I guess that most people would have considered us to be poor, but I don’t remember feeling that way, exactly. It was more about the dark curtain of isolation that threatened to smother me. Whatever could have prepared me for this shock?
Wandering down Lake Mary Boulevard almost 50 years later, I can see the Florida grass beneath my feet, oddly sharp and unfriendly. Those oversized spikes remind me that I am back in the tropics. The moist, heady warmth of the Florida afternoon sun seeps into my bones. Slowly, translucent shards of memory come back to me, fitting together into a glittering mosaic of joy and pain, the time in my life when I became a mother…
Oh, that foreign grass, those hideous trees. Palm trees shouldn’t be considered to be real trees. Tall and arrogant, with lizard skin trunks, they thrust their unseemly fronds into the air. Are they animal? Vegetable? Mineral? Who can tell? How can these monstrosities ever hope to photosynthesize? But they do, with a vengeance that insults my northern concept of “tree”. Give me a regal Douglas fir, fragrant and full. Give me an apple tree, its branches curving to the earth, laden with fruit. Give me a maple, a storybook tree for children to climb. I am in alien territory.
And the ubiquitous bugs. Giant lumbering beetles. Fire ants that sting with a vengeance.
Palmetto bugs heaped in steamy suicidal piles under the street lamps every morning, rotting in the neverending heat. And reptiles. Bull snakes thicker than baseball bats, slithering around in the back yard. Tiny chameleons switching colors on the wall of the washhouse. Frogs strangling in the street when the rainstorms come each afternoon with mind-numbing regularity, leaving the ground soaked and vaprous.
There’s not a hill in sight for hundreds of miles, not even a knoll. Everywhere it is flat – we are at sea level, period. Don’t ask for more. Don’t think about Mt. Baker rising in icy splendor at the end of my childhood street, tinted to strawberry ice cream pink by the evening light. I am mere feet from the edge of this godforsaken state. One false move on a dark night and I’ll slip into the Atlantic and be lost somewhere between Florida City and Key Largo.
This is not home. The damp and loneliness choke me. I’m falling over the edge now, gulping for air.
The baby cries. Oh, how beautiful and perfect he is, my tiny son. How I longed for this baby. Then he came, and with him came the drenching summer. I cannot care for this little human being. I am not ready for this. How will I comfort him? What if I drop him? What if I drown him?
I’m horrified by my massive, swollen breasts, stretched to unimaginable tautness. They are foreign objects, no longer a part of me, oozing milk and soaking my blouse whenever he cries. He sleeps in short bursts and then wakes to cry again. Is he getting enough to eat? How will I know? Will I starve him?
Who can help me? My mother and sisters are thousands of miles away. We have not had time to make friends. My beautiful new husband is always working or sleeping, trying to keep us fed and clothed. I see him stretched out on the bed, lean and tanned from working out in the blazing tropical sun. I can’t bear to disturb him. I don’t have the heart to tell him how I feel, to add to his burden. I tiptoe out of the bedroom and softly close the door. The baby is crying again…..
The heat and humidity press down on all of us as darkness falls. I have just fed the baby and tentatively tucked him in for the night. He is limp and drowsy with sleep, cozy in his soft little gown. I settle down with a new book and take a deep breath. Three pages in, I hear him begin to whimper. I wait. Perhaps he will quiet himself. Sometimes that happens. Please, God. But little by little, the simmering cry escalates to a rolling boil.
The baby is shrieking now, his arms and legs flailing wildly. I lay my book aside, then I reach down to scoop him out of his crib and rock him back and forth in my arms, holding him tight. “Sweet and low, sweet and low, wind of the western sea, blow, blow, breathe and blow, bring my love back to me…” Gradually, he calms. Then suddenly, to my surprise, I myself take up where he left off. From somewhere deep inside my chest, sobs wrench me as I weep for all the lost love in the world, for my mortality and his. To stop this flood would be to stop breathing. The baby stares at me through my cascade of tears, his eyes wide, allowing me this luxury of emotion. His downy hair is so soft, his eyes bluer than blue, so like his father’s. Oh, how strong and healthy he is, how full of life. Any day now, he will surprise me with a smile. I must be doing something right.
“Over the rolling waters blow, come from the dying moon and blow, blow him again to me, while my little one, while my pretty one, sleeps”. There. I am calming too. The baby drifts off again. I think of my mother in law, singing this lullaby to her babies, for she taught it to me. I think of her losing her mind on the little farm by the river in northern Minnesota when the fifth baby was born. I think of her coming back, strong, to live her life and impart her strength to her six children. I think of my own mother, surviving the early death of my father to create a life for me. Mothers hold their babies close and sing to them, and it is enough.
I will survive this. Fall will come, bringing cool, dry air to make life more bearable. We will discover the abandoned orange groves, the sandy white beach at Naples, the pleasure of picking strawberries in the field in March, the mild sunny winters. Friends will come into our lives. The baby will grow and thrive. He will begin to smile and laugh, to sleep through the night, to capture our hearts with love returned. The days will take on a rich and satisfying pattern. We will become a family.
I will make peace with Florida. I will make peace with motherhood.
