Slowing the tide: a Thanksgiving swim

Some moments resonate with us for years, and some years pass us like a moment, with their fleeting details lost.

As parents, our weekends arrive tightly book-ended and, however we try, our days-off cannot resist the momentum created by our days-on. We plan ahead our family moments only to rush up to them, to have them and move onto the next.

We once waited weeks for prints of family photos. Then one day. And now an instant seems too long. It sometimes feels like we’re rushing today’s moments so as our future moments can come better into focus. And years that are lost, get lost faster. And the blur keeps moving onwards.

A four-year old on my shoulders was once held in arms. A seven-year old was once so much like the four-year old. Or was she?

And then there are moments that come up on us and stay, repeating and resonating. Moments that follow us, lingering and brooding and easily triggered. Moments that pull us backwards and by doing so, slow our tide. On the day after Thanksgiving we had such a moment.

As both a luxury and cheap vacation we rented a night at a local Hotel with an “outdoor pool.” Those two words aroused a kind of highly acute state of madness in our daughters. And that was before we had even got in the car.

Once up to their waists, the water appeared to contain some strange substance that entered directly into their blood and nervous systems and created some uncontrollable happiness. They bobbed around yelling and laughing, uncontainably. They became a single giggling loop of energy passing its flow back and forth in some kind of mad closed circuit.

After a time I broke free from my parental role of giving rides and playing shark and I swam a length underwater. As I surfaced I could see the wake of steam that followed me as the cold morning air churned with the warmth of the pool.

The girls stood agape as they noticed a quiet rain begining to fall. We watched the rain lose its hesitancy and fall fuller and more evenly. The girls lost themselves watching the rain bounce and dance on the surface of the water. The cloud cover pulled a veil over us, darkening the morning and the downpour fell more forcefully on us.

For a moment we held our breaths and listened and absorbed the moment. Each silent drop of rain combined with a thousand of their sisters to bury us in its noise. It was there. It was then. We had our long single moment.

And now and then our silence in the rain visits me. It slows my pace as it stretches out its hand to pull me back from the irresistable forward pull of the future.

A nine year-old's Tale

The image of a seemingly unending, tree-lined road that leads from a cemetery to a large stately home repeated itself for many years in my dreams.

When I was nine my brothers and I were driven up that long straight lane to the country mansion that was to be our new home, where the only grownups were social workers. It was a home for children with no parents or parents the state considered unable to cope.

We were sent to Denham Court in the summer of 1970. I returned home in 1972.

At that time the home's regime was in transition. It was moving from a Dickensian-style orphanage, where children were uniformed, regimented and subject to corporal punishment, to a more liberal institution for the children of the poor.

There was lots of normality at Denham Court: we played hide and seek and tag, got into small bruisers and like all children we resisted chores. We just did it without parents, and in large numbers. We traipsed in line to brush teeth and we fell asleep in dorms that slept eight kids, all of us in our large metal-framed beds.

Where my own kids may be given a two-minute time-out on the hallway bench for punishment, in a large children’s home things were notched up a bit. For a nine year-old to walk into a room where a hundred potatoes needed peeling was just a bit overwhelming. I remember my plea of inexperience falling on deaf ears.

We didn’t suffer cruelty or abuse. Or perhaps I’ve buried that. But being removed from your mother at nine was trauma enough for an entire lifetime, a scar that would never fully heal.

Today, I live in a world where so many of us parent so carefully and conscientiously that we can forget the incredible resilience of children. Despite the awful fate of that nine year old, what resonates with me more is that we survived.

At Denham Court, the older kids introduced me to music. From then on, music was never background noise but assumed a bigger dimension in my world. I discovered lyrics there also, which in turn nourished my love of language.

Last night our youngest, Ilyana had her first night without a pull-up. We could tell the issue of transitioning away from pull-ups at night was affecting the mood of our four year old. I was taken back to my first nights at Denham Court where bed-wetting was common. We all slept on thin cotton sheets that sat atop a thick rubber sheet. Getting into that bed in the winter was somewhat akin to getting into an ice-cold bath.

We returned home to my mother in 1972. Now, a parent myself, I feel both the grief felt by my own mom, and a deep sadness for that nine year old boy. And when as an adult I fret about the anxieties my daughters are processing of their own, my own past helps me maintain a sense of proportion.

Ironically Denham Court is now a venue rented for wedding receptions, and so today that long tree-lined road that leads to it resonates differently in other people’s dreams.