For My Mom

I wrote this little memory up on Mother's Day for my mom. I couldn't quite get the ending right. I didn't know how to write out what that dawning feeling was like. But I remember this small childhood moment so clearly -- the wheels in my little mind turning with some new understanding that I still can't put into words very well. Anyway, here it is:

I don’t know how much danger I was really in. A lot? None? I was only four after all, and I’m judging the experience from my then-perspective. But whether I was about to be whisked to sea and lost forever or not, the absolute terror I felt was real. Real enough to stamp a vivid memory in me (from an age where memories are sparse).

We were on a family trip. California. Visiting my oldest brother and his wife. During a visit to the beach I’d wandered cautiously between two towering rocks in ocean water up past my knees. It was a risky move. My ten-year-old brother had informed me earlier that these ocean rocks were covered with small, treacherous creatures. It didn’t matter that I couldn’t see them. If I touched the rocks they’d ... well, I don’t recall what they’d do. Sting me? Suddenly materialize, crawl up my arm and feast on me? I don’t know. But he was ten. Surely he did know! So I kept my arms at my sides — eying the wet, pocked, rocks nervously as I passed between them. Only, without warning, the water swelled around me and surged up behind me as a giant wave crashed over and between the two rocks. To stop the wave from dragging me away, I instinctively stretched out my arms and clutched a small hand to each jagged rock side. But even in that tiny space of time, as the wave consumed me and my hands reached out, my mind found time to fill itself with dread over the rock creatures, and I screamed with all of my little might.

And then suddenly, impossibly, I was scooped into my mother’s arms. I’d seen her up on the beach moments earlier. That scream had contained all the fear of wave and rocks AND nobody close enough to save me. Yet there she was. Comforting me, protecting me, soothing me. As she carried me back to the beach I could feel her heart beating fast and hear her own rapid breathing. And then I saw the inside of her foot. It was bleeding. Quite a lot. I don’t know why it troubled me so much in the midst of my own distress. But it did. Didn’t she know she was hurt? I anxiously pointed it out to her. She brushed it away as nothing. She’d gashed her foot across a rock on the beach as she ran (crossing more distance than was quite possible in that fraction of time) to rescue me.

I remember staring at that small, jagged, beach rock for some after she’d set me down again. The rock she cut her foot on. It drew my thoughts more than the two giant ocean rocks I’d just been in peril among. There was some new, wordless understanding growing in me. And I was turning it over in my mind — trying to make sense of some shift in me. I shouldn’t have been surprised of course. No mother would pause an Adrenalin-filled dash to her own terrified child in order to whine about a cut on their own foot. But it captivated me and pulled me into a different state of being. I was no longer simply a child — blissfully, ignorantly, existing. My needs met. And love so present that I never thought on it at all. Suddenly I was aware of its reality. Like air newly visible. I ... was sacrificed for. I was worth bleeding over. Self-interest was set aside for me. I was still too young to begin comprehending the choice my mom made to have a tenth child. The weight and responsibility and worry and work that would entail over my lifetime. But my mom’s rescue. That rock. Her bleeding foot. I was ... goodness, I was not simply a soul anymore. I was newly aware of my existence and of my being a valued treasure! I was worth some tremendous amount! And there was this woman. On a sandy beach, with a passel of kids, and a bread bag with tuna sandwiches, and a bunch of wet, sandy towels, and a station wagon that didn’t quite fit us all — just willingly, effortlessly, and through tiredness and difficulty, teaching it to me.

(Me at about 15 months with my mom.)