We leave early, the greydark sky still holding its calm hand over the sun’s burgeoning light, gentle touch of a mother, palm pressed to her child’s forehead. The roads are clear; there is never traffic at this time. A bright earring of moon dangles from the sky’s lobe, a dazzle or two of star studs her forehead; she’s distracted, busy in the process of awakening to her own blueness. The sun wears her morning gown of lavender and lilac, ringed with soft orange, her light not yet blinding even as we speed towards her.
We arrive in time to catch the moonchill the sun will soon burn off. Dewtears wet the long sea grasses, coloring them in glistening golds as they rise to dance with the breeze on the dunes to our right. We’re greeted by the comforting crash of waves and the bright cries of early gulls, circling these protected waters.
My daughter and I walk the shoreline together in contented silence, feet naturally falling into a joint rhythm. She looks more like her dad but we share the same mannerisms; the same way of walking, titling towards tomorrow, the same way of slouching onto one hip to appear shorter than we actually are. The shadows we cast look almost identical, although hers is longer, thicker where the outline of the small cooler she carries bumps against her hip.
She should have been preparing to return to college for her sophomore year, but COVID has diminished our personal universe, and we’ve just learned her classes will all be online. Aside from walking the dog we’ve barely left the house since she returned home last March. But the summer weather and the lifting of some travel restrictions have provided a bit of a respite, and on days when the weather is warm we daytrip out to Corson’s Inlet.
Before COVID we spent our daytrips at the beaches “downtown” in Ocean City. Often the shoreline was so crowded people sat right at the edges of each other’s blankets; you’d have to be careful not to knock into each other when you went out to ride the waves. But there’s a boardwalk, and we loved the convenience of salty fries, bathrooms, ice cold lemonade. We didn’t really mind the crowds, back before people and voices and breath itself were dangerous, back before we had to shrink away in fear from the things we loved most. Now that we have to distance ourselves we’ve discovered this precious place, a small unguarded beach that’s been intentionally preserved. There are people here, of course, but they are few and far between.
We walk towards the water, noticing waves and sky from a distance, tracking scrims of seagulls, cawking through the early light. Our far-flung eyes notice greyish sand, blending to amber when the light hits it right. A smattering of colorful umbrellas, a shimmering line attached to a pole jammed in the sand– the seascape seems timeless and unchangeable. Here at the edge of the world it could be easy to believe that life itself is fixed and static.
But of course that’s not the case. The only timeless is change, and now that we’ve been caught in history’s web we are learning how important it is to pay attention, to observe the small things that shift every day. What COVID has done is forced us to go deep within, to stare intently into what is in front of us; when we come to the beach we notice. We want to soak everything in because suddenly there is an urgency, a deeper understanding that the things we love most can be taken from us at any moment.
We pack carefully. We have to lug our things a long ways out, trudging as far from other people as possible. We haven’t really done this before, distanced ourselves like this, and every time we come we love the isolation more. Being alone at a beach is an invitation into communion – with each other, with the ferocity of nature, with our own selves. Exploring a more desolate beach offers us the opportunity to encounter a surprising array of wildlife, things that shirk away from crowds of shouts and stamping feet. On one of our first trips we saw a small shark, swimming quite close to shore. It had been bitten by something and was close enough that we could see the shocked gape of raging red as the wound sought to close itself, eddying flesh pulsing against the salted water. No fresh blood flowed, but we caught our breath anyway, praying that the shark would survive, astonished that it had shown itself to us. Depending on the day and time and placement of the stars we encounter horseshoe crabs, their stalwart helmets plodding a solid line to the sea, smaller fiddler or ghost crabs, clearnose skates, birds of all shapes and sizes. We even saw a small white-tailed bunny in the dunes, once. It was as if an entire universe existed just yards away from the town beaches, filled with the people and their sunscreen and speakers, their coolers of beer.
We feel so grateful to live close enough to the shore that we can spend time there safely at a distance from others and the dreaded virus. And we have stamina – sometimes we arrive at sunrise and stay through dusk without ever wanting to leave the water’s edge. But what we have come to love most are the tide pools; we plan our entire days around low tide.
The tide pools are hidden when the water is high; we have to wait for the ocean to shrink back, following the whimsy of the carefree moon. But even as we wait we pay attention. Some days the water is dotted with dolphins, tracing graceful arcs against the grainy horizon. Other days we observe the oblong poke of a turtle’s head, languid as a snake, giving us an evolutionary shiver, until we puzzle out its harmlessness and our biological fear fades to delight. We chart the tide times, and just before low tide we leave our things and begin our walk further down, towards the tip of the inlet, where the tide pools form as the waves recede, recalcitrant children being summoned back by their mother, diminishing as they’re overshadowed by what gives them power. We welcome the gentling touch of the sun on our golden shoulders as we wade out to the tide pools and find a seat at their edge.
We enter each pool with curiosity and reverence. At first it appears as if there’s nothing in there but the water and our own slender feet. But as our eyes adapt we discover entire universes in the rings of water. It’s almost like discovering dimensions of a person with whom you’ve fallen in love, as you peel back their layers and hone in on what’s underneath their seismic skin, getting to know them as their purest selves….
When you sink into a tide pool and start to pay attention you become acutely aware of how much everything changes, even from day to day. The pools are always cool and inviting, although usually the water in them is much warmer than the water in the waves that continue to pound behind us, calling out goodbye as they skip off into the vast beyond. My daughter is fascinated with the striated patterns of sand at the edges of the pools, the complicated ridges facsimiles of a Grander Canyon. We stare together at the patterns, looking for color, pinks edging into grayish-greens. Then she sees a tiny whorled shell, and even before we can gasp in appreciation the shell is on the move – a hermit crab, no two, no three, and as our eyes adjust we observe an entire cadre of tiny, nimble crabs, bustling about in their temporary shelters. A school of blazing fish flash by, tinier than my thumbnail and almost translucent. If we weren’t bent over the water just so in order to trail our fingers along its surface, if the sun wasn’t angled at a perfect 45 degrees, we’d never see them, and this feels like a perfectly glorious miracle. Sometimes tiny jellyfish float by, practically see-through but for the donut of orange at their gelatinous core. Other times there are bigger fish, gray and substantial, assertively bumping up against our calves. We never find the same thing twice, and this, along with the healing alchemy of salt and sea and sky, is what draws us back.
It was hard to let my daughter go the first time she left for college. The space inside me where she’d once nestled in my womb ached for weeks. Although the reason she came home was tragic and terrifying it still felt like a small miracle to have her with me again, to have time with her on an empty beach with few responsibilities and nothing to do but observe.
I still have the stump of her umbilical cord, oyster-dark and imbued with mystery, tucked away into a colorful box with other mementoes of her birth. When her father cut her physical cord a new cord was formed, bright blue and invisible to all but me; that cord had stretched across miles of city and tunnel and aching road when she was away, vibrating all the love that I had in her direction.
But she did not come from me, not really. She is not of her father. She did not even come from the miracle of our love. She came across an ocean of mystery, something forming from nothing. Immersing myself in the marvel of the tide pools reminds me of this, that even the smallest things are made of magic bigger than anything we can imagine.
I have always loved the ocean, and for me the experience of giving birth was a sacred submersion into the memory of its rhythms. I surrendered to the battering of my daughter’s body just as I once learned to surrender to the rhythms of the water, timing the crest of the waves, succumbing to a mouthful of salt and the rough tumbling among the sprinkling of shells at the bottom if I didn’t get it just right, becoming one with the ocean as it breathed itself, coping as it encountered the resistance of the places where it ends. For me the contractions were exactly. like. that. I held my breath when I needed to, moaned fiercely when it felt right, and brought my daughter forth in a watery spasm of love and trust. She was carried to me by water, and when the time was right I carried her back to water’s edge, to relive a cellular memory of the time before what is.
I remember feeling both heaviness and joy when my daughter was an infant, tiny and perfect and terrifying, joy because of the miracle of her inquisitive eyes and soft skin, terror because her world was so dependent upon me and my choices. What I ate determined the quality of her food as she drank from my breast. How I treated her would form the basis of her own self-worth, her ways of seeing the world. I remember running my finger over the perfect pearls of her spinal cord, promising her that I would do my best. I remember wanting her to love the things I loved, and if that was not possible wanting her to love anything, everything, to be suffused with love and the promise of possibility as her life stretched before her.
For so many years after her birth my life was focused on discovering things through her eyes. As she grew up and away she started making her discoveries without me, leading to occasional fierce fights and moments of pallid disconnection. The gift of her return was a new opportunity to find things together again.
Over the course of my life I have experienced time as marching, always, inexorably forward. Dropping my daughter off at college the first time was one very significant milestone on the thick timeline of our mutual lives. I’d said goodbye with a heavy heart, never expecting a pause, a way to go backwards, to spiral in around the things that had been hard for us, following the sure path of the patterns etched into the conch shells she loved to examine. But our timeline was disrupted, and a day at the sea teaches us this — change is the only constant. Every day on the ocean is different – the shape and thrust of each wave changes, as does the temperature of both air and water, the direction and force of the wind, what creatures come to play, which hide themselves away. I can always count on seeing the clumsy tumble of coquina clams – except for the days they’re buried too deeply and the water is grimgrey. Being seaside reminds us of the magic of things coming and going, the sacredness of all transitions. It invites us to appreciate places we can get to with only our feet, where one thing is always ending and another thing beginning, rooted in the creatures of possibility which make a life here
When she was in high school we argued, often, and sometimes aggressively, but even then ours were the types of arguments which were forgiven and forgotten within minutes. At the tide pools we never fought – there was nothing to fight about. Instead we encountered deep harmony within ourselves and each other, the harmony of connection to the vast beauty around us and the luxury of time to spend there.
But then things changed again. The miracle of vaccines meant she would be returning to school that next fall, after a long, snowy winter and a spring that felt like a true awakening as things opened up again for real. We were happy, of course – it was time for her to be away again. But we would miss our timeless days at the beach.
A child leaving for college (again!) offers an opportunity to reflect on what we have given, evaluate our own performance as parents. There were probably too many moments when I failed as a mother, when I was exhausted or blind or just overwhelmed with the regular demands of busy life. But we were given a chance to reconnect, and on reflection I can see that I have given my daughter a love for sea and sky. I have given her a wanderlust, a desire to seek not only the big beautiful places in the world but also the reticent magic in whatever small tide pool her fingers are trailing through at any moment. A gift I know I have passed on is the gift of paying attention, of letting the world stop spinning while we sink into a quiet, miraculous moment, feet planted firmly in sand while everything else that makes up the ether of the present teems around, going about its business but offering a gift as well, a gift we can see only through focusing eyes.
Over our COVID summer there were times we were utterly alone in the tide pools. We’d sit, late in the day, feeling the cooling breeze and the diminishing power of the sun’s heat as it lengthened its angle against our bare backs. The landscape shapeshifts at the tip of the inlet at low tide, so occasionally it would feel as if we were on an entirely different continent, in Patagonia, perhaps, or perhaps on another planet altogether. There’s nothing but sea and sky; the way the water angles around the point and the geometry of our positioning makes it feel as if we have been swallowed by a bowl of water, held aloft by only a narrow stretch of sand. Thin white clouds imitate the birds who seek them, feathering out over color that can only be described as cornflower crayon.
We go back, several times, this year after COVID, before she leaves me again. The days feel more precious, somehow, because our time together will be ending soon. We spend our days in the same way, bouncing through waves, sinking into the tide pools we love, but they are infused with a new meaning as the day of her departure grows near.
Our last time there together I have to force myself not to cry, to get all maudlin, to offer stupid advice. What else is there but presence and love? What else could I give, that hasn’t been offered over 20 short years, that hasn’t been crystallized by our seaside summers?
Her move back is exciting, and all goes well. But it is a new adjustment, just as the gannets adjust to the wind, leaning into it and resisting the urge to offer resistance. I yearn for the beach even as I avoid it, knowing it won’t be the same without her.
One day I go anyway – it’s hot, but fall is coming soon, and I want to take advantage of the weather. I’m grateful when the cool ocean breeze brushes my cheeks and shoulders, wrapping me in the eternity of this liminal place, where water cedes to land and vice versa, where people all over the world come to love, to mourn, to question, to puzzle out the mystery of life. She was of me then out of me, her world widening like the ripples in the water, circling ever further from their center. But wherever she goes she carries my essence.
At low tide I walk, alone, to seek the pools at the inlet’s tip. The solitude on this long evening is stunning, and I swallow it whole, certain if it becomes a part of me my heart won’t hurt so much. I ache at the loss of my daughter’s long shadow beside me, seated next to me in the sand at the exact tip of the inlet, looking out over the bridge, across to the houses and umbrellas on the other side of the channel, laughing and dreaming stories of the people we notice there. It’s too quiet now; there’s nothing to joke about. The solitude stalks me. I am no longer building a life, figuring things out, as my daughter is, but rather taking stock of a life of small choices, riding the inside of the breaking wave that separates who I will become from who I have been. It strikes me that in some ways my most important, meaningful role in life is over, the bulk of my mothering behind me. I don’t suppose you are ever done mothering, but I am done mothering intensively, and it’s clear to me now, how my choices and sensibilities and flaws have shaped someone else, for better or worse.
As I observe the sea alone I peer through a window of loss, seeing mainly the vulnerable and unprotected. Death surrounds me, even on this inlet teeming with life. Suddenly it’s clear that being a mother has meant choosing between anxiety and freedom, the choices I have been making since I pushed my baby out in an ocean of pain and delight and had to decide what to do with the fragile pulsing thing no longer a part of me. I feel anxious now, without her, worried about her in this ever-more dangerous world, but I hope that I have chosen freedom more often, I hope I have chosen the glory of the dance of the dolphins leaping through thick spray, I hope I have taught her courage. I hope my daughter knows to look for the thing that frees you, to leave everything else behind like the desiccated salt of the mangled ladycrabs, which drift belly up or topple sideways through sand after surrendering their ghost to whatever larger thing consumed bits of them. The loon above discerns it all so differently than the clam, which can see but sand and salt. Perhaps it is only the bird that is truly free. I once wanted a bird life, for myself, but chose the gravity of sand when I anchored myself to my child. But maybe freedom isn’t so much about what you are tethered to, but rather the grace with which you can let it go.
I loosed my daughter into the ocean of her life, only to have her tumbled back to me on a high tide of tumult and fear. I grabbed her and held her close, grateful for sandy days which felt eternal, but then it was time to release her once again….all I can give her now is what she herself taught me, that sometimes the best we can do is continue to seek the beauty in the changing world around us, offering appreciation for what we have in each moment, seeing what’s there and breathing in gratitude.
I stare at the water with a throbbing heart, watching it recede, leaving behind only barren sand, trying my damnedest to see the miracle in what’s unearthed, abandoned. The body adapts to stress, I suppose, even the stress of a loss, just as I once adapted to my baby’s weight in my arms, not even noticing her growing heavier each day until one day she toddled off on her own, leaving only the outline of form, an ache heavier than emptiness itself
Off in the distance something glimmers. It’s a small shark, a dogfish, perhaps, delighting in defying gravity, throwing itself into the air, white belly shimmering silver against the sun. Droplets of water rain down from its lithe body, hitting the water before it, too, is drawn back down. Is it seeking a type of baptism, a communion with air, just as we humans seek to baptize ourselves in the essence of their sacred waters?
I sit for another moment or two, willing myself not to cry. Another shark leaps, so close I can see its distinctive frown, even as the sun is beginning to show out in her evening mauves and reds, kaleidoscoping my face with her spectrum of light. The shark disappears. I don’t know where it will go next, but I can see where it lands, the splash of bright water, and for now this has to be enough. The tide continues to recede, but I trust that it will return once more, laden with gifts, carrying back what matters most, even through the gauze of changes traced like evolving spirals, marking the shells scattered at
my
empty
feet.
