A Love Story: Remembering What Will Always Be

The picnic table was wet from a slow and steady rain, but we ate our dinner there anyway: cold fried chicken and coleslaw on paper plates. The campground was full; our tent site, though booked at the last minute, was the best in the park, surrounded as it was by wetland marsh alive with bird call and insect song. At night, animals screamed from somewhere among the tall grass.
“You know you love camping, if you have fun even when it’s raining,” I said.
I was attempting to start a fire with wet wood and lighter fluid. The boys were only half listening. They like camping, and they don’t like camping. It reminds them of something that’s missing. Someone who isn’t here; a life we don’t have. It does the same for me, yet I do it anyway. I persist in the planning and packing and set-up against a tide of emotion, because I refuse to be swept away from this simple pleasure. I refuse for it to be lost to my children.
We’re not allowed fireworks at the state park. It’s too wet for them anyhow. A storm is moving across the coast, stirring the brackish water along the inlet into a cauldron and kicking up the surf along the beach where we’re staying. The gulf is swollen and agitated under a sky muted by mist and low-lying clouds.
The boys run into the cold waves, which surprises me. It’s New Year’s Eve, and the ocean is still swimmable. I sink into the sand with my camera in my lap, watching them carefully. Every splash, every move into deeper water. The waves, twice their size, and stronger than me. I don’t look away. Ever.
We walk the camp loop, the beach boardwalk. My oldest son rides his bike. His younger brother refuses, choosing instead to step defiantly into each puddle, lip jutted out, head hung.
I walk alongside them, behind them. Sometimes hanging back so I can watch them.
I take in the sight of them. These are my boys. I feel this fact throughout my body like it’s the breath of who I am. It moves in me. The energy of it is my life force.
My boys vacillate between happy, carefree kids, and darkness. Within them is something I can’t get at, or make better.
Earlier at dinner, sitting in a row of three at the picnic table, my oldest son said in his most snarky tone, “I bet Dad is spending New Year’s with his girlfriend.”
And it’s true. Their father and I are divorced. Just a few days earlier, my son broke into tears talking about the woman who was suddenly overnighting at Daddy’s and spending time with them when all he wanted was to have his Dad to himself.
I knew about her long before that moment, just as I knew about the other women.
We line our camp chairs around the smoldering fire pit. Everything is soaked, but I manage to stoke enough flame to roast marsh mellows. We smoosh them with chunks of milk chocolate between graham crackers and feast.
The sun sets, and with clouds blocking moon and starlight, it is profoundly dark. We take our flashlights and walk the beach. The boys stay close to me. Curious yet unsure, they run ahead, and then turn back.
We find a ghost crab that isn’t ghostly. It doesn’t dart for cover, or disappear into a hole. We squat around it, creating a circle of light in which to observe its unusual stillness. We commune with the crab, enjoying a silent conversation of noticing between us until there is nothing more to say.
I ask the boys to turn off their flashlights for a moment, and we stand in the black night, listening to the surf and wind shushing the beach. It’s raining softly, but we don’t mind. It’s just part of being right here, right now, camping on the north Florida coast where weather blows in and out, changing in a moment, keeping you guessing.
Their emotions come in the same way. I try to stand strong, to witness their grief, but I falter. I more than falter. I am run over, laid out, flattened.
The miracle of motherhood is that somehow I’m always able to get back up and be there for my children. I don’t know how, or sometimes that I’m even back on my feet, but there I am stroking their heads, kissing their soft cheeks, cooking their dinner, laughing at their jokes, so full of feeling that it spills out of me and into the world, like milk from a nursing mother.
Parenting is exhausting even when your children aren’t heartbroken. Parents commiserate, drink another glass of wine, or complain on Facebook. We fantasize about getting a real break, about being alone. Finally. For once!
On this trip, I realize that I feel the opposite, and not just because I have time without them, when they’re with their Dad. The hardship and pain of divorce is drawing us closer. The shadow umbilical is pulsing and growing stronger under the pressure of our changed lives.
These two small boys are mine, and my relationships with them will always be.
Unlike romantic relationships that may come and go, my relationships with my boys are really and truly forever. We will always belong to each other.
When you’re grieving a marriage and the family life that went with it, it can seem like replacing it is the answer. People encourage you to date, to fall in love, and to build a new life with a new person.
There’s a cultural imperative that we all participate in the social construct of romance and marriage. When you’re not doing so, it freaks people out. Are you dating, they ask? Don’t worry, you’ll find someone, friends say, though I’m not worried. I’m actually happy being single. I actually like spending time alone with my children. I feel no urge to rush away from them into anything else.
After we change into warm, dry clothes the boys pile into the tent, which is the size of a small cabin. It’s a family tent, and we three are a family. At least I think so. When I refer to us this way, the boys correct me. “We aren’t a family without Daddy,” they say.
I’ve explained how families come is all shapes and sizes, and that while things have changed, we are still a family. They don’t buy it.
Family.
A term now loaded, like a gun. To utter it is to inflict injury.
The boys wrestle on the air mattress and sleeping bags while I clean up camp for the night. I sit for a moment alone by the fire, but they get louder, and louder, break into bickering and then fighting.
I join them in the tent. We snuggle up on the mattress, me in the middle and each of them nestled under an arm and I tell them a story about a mother and her two brave sons, and how they face the source of scary sounds found in the night. They brace themselves in suspense at what the scary thing is, and whether or not the boys will survive.
I pull them close, allowing the tension to build as the boys in the story slowly find their way through the marsh, moving closer and closer to the sound, the scream, which I demonstrate, is high-pitched and eerie. They want me to stop and to not stop all at once. Teeth clench, eyes widen, and then it’s revealed that the scary thing is a small, baby bird.
And the boys relax, relieved that their mother didn’t terrify them with an awful ending. They fall asleep pressed against me, but I lie awake listening to the rain, the animals, other campers coming and going. In the morning, I don’t know if I slept at all.
Is there a right way to do this? There are moments when I feel completely lost, and others where I’m so certain. I can anchor in the breath, in the solidity of my children. They are here. I am here. No matter what blows in, or how frightening the sight or sound, we are here, right here, right now.
Together, the boys and I pack up camp. It’s the first day of 2016, and I have no resolutions. I’m not hyped up on hope or weighed down by dread. I’m not focused on change, or improvements, or the fixing of life. Instead, in this moment, on this day, as I craftily fit our gear and supplies back into the car, wondering how I managed it the first time around, I’m present and watchful. What is this thing that’s happening in my life? Look at how it unfolds. One day, I’ll be able to reflect on this period as if watching a time-lapse video, seeing clearly how I went from a clenched bud to something soft and open. But now, as I stand in the middle of it, there is so much unknown.
And into that unknown I go.
I move forward aware of what has been lost, and what has been found as a result. In the relief of a brutal marriage, are my children and the opportunity to fully be with them. Buckled in their seats now, they dose off on the ride home surrounded by pillows and beach towels and toys. The car is packed solid, and we three are in it, tired, sandy, smelling of campfire, still sad and heartbroken in our particular ways, and together. Still together. Still in the field of endless potential. Still a mother and her sons.
