C is for Compass

“The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.” – James Arthur Baldwin

There is no greater privilege than being a mother to my children. Admittedly, it is a privilege that I sometimes lose sight of, but only oh so very briefly, when Emma rolls her eyes and asks me not to breathe so loudly—much less speak—when we’re in the presence of others, or when Tess screams and kicks in Hour Four of a five-hour car trip with 108 degree temperature readings on the fancy in-car thermometer and sand in our underwear from the beach, pulling up her miniscule eyelids with tiny index fingers yelling “I don’t want to go to sleep, I don’t want to go to sleep, I want to see,” so tired she can barely function, a deprivation that announces itself in decibels; she is so happy to be on the trip that she dares not miss any of it by sleeping. I love her fortitude.

I am humbled by what I learn from them – about them, about life, about how I am in the world at my best and at my worst, and about what responsibility looks and feels and tastes like. (And, actually, even in the worst of times—the grocery store fits, the teenaged sulks—I am learning from some pretty powerful free data).

I watched my brother and sister-in-law on a beach this weekend as they stood at the edge of the world, a point of land jutting into ocean water, the sun setting and making that sky I like so much, blue grey and white tinged with pink, flinging their only son—my favorite nephew—into that horizon as he married, standing with his bride inside a heart carved of sand, strewn with flower petals and shells, a tide reminding me of forces much larger into which all this is set, those gravitational urges that we all feel on a smaller scale than the earth, the sun, and the moon.

As I looked out into the sea, I realized that the line at the edge of seeing is either a horizon or a boundary, depending on your perspective. It either keeps moving, sweeping you with it to new parts of the globe inside you, or it doesn’t. In such vast travel, a compass is vital.

I felt my heart catch as I watched Emma, barefoot in her sundress and newly dyed pink and black hair and arms festooned with black bracelets, one made of tire rubber and bottle caps, the other with a silver rectangle that reads “Redefine normal,” watching the wedding, standing on the edge of the sea and on the eve of turning 15 in a few days, readying herself for a visit to a college today on our way home from the beach, a place in which she would try to imagine herself walking and laughing and creating art and living and eating Cheerios.

What will that moment be like when I turn her over to the world, wait for a good wind and fling her into the horizon to do her own living, her own work in the world, like a kite with a long tail? My heart exploded and then started reconfiguring itself—with changes—inside my chest.

I turned from the wedding to see Tess skipping in the water, going further out as Mr Brilliant stood by at a distance to allow for both safety and freedom, picking up sand and throwing it, wiping her sandy hands on her party dress, poking at sea foam with sticks, reveling in her first visit to the ocean, still reeling from her earlier swim in this magnificent huge wavy pool, those white crests crashing over her, knocking us both down, me desperate to hold her head above the wave and not lose her to the current, but getting thrown down myself, scraping my free hand on the hard bottom of the sea, and feeling the wave carry my red plastic L’Enfant eyeglasses with their happy and significant progressive bifocal lenses away from me.

My panic at losing those glasses is but a drop compared to my panic at losing them, the waves crashing, that kite string snapping, but the compass always pointing–not North, but home.