The Developing

It’s quiet, beneath. The laughter and joyous shouting of the crowd above is muted by the water rushing in my ears. It’s dark, too, even though I’m only a few feet below the surface, my toes skimming the sand beneath me as a wave surges over my head. A few seconds of stillness and peace.

When my head breaches the surface, there is once again sunlight and noise, but the peaceful feeling sticks to my soul like rubber cement. I float on my back, staring at the pale, cloudless sky. I am cradled and rocked gently by the sea. I’m so engrossed in my reverie that I bump a neighboring boogie board with my shoulder. I touch down again, feeling the buoyancy of the water, and I think about how lucky I am to live in an era where women’s swimming costumes are form fitting and lightweight. Mine happens to be rather modest—a pair of biker’s shorts that reach my knees and a full coverage top—but that’s because I hate applying sunscreen and am ghostly pale. I think about what it would be like to swim in a skirt. There was some book, or play, or something I read in high school about an overworked mother who walked out into the ocean and drowned herself. I wonder for a brief second if maybe she didn’t mean to commit suicide, but was just out in the ocean looking for peace.

As if on cue, my attention is drawn to my two-year-old daughter, who is careening unsteadily down the slope of the beach toward the water’s edge. My husband is loping after her, the eight-month-old clinging to his side. The older two are to my left, building a sandcastle. One. Two. Three. Four. The headcount I have done so many days and nights. All here and accounted for.

“Mommy’s swimming,” my husband cajoles our headstrong offspring, but she’ll have none of it. “It’s Mommy’s turn to swim, okay? We have to let Mommy have a turn, too…”

But our little one is now face down on the ground, screaming, rolling back and forth so that damp sand is forced through the tendrils of her wet pigtails and finds a home closer to her scalp.

Whether she is throwing a tantrum over not getting what she wants, or whether she just tripped on her journey, is unclear. I sigh.

“I’m coming!” I call. “I was done anyway; I was just heading back in.”

I splash forward toward the shore until I am within mothering range, then scoop up my daughter and plant a kiss on her cheek. She snuggles into my shoulder, one hand patting my arm, the other holding her thumb in her mouth.

As if on cue, my older children attack.

“I’m hungry!”

“I’m hot!”

“I want Italian Ice!”

“I want a new bucket, this one’s all sandy.”

“The water in the bottle is warm, why don’t you ever pack cold water?”

“That mean kid broke my sandcastle and I spent forever building it and now it’s just ruined, and he didn’t even say sorry…”

The noise crashes over me like an entirely different kind of wave. The baby, noticing my presence for the first time, reaches both hands toward me and wails.

“Time to pack up!” I announce.

There is mutiny among my crew.

Coming home from the beach, even from just a day trip, is always an ordeal. The drive is almost an hour long. Everyone is hungry. The baby cries the entire time. The older kids whine that they can’t hear their audiobook, because of the crying. I try to distract myself by Googling “high school English book mom commits suicide,” and learn the snippet I was remembering earlier was from The Awakening by Kate Chopin. When we pull into the drive, it’s already past everyone’s bedtime. Everyone needs a bath. The car floor is carpeted with sand and pulverized Goldfish crackers.

My husband and I take shifts, one of us shuttling kids in and out of the bathtub, the other making over-easy eggs and toast and peeling mandarin oranges as quickly as humanly possible. Then the children are put into pajamas, some more willingly than others, and my husband and I again divide and conquer to read stories, two in the girls’ room, one in the boys’. I take the baby into the walk-in closet, where we keep his crib, nurse him, then sway back and forth in the dark, singing softly until I feel his head rest against my shoulder and the tension of awareness leave his little body. I lay him down and sneak speedily out the door. The countdown is on—I have only three hours until he’ll inevitably wake up bellowing to be fed once again.

I thump, heavily, down the stairs. My husband is in his office, working, as he is most nights. I am alone, but the feeling could not be more different from my solitary sojourn in the Atlantic this afternoon. My route to the kitchen is thwarted by a hamper filled with water bottles, food wrappers, and bottles of sunscreen. The kitchen sink is full of crusty dishes from this morning’s breakfast. The open bathroom door assaults me with a view of wet swim suits and towels, tossed onto the floor, as my own mother would say, “for the fairies to pick up.” The dining room floor needs mopped, desperately.

I pick up my phone, scrolling for a good podcast that will give me the motivation I need to tackle at least some of the mess before me.

But then, I pause.

I slip into my flip flops and walk quietly out the front door instead.

The brilliant pastel sky has transformed in a few hectic hours to a deep black, lit only by a rotund moon and a sprinkling of stars that remind me of my oldest child’s freckles. It is quiet out—all the neighborhood kids are in bed and all the teenagers and adults are enjoying screen time, or else they’re mustering their last ounces of energy in order to return the house to a state of livability before the next day.

I begin to walk down the sidewalk, repeating the mantra, “I love my family. I love my kids. This is what I’ve always wanted.” But, unbidden, I imagine my walk down the sidewalk as Edna’s slow walk into the sea. What would happen if I just kept walking and never came back?

I sink down on the bench at the end of the sidewalk, looking back toward the row of houses all indistinguishable to the one I live in. Of course, I would never just run away, not really. Because now that they’re asleep, and the night is quiet and still, all I can think about is how adorable they are. That sandy little hand on my arm. How they fight to sit next to me at dinner—so very obnoxious, but all the same, intoxicating. I’d never been fought over before. I was always the girl sitting off to the side at the dance, never the one coveted. But here I am, thirty years old, and so very popular with the next generation.

It’s just exhausting being loved and wanted and needed this much. Especially during the summer, when there are no other adults in the lives of my children to bear the weight of their admiration and curiosity and devotion. It’s a stifling kind of love, so very greedy. It sucks your essence right out of you and only reciprocates rarely and usually in a grand sort of way—a huge pronouncement, “I love you!” followed only minutes later by a spiteful declaration of hatred because you said you wouldn’t be serving Tootsie Roll Pops for breakfast.

I breathe in, I breathe out. I close my eyes and try to recapture that ultimate tranquility I found in the ocean, alone, un-needed, free to float and to dream and to be. It doesn’t work.

I look up at the sky, at the countless stars above. Thinking of the vastness of the universe always reminds me of my own insignificant smallness, in the grand scheme of things. I imagine the Almighty, His view teeming with humans, and how many times magnification he would have to use to zoom in on me, sitting on this bench, looking up at the sky. I feel so tiny, a speck on the surface of the Earth who will never change its trajectory or amount to anything.

And yet, to my children I loom larger than life. My approval, my attention, my affection means everything to them. My example is studied and followed meticulously; my own faults replicated flawlessly in their behavior. What would happen if I just kept walking and never came back? Well, it would certainly change the world of the four little guys in the house at 35 Nile Street.

I am simultaneously nobody and everybody. I am a meaningless human, whose existence is fleeting and unimportant, and I am the most meaningful person on the planet. It’s hard to feel both, it’s heavy and it’s empty at the same time. It’s both overwhelming and disappointing. It’s humbling, and it’s discouraging.

My watch beeps the hour, and I feel the pull back home. There is laundry to be loaded and books to be picked up and a car to vacuum. Innumerable, never-ending chores, like the stars in the sky. I lower my head and start to laugh as I notice the edge of my swim shorts peeking out under my sundress cover-up. The suit is dry now, and I’m grateful that it’s so thin I hardly notice it, even if that does mean that I bathed four bodies tonight but neglected to clean my own.

The sidewalk extends past the bench, and I look down it, but without longing, turn back toward the identical row of houses on Nile Street. As I walk, I contemplate this newly felt contradiction, trying to find the middle ground between being a dot of dust and a Goddess. I don’t know that I ever will find that comfortable spot, but I do know this:

I am not Awakening. I am, merely, Developing.