Waves

Your arms are wrapped tightly around my shoulder and neck, and you watch over my shoulder towards the horizon.

“Here comes a wave!”

I jump so the choppy water doesn’t hit you square in the face, and you laugh like it’s the funniest thing you’ve ever seen.

This is (sort of) your first time at the beach. We brought you when you were less than a year old. You had just started walking, still took two naps a day, didn’t like being put down, and we still hadn’t figured out how to control your reflux. I shudder when I remember that affliction that plagued you for the better part of a year, often immediately sending whatever you’d been eating onto everyone around you like the ocean depositing foam and debris on the shoreline.

You were miserable for large parts of the trip, and so by default, so were we. It hardly counted as a beach vacation.

You are back now, two years later, and you can talk and you can run and you have a little sister to impress. You’re still little though, alternating between being asked to be held and shouting “let me do it!” when you remember that you love your independence. The two ebb and flow like the water we're standing in, as does your laughter and your tears, your anger and frustration at not being understood and your love for everything and everyone around you. It all comes in waves with you.

I worried how you would do with the ocean this time around. We’ve had you in swim lessons from the beginning, and you're doing really well in the pool. The salty foam and the seaweed off the Florida coast doesn’t seem to bother you much. You don't really understand why we’ve spent so much time and money on your lessons, or why you have to wear a lifejacket here at the beach. You don’t know about the dangers, and wouldn’t care if we tried to explain them to you. You don’t know about rip tides. Or about flash flooding. 

You don’t know about what happened in the Hill Country about a month ago. You don’t know about Mystic. You don’t know about those girls. You don’t know that when I first learned of the devastation, you’re who I thought of. Hearing how something so horrific could happen on such a large scale to girls just a hands-worth-of-fingers older than you, and the way it grabbed a hold of my heart and squeezed.

You don’t know that I blocked a lot of it out. I scrolled past, I changed subjects, and I plugged my ears to many of the stories that came out of that time. I put up a dam to keep the waves of sadness out. I no longer find myself motivated by morbid curiosity in the wake of these tragedies, like I might have when I was younger. Maybe that’s getting older, maybe I have your siblings and yourself to blame for that. The truth is, there are things I heard and read about in the aftermath of the flooding that made me physically ill. And so I blocked it out for a time.

Here's the problem though. We have never wanted you kids to be afraid of the water. Respect it, be comfortable in it, know what to do in it, sure. But never fear it. The waves knock you down here at the beach, they crush your sand castles, the salt stings your eyes. And you laugh. You get back in. You don’t run from it. 

So I took down the dams, and I let the waves come for me. Not as some exercise in masochism or a desire to make other people’s grief my own, I never want to be that person. But I think it’s important to see the pain that’s out there, watch how others handle it, marvel at their strength and yes, sometimes just let your heart ache for them a bit. 

To feel for the family who lost a baby boy about the same age as your sister, and wonder who his big sister will grow up to be, having this incident permanently embedded in her DNA. To be in awe of the counselor who shares the same name as the neighbor girl across the street, who swam with 3 or 4 campers at a time attached to her and made sure her entire cabin made it to safety. To openly grieve for the little girl who was lost, the one with the same name as you, and hope that peace can someday find her family. 

I imagine for all those affected by the raging flood waters of the Guadalupe river, the grief will come in waves for a long time now. I heard someone recently describe grief as losing an arm. You’re never whole again, but you eventually learn to manage and live with it. I think it’s also like this ocean tide. It pulls pieces of you away, little by little, and brings on new things that you might never expect (not all of it bad). And some days it’s very, very mild, a green flag on the shore line. Other times it threatens to suck everything completely under. But it’s always there, low and high, and just like the houses nearby built on stilts, you learn to live with the flooding. 

I realize the last few things I’ve written have been anything but happy. I think as I’m getting older I’m trying to better comprehend how and why we deal with things the way we do, try and find what I feel is an appropriate response to heart ache and disaster that occurs both near and far away. The bad news just seems to come in waves these days, even to myself who considers this particular version and timeframe on planet Earth to be a pretty fantastic place to be. But if I don’t know how to properly regulate all of this information and emotion, how can I ever expect you to?

And you HAVE to learn because… wow. You are a force of nature. You were born a middle child somehow, inherently knowing you had an entire stereotype to live up to before your mom and I ever suspected there would be a little sister. Your feelings are big, and I see you growing into them even now. Friends and family chuckle and say "She's a handful isn't she?" And don’t even realize how far you’ve come. How different you are from just 6 months ago. Things that used to scare you are now your favorite things. The tantrums are still there as we exit the Terrible Twos and make our way to the year of the Threenager, but they’re decreasing in time, intensity, and frequency. You have a new found ability to sit and play with your siblings instead of yanking something away and causing chaos, and it’s beautiful to see from a safe distance. I’m not sure we always register these moments when they start, when you make a clear and sudden change in the way you behave. They often happen in waves, and we look up one day and your hair is long and you’re speaking in full sentences and your mother and I act surprised that you’re not a baby anymore. 

I think sometimes I don’t realize the walls I put up that cause me to miss all the little moments in between the milestones. The debris and clutter that floated down and made a dam and blocked my waterfront view. Or worse, I know they are there and I don’t take the time to clear them. The work that has to be done today, the game that’s on, your sibling that needs me RIGHT NOW, or far more often… the 6 inch screen I spend hours and hours a day staring at, when I’m not looking at the other screens for hours and hours a day. I try to soak it all up when I can, and if nothing else, all the bad news in the world is a good reminder to stop inundating myself with it and watch the beauty in front of me.

Some days I’m better about it than others. I’m attentive, I’m patient, I’m a good dad. But not every day. 

Not every time. 

Like everything else, it comes in waves.