Overalls That Were Too Big

His knees were certainly buckling a bit more than they should have been, trying to carry me out of the water.

But we did it nonetheless, him determinedly digging his feet into the wet sand, anchoring on with his toes to resist being pulled back into the foamy sea. I didn’t do much to help, other than laugh and wrap my then short arms around his neck tighter. Salty water dripped off us, gathering in droplets everywhere from the tips of our matching messy brown hair, to the strings of my bathing suit, and of course to our eyelashes, which were angled low to protect from the glaring sun. I shrieked and held on tighter as he hopped on one foot to try and get rid of some seaweed that had stuck to his ankle. The seaweed insistently stayed, but water ended up spraying from us, pelting the warm sand and leaving golden spots.

“Well, don’t drop her, Lucas.” Mom peeked out from behind her enormous hat that we constantly made fun of, lifting the brim with her freckled arm. I could see a sly smile growing on her lips.

“Very funny.” He pouted ironically and set me down. I plopped onto the sand innocently, thinking about how little did he know, I will ask him to carry me in again and again and again just as soon as he sits down. I giggled and tried to stifle the smile of a child with a "secret" plan.

And indeed, he carried me into and out of the water upwards of twenty times that day. We would go in, shrieking from the cold, and he tried to teach me how to swim, first holding me up under my stomach as my feet paddled furiously, and then teaching me to float on my back. His hand would just softly hold me up, insisting gently that I didn’t actually need his help at all, I just needed to learn to stay up. I enjoyed looking up like that- rotating and staring at the sky with water covering my ears made me feel like it was just us there, and like the world was rotating around us as its axis. But my childish impatience only tolerated those lessons briefly- I would immediately fall back into his arms and tell him everything that was on my mind. I told him how I was convinced the waves could talk to me, and about the mermaids and spirits I knew were swimming just below us, observing our feet dangling, pale and ghostly in the teal water. And my nonsensical stories seemed to be enough to justify him continuing to run back and forth, me in his arms.

 By the time we clambered into the car at the end of the day, towels wrapped around us and skin sticky and taut from the salt, he was completely and happily out of breath.

Parenthood fit my dad like a pair of overalls that were two sizes too big. Overalls that were clearly meant for someone older, certainly not a twenty-year-old kid with messy brown hair that surely couldn’t be a father yet. Like overalls where the legs were too long, dragging on the floor. Like overalls where the straps were floppy and loose, one hanging off the shoulder completely.

The long legs and droopy fabric caused my dad to trip and stumble sometimes as he navigated how to raise me. Like when he was left to dress me on his own, and I emerged in a backwards soccer jersey and bunched up socks. Or like the time he wanted to show me how to use the adult swings on the playground when I was much too young, and I ended up on the cement on my back, legs sticking up in front of my puffy jacket like an upturned turtle.

And yet these overalls, in all their dorky glory, had a certain charm to them as they hung awkwardly on my dad’s boyish shoulders. People on the street giggled amusedly as my dad raced my stroller down the block at supersonic speeds, forgetting perhaps that there was a baby in front of him, not a soccer ball. Shoppers at the grocery store stifled their laughter when they saw my dad yelping and pulling me out of the alcohol section where I had somehow lowered an entire bottle of bourbon into the stroller. (He then proceeded to whisper to me under his breath that that’s not the good kind anyways) And my mom got an amused glint in her eye when my dad asked “hypothetically, would you be mad if I let her climb that tree in the park today? No, no- listen, I think it’s a useful skill for a four-year-old…”

I think back now sometimes and feel like that glint in my mom’s eye was probably how she knew she was in love.

And finally, the overalls were obvious. Not right away- no one expected for Lucas Brown, fresh out of college, to be a dad so soon. And yet his friends couldn’t help but grin at the crazed shine that they saw in my dad’s eyes as he ran out of the hospital room, hair disheveled, yelling triumphantly, it’s a girl guys! It’s a girl! I have a girl! Do I need to buy parenting books or something? They just laughed, clapped him on the back and said, “We’ve lost him guys- he’s a father now.”

And I loved every bit of him stumbling through the brambles of being a dad for the first time. It felt as if we were filling out our adult molds together, just at different stages. As Mom would point out, dad himself was still a kid. And so it seemed that we were in it together- my stupid mistakes were his stupid mistakes, his humor blended with mine, and my dumb questions weren’t dumb to him at all.

One of those questions was this one. I used to ask him whether I’d be able to see myself growing, even if I stood still and stared at the ceiling as it got closer. He said no, because the changes are so minute every day that I wouldn’t be able to notice them even as time passed. Every day seems the same until you look back and realize that the pencil marking on the wall that used to be your height is now at neck level.

And so it went. Every day he was there, until he wasn’t. Until I was all grown up and the pencil mark was at waist level. Until suddenly I was the one trying to raise a clumsy little boy that had our features, finally making me see what everyone was saying when they said me and my dad looked alike. Raising my boy was scary as hell to figure out, but I tried to remember that hey, I turned out all right.

           I had long moved away into another town, but on some nights that my husband was home to watch the child, I’d take a drive.

           The good thing about being an adult, despite the crippling fear that your happiest days are over, is that no one will yell at you if you go to the beach at night. And another good thing is that I was already taught how to swim.

           And so I’d float in the water on those rare nights, turning slowly and looking up at the stars that used to be the glaring sun. I’d wonder if he was looking back at me.

           And maybe he was, because I could swear I could still feel his hand under my back, and hear his voice saying that I had learned, I could float without him now.