eyes was palatable. That was the kind of thing that big love makes. That was motherhood. My mother was a master of motherhood. She put us first always. She’d lick the sand from our eyes.

In that moment, as I watched my mother heal my sister, I knew I needed to have children of my own someday; even then, I wanted the ability to come up with a solution out of thin air. I wanted to love my children with that kind of thick, unconditional, and obvious maternal love. And I’ll be honest: I wanted, of course, to be loved with that kind of awe too. I wanted, I still want, I think, the kind of gratitude that my sister had for my mother in that moment. Her mommy stopped her pain.

I was twenty-nine and had just had surgery to remove my thyroid and the cancer had grown. I was also sick with Crohn’s disease and a peripheral arthritis that brought me to my knees. I was stricken with insomnia and used that time to internally obsess about whether it would be selfish to have a baby in my state, to the point where it’s all I could think about. It was taking over every inch of my headspace, and I was slowly starting to drive myself crazy. What would I do with my life if I didn’t have children? What would my husband do? Would he leave? Should he leave? Should I leave to save him that choice?

There’s no clear prognosis with Crohn’s. Usually, hopefully, it was possible to get it under control and live a long, happy life. Doctors, patients and the internet showed me the gamete of other dire possibilities. Since then, I have heard more varying and optimistic versions. But it’s also very possible that my life could be spent in and out of hospitals, having numerous surgeries, living with very little energy and a low quality of life. Even if I never got worse, living a life I had been living—having to be within a ten-foot vicinity of a clean, private bathroom, hiding my depression from my friends, having a difficult time walking, standing up, sitting down, lying down, turning over—wasn’t a great indication of the life I would lead in the future. I could get better, sure, but what if I didn’t? What if I got worse?

My doctors had told me that the Crohn’s was an indication that I had very severe inflammation response, and the thyroid cancer was just one more confirmation that my immune system was severely off kilter. When foreign agents entered my system, my body tried to kill them. Why would that not happen with a fetus? Why would my body spare those new cells when it won’t anything else?

Also, this disease (and my other autoimmune maladies) was genetic. My father suffered from several ailments, as did my grandmother. What right did I have to pass that on to an innocent child?

I kept overthinking, bringing myself into reality: What would I do if I had children, but I couldn’t care for them? What if the cancer comes barreling back? What if I was too tired to help take care of them? What if my husband, Nick resented how much work of a burden he had to shoulder?

My mouth felt coated in cotton and tasted like play dough. Some of my prescriptions came with a side effect of dry mouth, and the aftertaste of the pills was always salty and surprising. I grabbed the water bottle by my side of the bed and took a long swig.

I knew Nick was sleeping, but I started talking to him anyway.

“What if it doesn’t happen, or maybe worse? What if it does happen but then I kill it?” I said.

“You are not going to kill it,” Nick said sleepily, as if he anticipated me waking him up with that thought. He sighed, turning over to face me.

Our bedroom had one big window right next to the bed. I stared out of it in my insomniac nights, watching the trees. The phone lines and their birds turned from black silhouettes to 3-D as the morning arrived. Pinks and oranges painted the sky. Clouds swirled above the buildings and the trees. It was so big, that sky, it made me feel like I could believe in some sort of God.

“What if I can’t take care of one?” I asked again.

“Well, I think you can, but I know what you’re saying,” he said.

The sunrise was blocked by the building across the street, but I got up and climbed onto the windowsill to peer around it, trying to find the sun.

“We could just try,” Nick said from the bed.

“Yeah, we could.”

I searched the sky for the answer to the real question: could I live with not being a mother? Could I live without giving birth? Could I? Could I really be like my mom on that day on the beach, ready for anything, giving it my all? Or would I be like her in different ways, ones less strong?

We are not supposed to remember things before we are four, but I do, down to the feel of the wallpaper.

I remember my mother, deep in her bed with her socks on, sticking out. She never wore socks, so I remember it surprised me. Her heels were always cracked, like mine are now, and though she perpetually tried to soften them, with creams and gels and special razors, in the summer they immediately toughened up, calloused and yellow and split as soon as she set foot on them. There was nothing wrong with her skin; it was just the way she was put together.

When I was about twenty years old, my mother told me that the best thing she learned in therapy during that period was that at a certain point you get to choose if you want to stay miserable. I’m not sure when that choice happens. After all, we can live inside of sadness for a long time before we see the choice as real.

I remember my father looking for me, I could hear him call, and I realized after a moment that my mother didn’t see me. She was sleeping, maybe. She had been in bed for days, maybe weeks, though at age two I should not have been able to remember anything like this, especially not the feel of time.

It was summer. The big fan in the attic was whirling. The air was heavy and hot. I sat on the coarse bright red and white rug on the floor of my parents’ room and looked at my mother’s face. It looked creased and old, though she was just over thirty. Her long dark brown hair spilled over the side of the bed but a thin piece stuck to her cheek with what I realize now was a glue of dried tears.

Something was different about my mother then. She was skinnier than I remembered, weaker. Her fingers were bare, her plain thick gold wedding ring sat on the mirrored tray on her dresser next to the perfume she didn’t wear anymore.

I heard my father again, this time closer.

“Fran?”

He came into the room and scooped me up. My bare legs burned on the rug from the quick movement.

“I lost you, for a second,” he said with a laugh because he didn’t mean it, or didn’t want to scare me, or something.

“Daddy,” I said, reaching up.

He had me on his hip, which was not really a hip for holding children—bony and sharp. His dog tags, actual dog tags because he thought it was funny to wear them, bumped up against an old Talmud pendant in sterling silver in the jingle that always told me he was there.

He perched me again on the other side, and then went over to my mother’s side of the bed, the left side, or the right if you were in it. He looked down at her, and just for a moment, lost his perpetual smile. The jungle wallpaper behind him became 3-D and I reached out my hand over his shoulder to touch it. It was rough, like real leaves, which at the time I imagined it was.

He took the little piece of stuck hair and pulled it gently off my mother’s cheek, placing it back on her head and holding it there.

“You need anything?” he asked, which surprised me because I thought she was sleeping.

“No,” she answered quietly, not opening her eyes. Not sleeping.

He nodded and turned away from her, back towards me.

“Should we get a snack?” he asked me, nuzzling his face into my neck, feeling the underside of my chin with one finger, as he always did.

I don’t remember nodding, but we went to the kitchen anyway for our usual snack of three cookies on a plate washed down with some ice cold milk.

That night, staring out the sunrise, Nick tucked into bed, arguing with me about my chances at motherhood, I realized something. At different times in my life, both my mother and my father were sick in some way. This is true for every child, I suppose. My mother had some times of sadness, like I do, and my father suffered the kind of severe genetic inflammatory disease I have been dealt. He has thyroid disease, and severe arthritis, and stomach problems, at times. I cannot know if the way I see the world is natural or nurtured. I imagine some of both. But I know what love is. And it is bigger than illness, in all its forms. It busts through.

The kind of love my parents have for me and my sister is fiery and absolute. It’s as small as the circumference of our four-person nuclear family and as big as the blue September sky. I have never doubted it for a minute and I can only hope that someday, someone will trust my love like that; that I will be that love that shines through any of my illnesses; that I will be strong enough.

Years later, we are on the beach, the same beach that my family has been going to all my life, the same eighty steps down the bumpy dune from the cottage at the top. I am with my family, my children, and Nick. Theo and Brieza and I are walking towards the surf. It is colder than usual in July, and the waves are rougher than they usually are on Cape Cod.

Nick is perched in a chair out of the way of the water, dressed in a bathing suit and a sweatshirt, holding the rainbow umbrella he just put up with one hand, but having a tough time keeping it still.

My son and my daughter play ahead of me, both only in bathing suits, neither of them cold. I pull a Little Mermaid towel tight around my shoulders, but follow them to the foamy break.

The wind kicks up. Sand whips around us and I throw my towel out against it.

My daughter laughs, but my son cries. He kneels, holding his face in his hands.

Immediately, I know what happened, and I know what to do. I run to him, lift his five-year-old head in my hands, tilt his chin up and peel his balled up fists from his eyes. I lean down and lick the outsides of each of his eyelids, one by one. He is surprised, but doesn’t squirm away.

“Better?” I ask. “Are you OK?”

“Yeah, Mama. I’m OK.”

There is a thin line between having it all and losing it all. It is on that line I balance. I used to think the beat of my life was uneven, stopping and starting with the poison of sickness. But the more I think about it, the more it seems like the beating has been pretty steady all along. I can’t do this, I must do this, I can’t do this, I must do this. And on and on.

Nick and I have landed in our life. It’s not settled, it never will be. We have two healthy children I thought we could never have. We have jobs, we have a home. We are well more often than we are not. We have an old cat that likes to find the square of sun on the edge of the bed. We battle chronic disease.

I used to wonder what would make me whole: what pill, or man, or relationship, or therapist. Now I think it isn’t about adding things to your life to become whole, but instead it’s about taking them away. Like my fear. Like my vanity. Like my need to be healed. Maybe, if I unfurl myself so that the palm of me is naked to the world, and I am here, in my body and in my life, in my remission, then I can finally be complete. Right there is freedom. Right there is absolution. Right there is grace. Right there is me.

Francesca Grossman’s work includes contributions to The New York Times Motherlode, Drunken Boat, Brain, Child Magazine, Ed Week/Teacher, Glasscases.com, S3 Magazine, and Interview Magazine. She graduated from Stanford with a BA and MA in Education and from Harvard with a Doctorate in Educational Leadership, with a focus on writing education and improvement. Francesca lives in Newton, MA with her husband Nick and two children, Theo and Brieza.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nearly Drowning

Nearly Drowning

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Nearly Drowning ART 2

By Vera Giles

I sat next to the learner’s pool, opposite my instructor for Overcoming Your Fear of Water.

I was 40, married, the mother of an almost-two-year-old boy. A few months earlier, I’d been laid off from my job and couldn’t seem to make myself look for a new one—but for some reason, I was also afraid to be a stay-at-home mother. Instead, Sammy went to an excellent day care, which we could afford thanks to my programmer husband, Aaron. I felt like the world’s worst mother.

I had tried several times in the past to learn how to swim. Now, I thought, since the rest of my life seemed stuck, maybe I could at least learn this one thing.

The instructor, a small, muscular woman, spoke with a friendly German accent. “Tell me why you’re here today.”

I wanted to tell her that when I was six, my mother took me by the hand and walked me into the ocean and kept walking until my aunt stopped her. That my mother was suicidal and eventually killed herself. Instead I said:  “I’m afraid of the water, but I want to learn.”

“Our goal is for you to stay centered in your body. You can’t learn if you are afraid. Are you ready to begin?”

We walked to the edge of the pool.

I shivered in my new black bathing suit. It was morning and the room was cold. Small waves caused by other swimmers slapped the sides of the pool, a metallic sound with a deeper note of water sloshing in and out of the overflow vents. The instructor smiled. “Shall we go in?”

Gray daylight poured through the large side windows. The room smelled clean and wet. Accent plants softened its sharp lines. “I guess so,” I said. Was it really this simple? No fanfare? But it felt right.

“Here,” she said, extending a hand. I held it and felt small and safe. Everything about this woman told me she was there to take care of me. “Let’s walk down the steps, one by one.”

I stepped down and submerged my feet in the water. We stopped. “Remember,” she said, “we’ll go as fast as you are comfortable. You can’t learn if you are not fully present in your body—all the way down to your feet. How are you feeling?”

I felt excited and calm at the same time. Could I feel my feet? Yes, they were cooler than the rest of me, firmly planted on the tiles. My hand was in her warm, sure grip.

“Yeah, I feel good,” I said, wanting to go on but self-conscious about seeming to rush. “Let’s go deeper.”

Down we went, step by step, until the water was at our waists. There were my feet. I still felt them. We walked further into the pool.

A rising anxiety finally surfaced, and I spoke. “I can’t hold your hand,” I said. I knew immediately this was a trigger, the memory of holding my mother’s hand, of being forced to go deeper and deeper into the water that day.

She looked surprised. She thought for a second, then crooked her arm. “Can you hold my elbow? Would that work?”

It felt odd, but I no longer felt coerced or restrained. I relaxed. “Yes, that will work.”

Like blind people walking somewhere new, we continued, navigating through my phobia. I let the water reach the middle of my chest—felt it move my body. I kept checking in with my feet. After a while, my instructor said, “You’ve made amazing progress. Look how far you’ve come! It’s time to get out now. Shall we?” She held out her hand.

This time I took her hand and we began walking to the stairs.

Something broke open in my chest. My eyes stung, and a warm feeling spread through my body. A mother was taking me back to shore, holding my hand to keep me safe.

I wanted to cry. For the first time, some little part of me felt secure instead of scared. I was going to be OK.

The next day, I remembered more of what had happened in the ocean.

 ***

I was six. My mother and I were visiting my Aunt Anni in Israel.

I loved Mama and she loved me. We understood each other. We shared secrets and told each other how we really felt. Some days she was very sad and everything seemed to go away. She just sat there and I felt very alone. But then she came back and she started to smile at me and laugh at my little jokes and I knew again that she loved me. I was very good at taking care of her.

Mama was the most beautiful mother in the world. Everybody said so. Her long blonde hair and beautiful dresses and lovely laugh charmed everyone.

Her older sister Anni was loving and distracted, her dreamy voice low from cigarettes. She smelled like perfume and tobacco and the oil paints she used in her studio. Blonde and the same height as my mother, she looked like Mama’s twin. Anni and Mama laughed a lot and shared makeup and jewelry. I loved Anni, too. She was gentle and safe and acted like I was a wise and wonderful person.

It was sunny and warm with cool breezes near the shore, so we were at the beach. I was playing at the edge of the surf, trying to step into the foam as it dissolved, wanting to feel the bubbles on my feet.

Then I felt Mama standing behind me, staring out to sea. She walked next to me, took my hand, and kept walking into the ocean. I didn’t want to leave the surf, but I was used to doing what she wanted.

At first it was fun, bobbing around as we got deeper, but I didn’t like how hard she was holding my hand and I started to pull away. She wouldn’t let go.

I was mad now. I started whining. She wouldn’t let go.

I got scared. The water was pretty high now. She wouldn’t let go.

She kept walking. It got deeper. I was screaming and panicking now. Some part of me was so terrified that something clicked in my head and I started feeling far away.

Water got in my mouth. I swallowed some. I couldn’t keep my head above water or my feet on the ocean floor. She wouldn’t let go.

I kicked and flailed and screamed, breathing in water and choking and swallowing water and drowning. She held my hand and her arm was stiff against her side and as I floated in the water I kicked her leg, hard, and it felt rubbery and she didn’t react and that scared me even more and I was drowning and I couldn’t breathe and this was way worse than asthma and I started to float high above my own head and watch myself drown, just my head, the crown barely breaking the surface as the water around was choppy with my struggles.

My mother stood there, holding my hand in a death grip, her arms at her sides. The water was at her chin. She was staring out at the horizon, completely gone.

Anni came and got me. She put my arms around her neck and walked back to the beach, as I coughed and hung there limply. I started to shake as she bundled me in a towel and tried to get me dry and warm even though it was a lovely day and the water had been perfect.

I fell asleep, from shock.

 ***

I was able to come to that swim class because Sammy was in day care—even though I hadn’t had a job for six months and should have been taking care of him myself. I felt like a terrible mother.

My friends, my family, and my husband all told me I was doing a great job with Sammy. I was not an alcoholic (like my mother and father). I did not abuse Valium (like my mother). I was not depressed (like my mother and father). I was not mentally ill (like my mother).

I did not commit suicide (like my mother).

She was 38 and a half when she killed herself. Coincidentally, when Sammy was born, I was 38 and a half.

Despite years of therapy, I was still terrified that I would repeat her mistakes. I might hurt Sammy. I might even kill him. This was crazy. Why did I feel this way?

When I was laid off six months earlier, I had been back from maternity leave exactly one year. I was 39 and Sammy was 16 months old.

“At least you’ll get to spend more time with Sammy,” my coworkers said.

***

When I was away from Sammy, I wished for more time than the squeezed hours I had with him. I craved him like a drug. I wanted to be there every morning when I got him, giggling and kicking with delight, out of his crib. I wanted to read him bedtime stories and sing him songs every night. I delighted in his expressive face, when he grinned or rolled his eyes or scrunched his nose with mischief. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from his rosy, round cheeks, his enormous brown eyes, and his dirty blond hair. He was perfect.

But I couldn’t stand to spend more hours with him.

“Didn’t maternity leave just fly by?” the same coworkers had asked me a year earlier. My reply—”No, my God, every day was an eternity”—killed their sympathetic smiles. Apparently I wasn’t supposed to discuss what it was like to enslave my brain to someone else’s needs. With Sammy, I was no longer a mind—I was torn and aching breasts, tired arms, a hoarse voice, sore legs. I was chained to his schedule: hovering over him when he was awake; wishing he was old enough to play with toys or even just focus on my face; returning home every three hours to keep the agony of breastfeeding to myself; constantly caught up on the laundry because I was so bored and lonely during his short naps.

By the time I was laid off, Sammy was older, but I still felt like I was failing. Each time he was home all day, I had to get him out of the house or he would drive me crazy and I would begin snarling at him. The kid never sat down. He started walking at eleven months and never stopped. So we would go somewhere we could walk, and walk, and walk. When he napped (thank God he napped), I fell into a stupefied sleep as well. On days when I was alone with him, I choked on my own panic. You can’t leave me, I would think as Aaron walked out the door. I’m an only child. You’re an oldest brother. You’re the one who knows what to do with babies.

There were so many fears. Was Sammy eating enough? He’d been born five and a half weeks early. Every milliliter of milk we got into him was hard-won. Now his toddler schedule of three meals and two snacks a day was grueling. How could I offer him different foods and balanced meals each time? I was a bad mother if I didn’t.

Was he sleeping enough? Everyone knows kids never sleep when you want them to. (Never mind that my child is in fact the most reliable sleeper in the world. Don’t hate me—I have no idea how this happened.) What if he suddenly stopped sleeping well? How could I keep nap and bedtime sacred?

Every mother has these fears, my friends told me when I wailed to them. But the stakes felt impossibly high. What was normal? I once had a mother who let us run out of food and kept me awake at night to talk about her problems. All my fears and worries told me that I was a bad mother like she was.

So many parents said that Mother Love made having kids worth it—but they were wrong. When I first experienced those primal, almost preverbal, feelings—Love. Hold. Mine. Protect. Fight! MINE!—I fell off the platform of sanity I had worked so long to build, into a wild, angry ocean. Even as I craved my son, my fears of all I was doing wrong with him triggered my Mother Love to protect him from the biggest threat: me. I knew I would somehow hurt him. With my inability to care for or feed him properly, I might even kill him. I had to leave him to the experts.

Day care was a better parent than I was. Day care fed him without angst. Day care had playmates he could socialize with, and teachers who were more patient and better trained than I was. Day care had structure and rules and activities, and didn’t get anxious about doing things wrong or rotating the toys or cleaning up messy art projects. Day care hadn’t lost a mother to mental illness and suicide, and didn’t have an ex-alcoholic father who lived mostly in his head. Day care didn’t take years to learn to get along with its stepmother, or spend years in therapy to keep its issues from contaminating the kids. Day care was calm and kind and good and never, ever depressed.

More than anything, I was afraid to lose day care. Because if I lost day care, I would have to be a full-time stay-at-home mom. And then I would have to face the reasons I knew—with a cold, insane clarity—that I couldn’t be a good mother.

 ***

I was 41. My husband, Sammy, and I were visiting with my cousins from my mother’s side of the family in a rented house on the New Jersey seashore. Over several days, I got the courage to tell them the story of Mama nearly drowning me—and they believed me. Some of them remembered her. All of them knew how private their parents were about the past. They knew that Mama could have done this, and that Anni could have hidden how serious it was. Some of them were not surprised.

One afternoon, most of us went to the beach while Aaron stayed behind. We got to the ocean and Sammy, now a tall, adventurous three-year-old, wanted to go in. With me. He wanted me to hold his hand.

I still didn’t know how to swim.

I still didn’t feel like a great mother.

I still didn’t have a paying job. Instead, I had started writing a memoir.

And yet I was getting somewhere. The day before I had stood waist-deep in the ocean, talking to my oldest cousin Andreas about our family and my mother’s childhood. Andreas was at ease in the water. In the middle of the conversation he watched me bobbing with a smile on my face as a rogue wave reached my chest. He said, “You’re doing quite well for someone who has good reason to be afraid of the water.”

Now here we were on the beach, Sammy and I. The sun warmed our backs and the seagulls coasted right and left above us. The surf pushed and pulled, repelling and coaxing.

“I wanna go in da ocean. C’we go in, Mommy? C’you hold my hand?”

How could I let Sammy trust me? Had my mother been so far gone that she didn’t know she was holding my hand in the water, so desperate to kill herself that she almost took me with her? The same thing could be inside me, waiting to destroy us both.

How could she try again and again to leave me—succeeding in her third suicide attempt after I turned eight—when I had loved her so much?

Or maybe I did understand. Maybe I was doing the same thing to my son by running away from him to protect him from myself—putting him in day care, telling myself that Aaron was the one who was good at raising babies.

I looked into Sammy’s wide brown eyes and chose. I chose life.

“OK, Bud. Hold my hand and don’t go in too deep, OK?”

“OK.”

We walked toward the waves, wobbled a little on the shells. Sammy squealed in delight when the surf tickled his feet.

Despite my fears, I smiled back. I could do this. I could hold his hand. I could keep him safe.

I could be his mother.

Author’s Note: I still have moments when it’s hard to stay engaged with my son and to have faith in my ability to mother him. But over time I am noticing little ways that our relationship is growing stronger: more hugs, more play together, even more confidence in the face of his ordinary rebellions. I am struck by how resilient he is, and by those little moments of wisdom that pop out in the middle of being an ordinary loud, funny, defiant preschooler.

I’m accepting that the important thing as a mom is not to get it right the first time, but to learn from my scars and mistakes. It’s when I recognize that I’m going off track that the healing can begin.

Vera Shanti Giles lives with her husband and three-year-old son in the Puget Sound region of Washington state. She is writing a memoir, Crazy Sane Mama, about overcoming the ordinary and extraordinary anxieties of motherhood—resulting from her mother’s mental illness and suicide—to raise her son with joy and humor.

Sweet Sand

Sweet Sand

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By Anne Sawan

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I went to the beach last week with my kids for a final run before fall rolled in. My older boys dropped their towels onto the sand and ran off to find a group of kids to play Wiffle Ball with. I set up the umbrella, unfolded the chairs and took out my book, while my five-year-old, Eliza, wandered down to the edge of the water and plopped herself down, her shovel and pail by her side. Soon a stout little girl, about the same age, sidled up next to her.

“Whatcha ya doing?” She asked.

“Building a mermaid castle.” My daughter said matter-of-factly. “Wanna help?”

“Sure. I’m Ava.”

(Amazing: a bat and ball, or a bucket of wet sand, apparently that’s all you need to spark a friendship. We adults have a lot to learn.)

The two little girls planted themselves not far from my chair and began to dig, chatting as they worked side by side asking each other important relationship building questions such as: How old are you? Do you have a cat? How many teeth have you lost?

“My mom had a baby,” I heard Ava say as she flung a shovel full of sand high in the air.

“Oh,” said my daughter, pouring a bucket of seawater into a deep hole.

“She’s my sister, her name is Sophie. See her?”

Ava pointed a few seats down to a woman sitting under an umbrella with a baby sling wrapped protectively around her body, the top of a fuzzy head just barely poking out. The woman smiled gratefully at me and I nodded in return. Silent mommy talk for “They’re okay. Don’t worry.”

“Do you remember being a baby?” Ava asked Eliza, as she placed a crab into the moat surrounding the castle.

Eliza shook her head.

“Me neither,” said Ava, diligently digging on. “But my mom said I was a sweetie.” Then she giggled. “She said that she ate a lot of sweets when I was growing in her tummy that’s why I came out so sweet. She’s so silly! What did your mom eat when you were in her tummy?”

I glanced up.

Eliza shrugged, “I don’t know…Maybe mac and cheese.”

Both girls began to laugh.

They worked on, gathering up some more unsuspecting hermit crabs (excuse me, I mean “mermaids”) but soon the tide began to creep in and the water began to splash away little by little at the tiny bits of sand until at last, unable to defy the mighty sea, the mermaid castle finally crumbled. The girls shrieked and the relieved crabs all scurried quickly away. After a quick break of lemonade and pretzels, the girls recovered from their loss and skipped off to splash together in the ocean.

After a while the boys returned. We folded up the chairs, gathered the shovels and took down the umbrella.

“Make sure you shake out those towels,” I said. “I don’t want any sand in the house.”

It was a good day.

Later that night, back at the cottage, after a dinner of charred hamburgers, and ice cream from the local dairy, I laid down in bed next to Eliza. I was exhausted but small bits of sand on the sheets scratched at my legs and my back making it impossible to sleep.

I sighed; I loved the beach but the sand was my nemesis. Always sneaking in no matter how much I tried to keep it out. I tried to make sure the kids rinsed their feet with the hose and left their flip-flops at the door, but still tiny pieces of the beach always found a way to sneak into the house.

Eliza rolled over, flung her arm across my neck and pushed her nose against mine.

“Mom,” she breathed. “What did you eat when I was in your tummy?

My heart dropped.

“Remember on the beach,” Eliza forged on. “Ava said her mom ate a lot sweets when she was her tummy that’s why she’s so sweet. What did you eat when I was in your tummy?”

“Well…” I took a deep breath, and gave a few futile swipes, at the grainy sheets trying to brush away the relentless sand that poked at me. “You were never in my tummy remember? You grew in someone else’s tummy.”

“Oh yeah…”

“But I bet,” I took a deep breath and continued. “I bet, she ate a lot of sweets.”

There was a long silence, the invisible specks of sand scratching persistently at our skin as we lay there together in the dark listening to the soft whir of the overhead fan.

“Mom?”

“Yes?”

“I think you ate a lot of sweets too.”

I held her close, no longer minding the sand. “Me too sweetie. Me too.”

Anne Sawan is a mother to five wonderful and aggravating children. She also is a psychologist and an author, having articles published in Adoptive Families Magazine, Adoption Today and several children’s books published by MeeGenuis. 

Photo by Scott Boruchov

The Sun-Drenched Chaos of Family

The Sun-Drenched Chaos of Family

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By Laura Petelle

This is the final post in our What is Family? blog series. Click here to read all of the posts in the series.

PetelleThose early years all blend together, from when I was about three until I was maybe twelve. It’s one long summer of sand and sun, bare feet and itchy clothes.

Every summer, for twenty-seven years, my mom, her brothers and sister, and all of the spouses and kids, made their way by car and plane, from Illinois, Wisconsin, Massachusetts, Virginia, and Kentucky to The Beach.

That’s what we called it—The Beach. It was Ocean City, Maryland, but it didn’t need a full name. We anticipated it all summer and cried when it was over.

It wasn’t until I got older that I appreciated what the adults gave up for us to be close to our grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. It’s not everybody’s idea of fun to spend a week with their parents, adult siblings, and a herd of noisy children in close quarters, especially if it’s the only vacation of the year.

We children never knew how much work went into this sublime sun-drenched week—the dozens of loads of laundry, the hundreds of sandwiches, the scores of mediated spats. For us kids, it was a week of sheer bliss, packed into two condos with all of our cousins, aunts and uncles, and grandparents. We had freedom and a pack of built-in playmates, plus time at the beach, with acres of sand and crashing waves.

In the end, there were thirteen cousins. Nell, Big Mike, and I were the oldest, and I desperately wanted to be included with them rather than the three Bubbas—Pat, Chris, and Brian—who were all the same age and came next, two years after me. After them were Danny, Kate-o, and Kevin. Then Jamie and Michael, the same age, and last of all Will and Rachel. But what I remember most about those years are my aunts. I had four of them, plus my mother, with Aunts Cathie and Carolyn playing the young “cool” aunts. What stands out most about those earliest years is Aunt Janet, Aunt Ellen, and my mother—a trifecta of mothering.

In those days at the beach, when I was waist-high and the world seemed to exist in two distinct levels—those of us whose heads didn’t reach the countertops and those who stood near the ceiling—my mother was suddenly multiplied. I would patter around the condos busy doing “errands” until confronted by a woman’s knees and a kind, smiling voice. I would look up – up – up and see my mother, or Aunt Janet, or Aunt Ellen inquiring about the events of my little world.

In that wonderful week, I would walk up to my Aunt Janet just as imperiously as I would my own mother and demand that she “goop me” as my mother was busy smearing sunblock on one of her nephews. I would beg and whine to Aunt Ellen for extra donut holes as if she were my own mother—no company manners there. And I watched as my mother adopted nine extra children as her own, changing diapers and making lunch for a baker’s dozen of children.

Of course their husbands were there too. When I think of my uncles, I remember them reading the Washington Post, and if you asked nicely, Uncle Bob or Uncle Gene would usually be able to find you the comics section. Uncle Dick and Uncle Jack and my dad were the lifeguards and mission commanders, organizing the massive trek down to the beach every morning, assigning this cousin to carry the umbrella, that one to carry two chairs, this one to carry the blanket. They decided when we could get in the water and how deep we could go, and they took the babies into the shallows to splash in the waves.

They were always smiling, my aunts and my uncles. The years seemed to drop away from them at The Beach. They have all grown wrinkles and bellies and gray hair with age, but still when they smile I am transported back to the eternal summer of The Beach. At The Beach they were children, teenagers. Uncle Dick knew the best way to dig a hole in the sand. Uncle Bob told the same joke over and over—and we always fell for it. Aunt Ellen would nearly always give in, with a look of disapproval that was never effective because her eyes were twinkling, when we teased her for an extra donut hole. And my mother seemed like a girl, laughing and teasing, more carefree than she ever seemed at home.

They would sit around the adult table long after dinner was done, retelling family stories as we hung over the couches or crawled into their laps or played quietly with our toys in the deepening dusk. Some of the stories were the same every year—the time Nell switched all the tags on the wedding presents, the time Chris fell asleep with a mouth full of hamburger—and some would have a sudden resurrection from the depths of memory. We listened hungrily to learn the stories that made us family, so that we too could repeat them one day

The room was full of laughter, so loud it would echo through my child-sized head, sometimes hurting my ears. The laughter was almost a living thing. Was this what being an adult was like? This endless laughter? I would shift in my seat, itching where the sand was still in my clothes, bask in the salty sea breeze that rolled in from the waves, and revel in the happiness around me.

My aunts and uncles grew older, and inevitably I did too. I stretched from childhood into gawky adolescence, and eventually slid into adulthood, without gaining the extra inches I had so hoped for. My uncles grew bellies and my aunts’ capable arms began to sag. They grew wrinkles from mortgages, gray hair from driving lessons, and those knees I so loved began to resemble elephants’. In time, the chill hand of death touched our family, and I saw my uncles cry. In time, I learned that family meant tears of sorrow as well as tears of laughter.

Now, when we gather as a family, some faces gone from us and some new to the clan, we cousins can join in when the stories are retold. And now, when my mom and Aunt Ellen and Aunt Janet smile, their faces relax into labyrinths of lines and those who admit it wear their gray hair like crowns. But in their happy faces and sparkling eyes, I can see more than a score of summers stretching out behind them, smell the sea air of my childhood, hear the lonely call of the gulls across the years. I see them as young wives, and harried mothers of teenagers, and a wonderful trinity of mothers, six knees all in a row, smiling down at me like a benediction.

Laura Petelle is an attorney, author, and mother of two who writes frequently on parenting and education. She lives in Peoria, Ill., and is on the web at laurapetelle.com.

Click here for all of the posts in the What is Family? blog series.


 

New England Beach Babies

New England Beach Babies

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By JoeAnn Hart

Web Only Beach Baby art“What now?” I muttered as my trowel hit an obstruction. “A plastic something.” In the depths of a major garden excavation for my son’s wedding, I kept coming across indestructible bits of our family’s life. Bare tennis balls, bottle caps, keys to cars we no longer owned. This time, though, as I cut away the roots wrapped around my latest find, annoyance gave way to memory. It was a child’s green plastic shovel, and as I turned it over in my hands, years of sitting at the beach with children washed over me.

“What a luxury,” people had always said, “to live within walking distance of the water.” What a pain, I’d grumble to myself. I grew up with suburban sprinklers, not ocean, so I was not a relaxed summer-time mom. Getting the kids ready for our daily beach expedition was like being backstage at a circus, helping squirming bodies into suits and painting faces with sunscreen. Adding up the hours, I have spent a full week of my life searching for sandals the length of my pinky. I could not begin to guess the time spent packing The Bag: Sunscreen, water, box juices, cookies, mini-carrots, peanut-butter sandwiches, towels, more sunscreen, and a blanket. I was exhausted when I finally hit our isolated patch of sand, and it was just the beginning. Clutching a sweaty baby boy while digging a moat with a toddler without taking my eyes off the oldest at the water’s edge was no day at the beach. I did my best to identify the sealife for the two older girls (“that’s a dead crab, honey, put it down”) and answer their questions about nature. “Why is the water blue?” Because it reflects the sky. “Why is the sky blue?” Have a cookie.

We stayed as the tide played in, then out. (“Where does the water go?”) We kept time by an upright stick in the sand, and when its shadow reached a certain angle they knew we had to head back. After packing up camp, an epic adventure of lost and found, we’d begin our forced march, me pushing the stroller with baby and toddler smushed together like sardines, the oldest lagging behind and whining. This was followed by the hose-down, story-time and a nap. That last one more for me than them.

Oh, it got easier over the years. My job became that of lifeguard, albeit one who burned easily and got dizzy from the sun. I sat in a chair, a magazine open on my lap, and watched the kids float like soap bubbles and swim like otters, dark shapes against the sunlight on the surf. Occasionally I’d be called into duty to help steady a kickboard, but mostly they tried to lure me into the water so they could hear me screech like a seagull. My children, true New England beach babies, are unfazed by the sharp slap of the frigid Atlantic. I will never get used to it.

One by one, they reached the age to beach it alone. My oldest girl would run off after breakfast and I’d meet her down there with the two younger ones. In later years, there was just one with me, and then there were none. After that, I’d only go to check that everyone was using sunscreen and staying hydrated. Usually I’d just find them working on their tans, but well into their teens, I’d catch them building kingdoms of sand, festooned with seaglass and bird bones. At the end of the day they’d watch their creations wash away with a shrug. To them, raised on tides, change was the way of the world.

Not so many years later and there I was with a little green shovel. Slipping two fingers into the handle, I could feel the small hand that once wrapped around it, and suddenly I missed the beach. Not the heat or the sand fleas, but the three familiar shapes moving through the water’s brilliant light. I missed their childhoods, and sometimes, I think, so do they. For his wedding, my son wanted a sand castle cake, a clambake at the beach, and silhouette photos against the sun as it dropped into an orange-red sea.

I stuck the shovel in a pile of dirt and tried to guess the time.

JoeAnn Hart is the author of the novels Float and Addled. Her short fiction and essays have been widely published, and she is a frequent contributor to the Boston Globe Magazine. She lives in Gloucester, Massachusetts with her husband and a few barn animals. To find out more, please visit www.joeannhart.com

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