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Reflections on Identity
Mourning the Partnership I Never Had
How a simple gesture reminded me of what I had wanted
On the beach today, I watched a little boy toddle back to his father, holding his mother’s hand. His face was mottled with artificially bright colors, courtesy of an ice pop that likely started dripping the moment it was released from its cartoon-festooned wrapper. The father instinctively reached for a bottle of water, and I heard the mom casually instruct, “make sure you get his neck too, some of it dripped down there.”
I held my book on my lap, watching them intently. All I had wanted was this day: the healing heat of the sun, the soothing lapping of waves, a good book, a bag of cherries, the absence of my own children. It had been a roller coaster of a month, filled with milestones, too many of them to adequately be addressed in such a condensed period of time: the rapid decline and death of my father; my first book’s publication; my son’s graduation from high school; my daughter’s graduation from the elementary school which had become our second home after seventeen years; and finally, the move out of the “forever” apartment my husband and I had bought and renovated just a few years earlier, when forever was still part of our shared language.
