“Sylvia you are an absolute mess. You’re dripping water all over the floor.” My mother was not happy. It was July 1966, I was sixteen years old, and we were at our beach house in Cape May, NJ. “I know, mom, but I just had to get back home. I don’t know what happened.” Now she harrumphed at me, narrowing her eyes as she looked askance at my sea-weed-like hair plastered across my forehead and down my back. In contrast she stood before me perfectly coiffed, make-up expertly applied, jewelry carefully chosen, and a soft-blue caftan drifting feather-light over her slight frame. These ramblings of mine around our small town mystified her. Life in The United States was still quite new to her and to make matters worse, she had only lived in cities her entire life. The world of a beach community was foreign territory and she did not yet have the language for it. She had never ridden a bike and when my father, Fred, taught me how when I was 6, she was terrified. “Fred, she’s going to hurt herself,” and “Fred why are you not holding onto the seat she could fall? She’ll get a concussion.” When I inevitably did fall, there were great recriminations. Even hopscotch was problematic for her, and jump-rope was not to be done when she was around. Skinned knees were the stuff of great drama and try as I might to hide them from her, she would see. So, now, at 16 every time I left the house on my bike to go to the beach or to visit my friends, she would warn me of imminent disasters. “Watch out for cars! Children play in the street—don’t run into them. Keep your balance.” But on this day in July, as I stood before her disdainful eyes, something was different. I was not dismissive or teasing with her. I was confused. She noticed. “What were you doing today? You were going to Bobbie’s house, right?” Bobbie was my friend who lived on the harbor. Her house had a long pier off the front where her brother and cousins (who were our ages) would dock their boats. She and I would watch the boys dive into the water or push each other off the dock in raucous horse-play. Sometimes they’d take us out on boat rides where one or the other would water ski. I sighed as I began to explain things to my mother. “Today I asked to try water skiing,” I began. She gasped and sat down. I continued, “It looked like so much fun, and the idea of gliding on the water seemed wonderful.” Her face looked horrified, but I continued, “One of the guys said that girls were never good at this, but Bobbie’s cousin Scott told him to be quiet and that he was sure I could do it. He explained things carefully to me: ‘adjust your life jacket like this; hold the rope with both hands on top; get in the water and have just the tips of the skis jutting out; and when we start to speed up, bring your body up to the surface. And then just glide along.’ He also told me that most times people don’t get up the first time. It’s really hard.” I put some towels down on a chair, collapsed into it, and continued: “So I did it. Jeff laughed and reminded me that girls were terrible at this as I lowered myself into the cold water. But I followed directions carefully. And the boat started to speed up.” Now my mother reached for a glass of water and gulped some aspirins as I continued. “It was amazing. I got up on the very first try! I thought about everything I was doing and my strong legs and arms worked to hold me up. It was glorious. I could feel the water sliding under me and the wind blowing my hair back and I thought that this is what birds must feel like when they take flight.” Now I hung my head. “What happened next?” my mother asked. I continued, “I don’t really understand it. I was holding onto the rope and I looked at the kids on the boat in front of me cheering me on and I looked down, and suddenly I just let go. I just let the rope go and I slowly drifted into the water. As soon as I got back on the boat and then back on land, I jumped on my bike and came home.” I continued, “I kept thinking that it was just luck. I saw Jeff on the boat and thought that maybe he was right. Maybe girls can’t do that. It all seemed improbable to me suddenly. And really, almost no one gets it the first time. I was just lucky. So I just let go.” My mother stared at me a minute, told me to go change into a clean bathing suit, and shooed me into my room. This made no sense. Half an hour later, my mother, who was afraid of all sports, who was against my participation in anything vaguely adventurous, had me in a car on the way to the harbor. There she had arranged for Gus and Kathy at the small local yacht club to fit me for skis and to take me out on their boat. “Mom, I don’t understand. You hate this stuff. You don’t want me to do this. Why are you having me go out there?” She looked at me defiantly, “I never want you to believe that your hard work and your effort and your ability are all just luck. Yes, you are lucky in many ways, but when you try hard, you need to know it was you who did it. Never let anyone—not even your own self—disminuirte (diminish you). Now go back out there.” And so it was that my perfectly manicured mother in her floral sheath dress and white heels, who disapproved of all my shenanigans, watched me soar and skim across the bright blue water, whooping and hollering as I jumped some small waves. Once or twice I looked over at her standing on the shore and I could see her clapping. She never fully understood my quirkiness—we were always differently wired, but she clapped for me. Years later, when I graduated from college and earned one master’s degree, then another, then my PhD, my mother clapped. My mother, who had dropped out of medical school because she thought she wasn’t smart enough—who had given up and gotten married young because the world around her told her that she needed a man to support her—who had to find her way after her first husband tried to kill their baby (me) and then disappeared—my mother put her white-gloved hands together and clapped for me over and over and over. Comments are closed.
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