A Beach
I imagine every pregnant person turning the words over and over again, trying to make sense of the puzzle unfolding inside them.
I am the place someone is from.
If when we die we go back to where we came from, mothers are the afterlife.
Is death an arrival in another womb?
What did this heartbeat leave behind to be here in me?
It will leave me behind to begin breathing air. Before that it was all water and darkness.
With each pregnancy come these quiet poems, a life trying to understand what it means to also carry life. We are each a result of these poems, there are words of wonder wrapped around each of us. It dries off, is wiped away. With blankets and time and hands which reach into the void and bring us here.
But what happens to all that wonder we inspire in utero? There is some magic we are born with, some perfection our parents seem to unanimously acknowledge when we arrive. “I remember the first moment I saw you” they reminisce, often with a similar romance and nostalgia. But at some point we transform from being the fruit of the womb into something more human and disappointing. What I see behind the smiles of people who tell me to “enjoy it while it lasts” because it all “goes so fast” is a fall from grace. When babies become people with their own will. When as parents giving everything of yourself still isn’t enough for them.
As I write this, there is a new baby dancing around making his little hands and feet known to me through a flurry of movements I can’t visualize but can feel distinctly between my hip bones. He is exploring and swimming. To him I am more a place than a person. Perhaps all mothers are just a place to leave, or a place to rest.
I realized I was such a place when my son landed on my chest. Love ringing in my mind so loud it crowded out all the bleeding and sewing up and beeping of the hospital. It was an honor to be this landing pad for him. It was fine to be a place to that could be left behind, just to see him arrive earthside.
I imagine I must have come to shore in a similar way. That my mother held her hand above me when I swam around in her. That when she held me for the first time and she watched me wade into personhood that the love swelled in her as it has in me. And yet I cannot fathom her love,it’s just always been there.
She was love itself, was the universe. And then she, like all mothers, and at some point like all beaches, became a place to leave.
Becoming a place, losing my personhood when my son was born, in that room I can’t forget, taught me that we are all perfect when we are born, and that there is no need to aspire to be anyone but fully ourselves. That everywhere we go we are accepted as we are by the world. A love that is at once fierce and indifferent.
The part of me that is a place and not a person reassures me that my varicose veins are fine, that my pregnancy is beautiful, that I am an image of life and joy itself. That my natural hair color is the right mix of sunlight and shadows, that my body in its untouched and natural state is all I will ever need to seduce and enchant my husband, or any other partner I should ever desire.
Growing up and leaving my mother, finally, and entering into my own skin and family is like a molting. I am arriving and leaving, ending up where I started. A mother leaving her mother. Preparing for a life of sons leaving her for their own lives, towards their own voices and selves. It will be extraordinarily hard to let them go, and I will have no choice but to love them every minute of it and to stay behind.
A beach with no people on it anymore is still a beautiful place.