low tide

I'm not sure if it's true, but for all the time I have spent by the ocean, I believe I've never been alone on a beach. I don't mean without anyone; I mean without my anyones. 

I've been a mom for a long time. I had a baby at seventeen. More precisely, I delivered a baby alone in a bathroom, seventeen days after my seventeenth birthday. 

I went from being someone's child to someone's mother in the blink of an eye. 

That child will turn thirty-two next month. I don't talk about it anymore. In comparison to her and her life, the events of her birth have faded. The memory is like a giant ship on the horizon bleached into a ghostly pastel by the sun's brightness. 

And it's hard to go back because only the thinnest line in the circumstances separated us from being who we are now and a tragic curiosity. Or, I should say the thinnest of linens; what most likely saved my child's life was me wrapping her in a damp, cold towel because I was in such severe shock I was too numb to register any physical sensations. 

You don't have to believe my version. The ER staff certainly didn't. They suspected I might have been attempting an abortion and called the police, who called my parents. That was giving far too much credit to a child who didn't even fully understand she was pregnant or what that might mean: a dangerous mix of religion, naivete, lack of access to sex education, and too many episodes of Days of Our Lives.

What I did to keep from realizing how dangerous a spot I was in was to hide under a smothering blanket of words. Beneath the cover of the old radio programs and stories that I played in my room on a tape deck to block out my own thoughts. Programs like the Tuesday Club Murders, Orson Wells, and Mystery Theater. My mind and body were the battlefields, silence was the enemy, and my weapon was denial by absolute distraction. But you can't distract biology. 

I was told "it" could all be covered up, and I could go on as if nothing had happened. She could go to a good home, and I could go back to being me. My body knew that wasn't true. I didn't know what she was, but I knew I couldn't let her go without finding out. 

I seemed an unlikely candidate for early motherhood. I was hoyden wearing boys' Levis and tee-shirts. I carried around a soccer ball and would forget to brush my hair. I had lots of friends who were boys, but only two of them had been actual boyfriends and only one in the way that matters. I had a 4.0 and was a nation Latin Scholar who wanted to be one of three things; a writer, a doctor, or Harrison Ford.

My daughter was born weighing two pounds, three ounces, at twenty-seven weeks gestation. She spent three months in the NICU, two more tethered to oxygen. I asked permission for every move I made in there. The nurses were mean, rightfully so. Whether I meant to or not, I started my career as a mother by doing the worst thing one could do. I put my baby in the direct path of danger. It was unfathomable. With all that could go wrong, a premature baby, delivered at home, in an unattended birth and she came out far better off than most. She was a miracle, and I was an anathema.  

I was supposed to be back at school pretending nothing happened and considering adoption. Instead, I ditched and would sit for hours beside the incubator, too afraid to ask to hold her. (I also had to dodge my own mother, who was skipping work to do the same.) I would wait for the nurses to offer or until she needed changing or feeding, and I could use it as an excuse. 

I was told if I chose to keep her, no one would ever want me. I would be alone forever. Not marrying would mean I would also forfeit the kingdom of God. It was hard not to notice that the world and heaven were already against me. When I brought her into the ER wrapped in cold towels, I was placed under arrest until they could corroborate my story. 

She was instantly life-flighted to another hospital. I was admitted because I didn't know anything about the placenta, and I had shut down the contractions to care for the baby. I had never had any sort of GYN exam before giving birth. They had to restart labor and then force dilation of my cervix. I was given nothing for pain or care, no IV, no water, no food, just left bleeding in a bed like a leaper no one wanted to deal with. I was released the next day without any follow-up plan or care instructions. Lack of care eventually lead to an infection that required surgery.  

I remember thinking, this will be how I'll be treated the rest of my life if I can't walk away from her. I accepted all the dirty looks, whispers, loneliness, and damnation and kept her. I made a promise to that tiny little soul who just appeared in my life, I would always do my best to make up for not giving her a two-parent home.  

If I try, there are things I remember about being a seventeen-year-old girl hiding a pregnancy (even from myself) and giving birth alone, details you don't need to know. But I will share is what I said so softly to her as I held her in my hands for the first time. "What are you doing here?" 

It may not be poetry, but that question fits her so well. She has always had a purpose.

This month I turn forty-nine. I don't look like a teenage mother anymore. It's a title that one outgrows. Like snakeskin, it stops fitting, and you have to shed it. Now I'm a grandma with grown children, step-children, in-law children, nearly-grown-children, and motherless children. 

We drove ten hours to California for a gymnastics meet that my youngest daughter was too injured to compete in, but the plans were all made, so we got three days on the beach. 

That's how I ended up alone walking the waves. It was like stealing glances at the setting sun. For just an instant, I did what you're not supposed to do and let thirty-two years of motherhood slip off my shoulders. 

There are so many other things I might have been. My children created a mother out of a wild child with a faithless mind and a bleeding heart who still wears mens' Levis and forgets to brush her hair.

Five thousand miles away in Scotland, my oldest daughter is completing her Master's Degree and choosing where to go for her Ph.D. Like I said, she has always known why she's here. From the moment she was born, my world changed course. I have no regrets for choosing to follow love.