Wave

It’s a long time that I’ve loved you. Never, never go away.

– “Love Song of the Little Bear”, Margaret Wise Brown

An ash leaf drifts on the surface of the water, vermilion and thin, as the sand sucks slowly at my ankles. The bay’s chill embrace beckons with curling fingers, veins of sand running rigid beneath the rippling wet glass. The waves pass, begging, drawing my skin taunt and open as my daughter breathes cloudless dreams, her chest rising and falling like a song against my breast. The light fractures and webs against the water like neural architecture, folding and growing and shimmering. The sun has carved a door of light across the surface of the water, and it follows me as I walk, glistening. Beckoning.

I want to walk across the water, towards that door of light. I want to walk into the sun’s embrace and let the waves consume me.

Four years ago, I followed Lizzy as she walked this beach, this sand, these waves. I still follow her, tracing her steps, waiting for her to look back at me with the smile that will forever guide my dreams. Lizzy walked through that door of light on the surface of the water. Jesus said to her, “Be not afraid,” and Lizzy said, “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water,” and Jesus said, “Come,” but unlike Simon Peter, Lizzy walked on the surface of the waves and did not sink for lack of faith.

Is this what it means to be woman? To be filled and then emptied again and again until so much of you has gone forth in the life you’ve pushed forth–in the love you’ve bled from your core–that you are both lost and found to yourself, eternally? Will wave after wave of love and grief and need continue to fill me and draw back, only to return again, drawing me further out of myself, towards that door of light, teaching me to walk on the water?

Always, I have let the waves take me under and consume me. Filling, retreating, returning, bursting forth and bringing from me life that had never existed before and will never exist again. To be woman–to be mother–is to weather these waves, to allow the tide to carve and take you with its swells, to learn to become less and less a creature of the land as you feel your body move, open, and learn a new type of breath.

Lately, Cecilia has been saying to me, “Never, never go away,” and I cannot tell her that I am already lost to myself and found in the space of a week, an hour, a breath. I cannot yet explain to her the waves that will come and fill and then empty her as she becomes a woman–the self that will rise and fall with the tide–the grief and joy and need that will burst like magma across her brain and skin and lungs. I cannot tell her that I still need her as desperately as she needs me, that my need for her continues to drive and define me, blinding my eyes, growing like wings, cutting like gills.

To be mother is to want and to give eternally, to be filled and emptied and endure the torment and the silence. To wait, to become and to stand when all you feel you can manage is to crawl. To have blood and milk and desire flow forth from you in an endless and melting oblation. To prostrate yourself on that altar of sand again and again and feel yourself slipping away with it, grain by grain. And when the tide recedes, the wind rustles the pines, and the sun carves a door of light across the surface of the water, then it means to whisper, “Yes . . . yes . . . yes,” and stand without sinking.