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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.
I watched the father gently pat his son’s sweet, sticky face, and the mother sit down to reorganize items in her bag. I had been furtively eyeing them all day, not so much out of voyeurism as the fact that without any concern for beach etiquette they had set themselves up right in front of my own simple set-up, erecting a massive billowy tent that obstructed my view of the ocean. I had had no choice but to watch the exhaustion of their day, the endless parade of beach toys to occupy the kids, the sandy bags of popcorn, the container of carefully cut watermelon that had spilled into the sand. I had thought, if there’s a silver lining to this now being my view, it’s that I am even more grateful to be sitting here alone, with my book and bag of cherries and an open expanse of time to myself. It seemed unlikely that this exact moment, the fluid, mindless handoff of the son from one parent to the next, would become part of the parents memory of the day, but now it was singed into mine.
