Mama Brain

I was a regular mother pack mule that afternoon, carrying a beach bag stuffed full of sand toys over my right shoulder. Across my chest, I criss-crossed the straps for a lawn chair and a boogie board. A mini cooler leaking melted ice weighed down my left shoulder. Later, I would blame these things as reasons for my distraction.

My children trailed behind me voicing various complaints.

“Mama, why does Zack get the green beach towel? I wanted it!”

“Mama, why does Jamie get the purple popsicle?”

Jamie’s purple popsicle was melting even as she furiously licked it. Splattered drops of purple followed us, marking a trail from the beach sand on the way to our car.

“Mama, I have to pee!” Zack cried out.

I rolled my eyes and glanced around at the surrounding houses lining the path to our car. “That’s what the ocean is for, bud! The bathroom is very far away. And you can’t pee right here in someone’s neighborhood.” Especially an upscale neighborhood with owners paying millions for beachfront views.

“I have to pee NOOOOOW! I have to pee NOOOOOW!”

I spotted a tree nearby to the left of the sidewalk. Annoyed and resigned, I threw down the bags from my shoulders but left the straps across my chest, picked Zack up, and hid us behind the tree. It was sitting on the edge of someone’s intricately manicured lawn, which was terribly embarrassing, but it was on the side of the lawn near a back gate and possibly more respectable than letting my three-year-old son strip his pants down to pee right in the driveway of a multi-million dollar house.

“Tinkle, tinkle,” Zack sang.

After he finished his urgent business, I had to force the top button of his pants to refasten. The top button always seemed to be too big for the hole on those pants. I grabbed his little hand and we walked back to the sidewalk to pick up our bags.

“Jamie, baby, maybe you can carry the large sand pail…” I began to say as we walked back. I paused. “Jamie?”

Jamie was nowhere to be seen. I felt the panic rise in my throat but I told myself that she was just playing a game of hide and seek.

“Oh, Jamie,” I crooned it playfully at first, as if I were the It-Monster coming to get her. “Where can you be?”

No response. I tried again. Nothing.

“Jamie!” I yelled sternly, quickly impatient in the heat of the afternoon. “You come out right this instant! I’m going to count to three, and if you’re not out here, you are going to lose your special doll for a week!”

Jamie was five and loved her stuffed doll that her grandmother had sewn for her on her fourth birthday. She dressed the doll in a cream and red dress and named her Sophie. Sophie came everywhere with us, even to the beach.

I firmly counted, “One…two…three!”

Jamie did not come out of hiding. Now I lifted the straps of the boogie board and lawn chair off my chest and set them on the ground next to our bags. I crouched behind several nearby bushes but still did not see her.

“Jamie, come out now!”

Gripping Zack’s little hand in mine, I began to follow the splatter of purple popsicle dots on the ground back toward the beach. And there, near the line where sand met asphalt, lay a half-eaten popsicle on the ground, its purple slushiness pooling around the wooden stick.

“Jamie?” This time I whispered it. Now frantic, I pulled Zack along to the sand and squinted, attempting to make Jamie out amongst the sea of people dotting the shore. How long had I been with Zack behind the tree? Five minutes? Six? She wouldn’t have swum into the water alone, right? Guilt swelled up in my chest and lodged itself in my throat. For a moment, I could not breathe. Images flashed in my mind of her swirling under dark salt water out with the tide. I banned the image.

Maybe she went back to the place where she built her sandcastle. Hustling now, I slung Zack onto my hip and ran to the spot where we had been swimming all day, but a passerby had already smashed Jamie’s sandcastle. Chunks of it disintegrated into the ocean. I spotted a couple sunbathing on a towel, oblivious to my panic.

“Hey, have you seen a little girl?” I called out. “Brown hair? About five? She had on a yellow swimsuit.”

They shook their heads. I wasn’t sure where to go next at that point. Should I run to the car and check to see if she went on ahead? Or should I ask around at the beach? Every second gone was a second she could be moving farther away from me.

Now I was truly frightened. What would I do if I couldn’t find her?

Slinging Zack onto my hip, I ran to the nearest lifeguard station. Station #5. A muscled young guy clad in red shorts and hipster sunglasses sat back on his chair soaking in the sun.

“Excuse me!” I nearly shouted, startling him. “I’m looking for my daughter, Jamie! Brown hair, age five. She had on a yellow swimsuit.”

“Uh…” he took off his sunglasses and squinted at me, standing. “When did you last see her?”

“About fifteen minutes ago. We were walking to our car and I had to take my son to...to pee…and I turned around and she was gone.”

“Can she swim?” Now he looked concerned.

“Yes, but mostly in pools. She just jumps in the waves here. I’m not sure that she would actually go in. Can you keep a lookout for her? I’m going to check my car.”

“Yeah, of course,” he agreed. He grabbed binoculars sitting on his white chair and brought them to his eyes. “I’ll start looking for her and radio the other stations. Leave me your number so I can call you.”

I rattled off my number and he entered it into his phone. Then, with Zack on my hip, I took off over uneven, hot sand toward my car, angry with how difficult sand can be to run on and angry with myself for taking Zack to pee in someone’s yard and angry with Zack for needing to pee and angry with those damn people at the beach who have not seen my girl in a bright yellow swimsuit.

“Jamie!” I bellowed as my eyes roved over the beach and then the street. “Jamie! Jamie!”

I checked near my car but Jamie was not there. Maybe she thought we parked somewhere else? She was only five after all and was barely paying attention when we arrived. She had been too excited to show Sophie a sandcastle. I slammed on the hood of my car in anxiety. Would she have talked to a stranger? I would not let myself think of that alternative for her sudden disappearance. I would not.

“Mama,” Zack whispered. “Mama, you okay?”

I was turning red. I was about to cry. “Zackie, where could Jamie be?”

“Side,” he said.

“The side of what?” I looked down at my three-year-old, his eyebrows furrowed in concern.

He repeated, "Side."

Frustrated, I adjusted him to my other hip and traced my steps back to the house where we had hidden behind the tree. Maybe Jamie went back there?

But no, she was not there. The pile of our sand toys, boogie board, and cooler lay in a heaping mess in the middle of the sidewalk. I reached for my phone in the back pocket of my shorts.

“Zackie, I need to put you down for second,” I said gently, placing him on the ground. “I need to call the police to help me find Jamie.”

“But mama,” he protested. “SIDE! Side, side!”

I hesitated.

“Side! By dino.”

Dino? My mind raced through their stack of sand toys to pull up a mental image of a four-inch plastic dinosaur, but then it dawned on me. Zack was saying slide, not side! The dinosaur was a large climbing toy right next to the slide at a playground next to the pier. Had Jamie gone to the beach playground?

I swung Zack into my arms and pumped my legs as if I were an athletic runner in the Olympics, and not a graying, overwhelmed mother melting down under the sun’s scrutinizing heat. The playground was piled with children on swings, hanging upside down from monkey bars, and climbing on the big green dinosaur. My eyes were looking only for yellow.

And then I saw her.

Hidden under the shade of the slide, I saw Jamie making a sandcastle with Sophie sitting up on the sand beside her. Breath filled my lungs.

“Jamie!” I screamed, surprising other parents.

Jamie looked up and made eye contact with me. She waved innocently and called out, “Hi, mama! Say hi to Sophie!”

I was in tears. I was trembling there in the scorching sun as the raging emotions of hsyteria, shame, and relief flooded through me. Zack and I ran up to Jamie, Zack as calm as if he had known she was there under the slide all along. I swooped Jamie into my embrace and kissed her sweaty brunette head. I scolded her then and told her tales of children being kidnapped or swept away by beach waves. I warned her of all the devastating consequences of leaving her mother’s side without permission. I threatened to take Sophie if she ever wandered off again.

“But mama,” Jamie interrupted me. “You told me to come to the park.”

“I…what?”

“When you said you had to take Zack potty, I asked if I could go to the park soon, and you said yeah.”

“No, I did not say-” I paused and reflected. I think I had said “yeah” to something, but it was an automatic, distracted response. And even if the question had registered with me, I certainly would not have interpreted that going to the park soon meant now. I laughed then, surprised, and secured my children’s hands in mine.

Jamie looked up at me. “Mama, I want another popsicle.”

“Me, too, baby. We all get another popsicle today!” I beamed a true smile at her.

This was motherhood. A never-ending dance between smiles and guilt, mistakes and redemption, tuning out and being present.