not done yet
Beginning of April. I pour myself a cuppa tea and my gaze alternates between the peace of my yard and the laptop screen featuring my utterly hacked website. The only solution being creation of a scratch new site feels daunting. I sit in a pool of wonder. Really? I’m 74 years old, my sweet hubby retires at year’s end and I’m website building? I breathe in/out, think about my work in the world. Which I adore. I breathe some more, feel my vertebrae stack one atop the next, unflinching pillar of support. I breathe in/out. I speak: NOT DONE YET.
I take another breath in and as this exhale releases, I imagine being totally done, the final out breath. Yes, that one. Wonder if I’ll be able to appreciate my last living moment. And perhaps speak: YES, DONE NOW. And with this thought, flash, I’m pulled back to May 31st 1996, my son’s 13thbirthday. Long anticipated Merced rafting trip planned in ritual celebration, marking this life milestone. A day that began in rushing water splendor, light glinting camaraderie, unbridled joy. A day that ended in heart-stopping transcendence.
All day we negotiate exhilarating rapid on rapid until day’s end when, in a split second, we hell hole into topsy turvy, horrified to find we are beneath the raft. Our saucer eyes lock as I keep repeating the mantra: hold on to the rope, hold on to the rope, hold on to the rope. My son and I, buoyed by life jackets, have a death grip on the rope. And then he is gone. I gulp in some air and then I am gone.
There is nothing but liquid turbulence tossing me hither and yon. No sense of up, down, sideways. I hold this precious breath as long as humanly possible. It burns in me until I commence to eek it out bit by bit. Gifting bubbles of oxygen to the water gods in a desperate exchange that they might receive this ultimate sacrifice and release me from bondage. The most conscious exhale of my life. Knowing in every cell the inevitable next: a gushy watery inhale.
And at that threshold moment, the world turns over. Something, someone, some force thrusts me to the sun and with an inhale gasp I break to the surface. In a split second, my son pops up beside me. Our wide eyes lock just in time to lose each other to the next set of whooshing rapids that feel like forever but really last only a few heartbeats. Everything about us locks again until we spot the emerald reeds flanking the shoreline. We make our way pulling on one slender stalk after the next until our feet slip onto solid ground and we flop upon the earth in a stupor, right next to each other, breathing in/out/in/out/in.
That night I do my best to unwind beside his warm slumber in the tiny two man tent. All I can hear is the river’s constant thrum right outside the tent flap and the rhythmic sound of his easy breathing. I am awake throughout the night gripped in the loop of my obsessive mind: what if my son had died and I had lived? Over and over until finally the darkness begins to turn luminous. His face is softly untroubled, curled as he is into the memory of a fetus.
As we honor the mothers among us, the mothers who came before us, the earth mother and as we feel the ways we mother ourselves we might consider a quote from East of Eden. It was Steinbeck who said that “perhaps it takes courage to raise children.” There is no perhaps about it for me. This just put an exclamation point on that thought. And also, by the way, I’m not done yet.
❤️Bella