Within the Space of the Mother
A story of re-wilding
Later on, when recounting the story, my mother would laugh and say she had not been sure which one of us she would have saved.
The humidity was heavy that day, the kind that feels like bricks crushing your chest. We peeled the backs of our bare legs away from the sticky vinyl seat as soon as Mom turned off the car, the seat belts having left faint scarlet imprints on our skin. A feral smell spilled out as we opened the doors- the acrid odor of children that had been baking inside of a sun-drenched, stuffy car. Our dirty Keds crunched on the hot gravel as we tumbled into the wide-open space of the visitor’s center parking lot, which was empty aside from Mom’s Volvo. Our noses and ears were met with sensations distinct to the swampy marshlands that lay beyond the tall foliage surrounding the lot: high pitched cicadas, the dense aroma of wet rot and decay mixed with the freshness of new plants, the rustling of tiny creatures engaging in the eternal tango of predator and prey. Sunbeams reflected off the car’s silver paint and grew into blinding flares; the sun itself seemingly wanted to be another player in this unfolding melodrama.
My sister was still crying fat, fake crocodile tears in an attempt to get me into trouble. We had been fighting the good part of the morning, interspersed with quiet periods as we fed our inner bookworms or departed into our vivid imaginations. I had also spent some time listlessly sprawled out on the motel bed, the side of my face pressed into the floral polyester bedspread that smelled faintly of cigarettes, my finger tracing the diamond pattern embroidered into the fabric. While my body couldn’t escape, I had gotten into the habit of letting my mind go where it wanted whenever fear activated the oh-so-familiar cycle of fight/flight/freeze/fold.
Mom had been on the motel room’s rotary phone for hours, leaving stormy messages on the family’s answering machine. It veered into verbal abuse tennis with Dad when he finally caved and answered- the man who was physically absent half of the time and the other half lost in cans of Coors Light. He used to laugh and say that the silver bullet was better than a real one to his head.
We knew that once mom hung up after this seemingly never-ending row, her emotional tsunami would be turned full force onto us. So we did what we could to escape the present moment, and that day had been full of our usual coping mechanism: silent fighting consisting of full-throttle kicks and hits and bites without noise, like a choreographed ballet without an orchestra.
But to our surprise, after Mom hung up the phone she turned to us and said, “Let’s go” as she wiped tears from her blotched, puffy face. My sister and I had already started our familiar dance, though, and it carried over through the car ride and into the parking lot that day. As we walked to the ramshackle visitor’s cabin, Mom wheeled around just as I was reaching over to poke my sister, whose tongue was still sticking out at me. “ENOUGH!”, she roared. And we froze for what felt like eternity, wishing above all we could disappear into the thickets of bushes and forest of trees surrounding the lot.
We followed Mom as silently as we could across the gravel rocks until our feet landed on the dirt path that led into the Everglades, our animosity now turned into a kinship in punishment. We tried hard to stifle giggles as our tiptoes became exaggerated, silly gestures of “staying quiet.” The sounds of rustling leaves and busy wildlife filled the air as we walked down the trail, two children on either side of their mother, a canopy of dry green above us and a tunnel of lush green around us. I glanced surreptitiously at my sister behind Mom’s back when suddenly I felt my mother’s right hand grab my left, hers strong and sinewy from years of piano playing. She had never touched me in this way before, as any physical contact was usually powered by anger. This was pure maternal energy coursing through her body, down through her arm into our clasped hands, like lighting ripping through a tree and into the ground. I looked up at her face. It was frozen into an odd twist of sheer wonder and fear like she had gazed upon Medusa herself. I pivoted to see what had turned my mother into electrified stone, and there, there, there before us She stood, directly in our path, ten feet away, primordial God carried out of her on her heavy breath, her brute body motionless aside from minutely rippling muscles under her skin, the animal smell hitting me full force. A panther, so close I could see each bristling whisker and the gnats her tail effortlessly flicked away. She was looking straight at me, and my eyes locked with the dark sagacious liquid of hers.
Everything around me avalanched away in that fragile, exhilarating moment when death took a seat at the table. I was carried across boundless time and space. At once I was at the beginning of the earth when it burst into existence and at its end when it’s just another dark speck in this limitless void, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The panther and I were tangled together within this transcendent sliver of space between life and death that had no room for fear. It was then that I felt her maternal energy pour into me- a moment, an eternity, a mother recognizing a child beyond the limitations of species and form.
Abruptly, she swung her head straight and lumbered away into the thick bushes, moving step by step towards the end of another day, unencumbered by the things of humans. But I understood in every cell of my being that we had known each other across the stretch of eons, and would find each other again, mother and lost child, as it was meant to be.
And we did a few months later, though she in a different form.
The beach was barren that day, a long crescent of shoreline cut into the earth and rock by millennia of lapping waves and winds carried across the seas from distant lands. The warm sand was familiar under my bare feet; I had found the stratum that was my favorite- dry and crunchy on top as I stepped on it, but wet enough to slightly compress under my weight. I made shallow footsteps as I hunted for shark’s teeth and seashells. The tide was coming in, and it began to graze my ankles with seafoam. The salt made my skin itch; but I was made for the sea, and happily played tag with the lapping waves. The sun had started its descent, putting on a show worthy of the marquis at the Moulin Rouge- it had all the reds and oranges and yellows of can-can skirts flying every which way. My mom, my sister, and I each carried a brightly colored pail. Mine was the color of daffodils, and I imagined it was a thurible dispensing sunshine and seawater instead of holy smoke as I swung it back and forth.
The other families had already made their way back to their rental properties, sun-drenched, happily exhausted, ready for dinner and bathtime. Our dad had stayed in that day, choosing golf on TV and a case of Budweiser over us, and we dragged our toes in the sand to delay what we knew awaited us upon our return. Leaving the beach meant shedding the joy and innocence of my ten-year-old self; the armor I had to wear at home had already grown too heavy for me, and sadness filled my body- it wanted to stay free and light in the safety of nature.
I was etching my name into the sand with my big toe when my sister let out a jubilant cry. “Dolphins!” There, close to shore, three of them swam, jumping out in an arc, one after the other, back and forth, a synchronized swim that would make Esther Williams proud. We were precocious bookworm children, though, and could not simply enjoy the show. “Mama, doesn’t this mean danger?” She turned to look at me and opened her mouth. Before words could answer, her eyes replied. They gazed at something above and beyond my head with animalistic horror and awe.
“RUN!”, but her scream was stifled into a quiet plea as the sandstorm engulfed us, like a blanket snuffing out a fire. First went my hearing, then my sight, the only sounds were the harrowing shrieks of the wind, the only thing visible was the ferocious cloud of sand that defied rational thought. A black box dropped down around me, no light, only pain and abject fear as the sand beat against my body, my eyes, my ears. I could not scream, for I would choke on the blowing sand. Disoriented and directionless in this extreme act of God or nature, I took my mom’s directive and ran to wherever my feet would take me.
I suddenly found myself submerged in water, as I had driven myself directly into the turbulent sea, the waves throwing my tiny body as easily as my lab mutt would her ragdoll toy. I bobbed up into the air out of the water, then under, then tumbled in the waves, never able to right myself, gasping, drowning, not knowing which way was up, down, sideways.
“My pail.” The irrational thought of a dying person crossed my mind, and my heart broke for the lost seashells and shark’s teeth I had worked so hard and so lovingly to find. And then, another thought appeared in the space cleared away by primal fear. It was the voice of my kind-hearted Granddaddy- “Relax. Don’t fight it.” This was the great lesson in humility I had been taught over and over growing up outdoors in the South. Days were spent by and in rivers, lakes, oceans, those living bodies of water that had all power. So I became motionless and loose. I let my body drop beneath the tempest above and into the still, quiet part of the ocean below.
It was then that memories began to rise into the space that only happens in those precious heartbeats between life and death. I flowed backward through boundless time, to the beginning when I was nothing but a wild being comprised of stardust and liquid, and remembered:
floating in water for my first 9 months, in the warm home of the womb that carried and nurtured me, the muted notes of Beethoven and Rachmaninoff entering my liquid chamber as my mom practiced piano;
into the world and being gently dropped into the YMCA pool as a baby, learning how to swim before I could walk, my grandmother helping me to understand my relationship to water with firm but gentle hands;
falling into a lily pond as a toddler and opening my eyes to see tadpoles and goldfish swim past me between the reeds, fearless and happy before my granddaddy pulled me out by my leg;
learning about my own impermanence at age 8 as I stood waist-deep in the mighty Savannah River, my arms extended and my palms facedown on the surface of the ever-changing water as it flowed past me;
the experience time and again of stepping into and sinking within bodies of water with humble deference to their omnipotence, all of them the same but all unique. In that openness to them the osmosis of elements would begin, the transference of energy between the water and me until there was only the one, time and time over.
It was then, in that moment of drowning- of initial resistance that gave way to the calm of impermanence- that the knowing flooded back. I surrendered into the great womb of the sea and let it hold me until it carried me to land, just as it had the first creatures to make that incredible transition- a birthing into a life beyond the water. I let the ocean mother me, as water always had. As I lay beached on the sand, coughing, my body drained and torn apart, I turned over to look up into the sky which was now dark, clear, and full of stars. The heavy summer moon illuminated the earth as it had for thousands of nights across thousands of years.
As I was once again held in the space of mother nature, I suddenly remembered, I understood, deep within the ocean inside of me, my own inherent wildness.
