We live in this fabulous oasis of a community: the river is the heart of it, flowing straight through the middle: we have friends on both sides and with all it's twists and turns and bridges, it's only from the river you really get an idea of the lay of the land. Parcels are generally five acre minimums, close enough to feel neighborly but not crowded and so it feels wild - especially with campgrounds and nature reserves and amazing walking, biking and hiking trails on Conservancy dedicated land patchworked through. There are tangles of wildflowers and trees, wild animals and wild locals and it's a place so special thousands of tourists visit each year. It's an amazing place to raise a child.
And a terrible place to lose one.
Even prefacing this with the fact that there is a happy ending can't eliminate the knife-in-stomach fear for the parents I tell it to - maybe it's the fact that they can so easily transpose their own child into the story, that because of how tight knit (despite the five acre parcels) we are, they know me or my daughter well enough to feel what we felt.
There is a beautiful campground across the river and down a few miles from where we have our river company. One of our groups was camping there and so we were there for two nights and two mornings cooking dinner and breakfast. A simple path skirts the campground from upper parking lot to the campsites to the river access to the outdoor kitchen and dining area. Probably an eighth of a mile in total. The property bordering it upstream is a lovely local hiking area with a simple 1.1 mile trail that meanders along the river for a few hundred yards. The whole area is easily identifiable as former mining territory with rock tailings piled into meandering raised beds easily construed as paths. Animals or humans have carved more definable paths into the piles and the possible diversions for exploration are endless. Especially for a curious six year-old. On the first night, Jordan and Sawyer meandered down a path together and were just identifying that they were indeed lost when Tom found them. We had a good talk about being lost and what to do and not do, and there seemed to have been just enough of and edge to the experience to keep them wary of future wanderings. But Hansel and Gretel left out the part about what happens when there's the roiling emotions of a six year old in transition involved.
Two mornings later we were back and having refereed a fight about a dandelion that came out to Sawyer's benefit, my daughter was sulking and gave only a pouty nod to my "breakfast in five minutes" guideline. Eight minutes later I wandered the trail while nibbling a piece of cantaloupe, fully expecting her to appear and join me in a quick resolution of her emotions on the walk back to breakfast. On round two I made a wider loop, beginning to foray onto the potential trailheads, and increasing quite noticeably the volume of my calls despite the early hour. Round three I picked up Sawyer, now long done with his breakfast and asked him to show me the "secret hiding place" they'd discovered in case she was silently ignoring my calls. (I'm thinking of surgically attaching a GPS unit to the poor child. It wasn't a helpful endeavor and we both have poison oak in spots.) We made it all the way to the adjacent hiking trail and knowing he wasn't going to manage the one mile loop with any speed I was bringing him back and intending to go back for round four, the now worried guides joining in the search. Suddenly some one called "Here she is, Heather."
Running up the road, I found my crying daughter attached to the hand of a lovely twenty-something woman, blond and athletic and looking quite eerily the picture of who my daughter could be in another fifteen years. She had indeed found her on the adjacent trail. "She was sobbing," said the angelic young woman in running shoes and shorts, "she was so sad It made me tear up. But at least she knew where she was supposed to be so I walked her back here." There were tears in the poor woman's eyes and after hugging Jordan I shook her hand and then enveloped her in a hug. She had rescued my daughter, and even in her strong and able and youthful invincibility she connected so clearly to that feeling of loss and of being lost that I felt a ping of sadness for her, thinking already she could see through to this side of parenthood: the possibility of loss. Or maybe it was her empathy for Jordan that caused her tears, a connectedness still to childhood - she was a perfect figure to bridge mother and daughter, whatever her experience.
Never have my feelings been so conflicted about my daughter and what to show her. But her fear was palpable enough. I don't have to write what I said: its the same script any parent would have for a found child, the same one for when my mother found my sister who had lost herself purposefully at about the same age in our living room curtains, more terrified to give herself up to the crime of which I'd promised to tattle on her for than to answer the calls of my mother. When the police cars with their flashing lights showed up, her eyes grew wider and her confusion greater: were they there to punish her for her crime or to help to find her? I can see the confusion now in my mother's eyes, the flood of relief and the anger: I love you so much I could kill you for scaring me so with the potential of your loss.
The morning didn't turn magically into one of seamless redemption - clearly I'm no Ma Ingalls. My frayed nerves and the over-tiredness of both my children translated into an escalation of emotion. After a fight between the two of them over a cookie in the Camp Lotus store brought us to a pinnacle, I called my own mother to confess my sore throat from yelling at my children. And got to feel her fear and pain mirroring my own: after all, she loves my daughter, and she knows me now as both a mother and a daughter. I'm so filled with gratitude she's there for me to talk to. At these moments I so clearly still need a mama of my own.
These are the times when you connect with the comment "I aged five years in that moment," and yet you swear to yourself that you will never die of old age (no matter how quickly they cause it) or anything else: after all, you have to stick around for the rest of their lives to protect them. Raising children seems such a delicate balance: loving them so much you never want them out of your sight (much less your house), and at the same time allowing them the independence and strength to become their own person. Likely one who will be driven crazy by you just as much as they drive you crazy and so you will want them to fly on their independent wings as wonderfully high as they possibly can.
After just a few weeks of being a mother, I was walking bleary-eyed and in shock around my small cabin and picked up a tiny book on motherhood someone had attached to a gift. This small quote brought me to my knees in its profundity even at that stage: "Making the decision to have a child - it's momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body." - Elizabeth Stone
