Raised by Water

A few days ago, I stood on a beach in Georgia with my daughter. It wasn’t the first beach we’d walked together.

The ocean stayed the same. We did not.

I can mark the seasons of her life by the beaches we visited.

The strange thing about those beaches is that they’ve barely changed. The sand. The tide. The seagulls. The sound of the waves. Meanwhile, the lives we carried onto those beaches have changed completely.

Mikayla as a chubby baby in a tiny pink bathing suit and floppy sun hat, sitting on a beach in Hawaii. Fat fingers wrapped around a fistful of sand while her brother danced in the background. I still have that photograph framed with some of the sand tucked inside, carried home from Hawaii all those years ago.

A little girl in Maine searching for whales. A bright yellow rain slicker, strawberry blonde ponytails tucked into the hood.

A nervous child at Hanauma Bay. Afraid a spiny sea urchin would poke her. She clung to me for hours as we drifted through the clear water, snorkeling, splashing, laughing.

A teenager at Grayton Beach. Walking for hours beside me with our dogs. Lord Byron, our poodle, racing across the sand after birds at the edge of the surf.

A beach in Ireland. Lahinch. Her hair blown wild by Atlantic wind as she gazed at the water. A young woman now. Still in college. Still trying to decide who she would become.

And now Georgia.

Her back ramrod straight now. The posture of a newly minted United States Marine. Beside her, her boyfriend, a former Marine himself. The two of them talking easily about Marine Corps things I could not fully understand. A language and a future that no longer belonged to me.

I bent down and scooped up a handful of sand, just as she had done all those years ago in her little pink bathing suit on a beach in Hawaii. The grains slipped slowly through my fingers. Something about it felt like motherhood itself. Holding someone close for so many years, only to slowly feel them slipping away, wondering if one day you will be left staring down at an empty palm.

She took off running down the beach, chasing a flock of seagulls just as she had when she was small.

Almost as quickly, she caught herself. Straightened. The Marine posture returned. The seagulls and laughter forgotten.

But for one brief, golden second, my little girl was back.

Oceans Between Us

Now she talks about Okinawa. About the possibility of being stationed there someday. A chance to fulfill the dream she has carried since she was young, to live in Japan.

It feels impossibly far away.

And yet I find myself thinking about the ocean. The same ocean that may one day separate us also binds us. Water has carried us through every season of her life.

Perhaps one day we will walk together on a beach in Okinawa. She’ll be a seasoned Marine by then. I’ll be seasoned too. Older, grayer, softer around the edges.

Standing there beside her, I felt both things at once. Pride. And that small ache mothers carry when they realize the person walking beside them no longer belongs to them in quite the same way.

Maybe that is why beaches haunt me a little now.

Because they remain so unchanged while we do not.

The waves keep coming ashore exactly as they always have. But the people who once stood there together are altered every single time the tide rolls back out.

And somewhere beneath all those changed versions of ourselves, I suspect I will still be able to glimpse the little girl chasing seagulls along the shore.