YCMTPB

On being a good lifeboat and rowing back to the parts of ourselves we've left behind.

In the emergency room, I sit shoulder to shoulder with strangers, our anxiety nestled neatly on our laps next to our purses.

The chairs here sit so close together my arm can brush against the person beside me if I’m not careful. They are so close together I can lift my eyes and find another face just like mine a few feet away.

But none of us look up. Our faces have undressed, and not one of us is brash enough to look directly at another’s bare naked pain without flinching.

On the wall beside me is a piece commissioned from a local artist, and I look at this, instead—turquoise and emerald and cerulean stained glass reminiscent of water, roiling waves, the ruthless sea.

If this place is an ocean, then I am a lifeboat, and the person across from me is a lifeboat, and the person next to me is a lifeboat, and even though we’re each close enough to touch, the waves lurch so wildly, it is all we can do to stay afloat—knuckles blanching, jaws set against the salty sea.

It is not lost on me, even as I sit with my fingers curled tight around the chair’s plastic armrests, that the people waiting in the ER are almost exclusively women.

When I say women, I mean the people who stand willingly at the fault lines of things.

When I say women, I mean the people who have learned to contain devastation, who open their mouths wide trying to swallow every crisis whole.

When I say women, I mean the people who do the mothering, the caretaking, the nurturing, whether or not anyone calls them Mom.

I mean the ones who walk into the most broken-down, ugly, twisted places with one question tucked behind their sternum, right next to their beating heart.

This place could be beautiful, right?

The day before, at the end-of-the-year MOPS gathering, a dozen mothers and I had made friendship bracelets.

The general idea, my friend had said, is to string a few letter beads into a word, or a Bible verse, or your child’s name, or your family initials.

I had hesitated briefly before fishing each letter out of its tiny tackle-box square, before dropping each bead gingerly into my palm:

Y, C, M, T, P, B.

I did not know, then, that twenty-four hours later, I would be spinning this bracelet around my wrist in the ER waiting room, reciting Maggie Smith’s poem Good Bones in my head.

Life is short, though I keep this from my children. Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways, a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative estimate, though I keep this from my children. For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird. For every loved child, a child broken, bagged, sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world is at least half terrible, and for every kind stranger, there is one who would break you, though I keep this from my children. I am trying to sell them the world. Any decent realtor, walking you through a real shithole, chirps on about good bones: This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful.

You could make this place beautiful.

You could make this place beautiful.

What lifeboats can do:

They can launch in record time to save people in crisis.

They can function well in brief rescue missions.

They can remain afloat even under severe conditions.

What lifeboats cannot do:

They cannot remain on the water for long periods of time.

They cannot travel distant voyages across an entire ocean.

They cannot rescue someone who cannot get in.

The writer describes herself as a lifeboat, a rescuer. What does this tell the reader about the writer’s psyche?

A. The writer has a notoriously flawed savior fantasy, in which she is the savior, and other people are, decidedly, not.

B. The writer is perhaps moderately codependent and lacking in boundaries.

C. The writer tends to have a big ego.

D. All of the above.

Therapists call it a healing fantasy—the idea that trauma survivors tend to hold onto a specific storyline in order to survive.

Mine is that I can save everyone. Mine is that I can be the best lifeboat—that I can mother people who are not mine to mother, rescue people who are not mine to rescue.

Maybe, I have thought to myself for years, I can make the world beautiful by saving everyone who needs saving.

Maybe, I can keep throwing myself again and again at the crashing waves, salt in my throat and sand in my teeth.

Maybe, I can rescue every single person I love and we will all live happily ever after.

And so I left part of myself on the shore.

She is still there, now, building sand castles and scanning the surface of the water—waiting to see if I am ever coming back.

Things lifeboats must carry, by law:

-One sea anchor

-One survival manual

-One pump for bailing out water

-One searchlight

-Six red hand flares

-One copy of lifesaving signals

I have carried everything I must carry.

I have tossed the anchor, dog-eared the survival manual, and bailed out gallons upon gallons of water. I have aimed the searchlight’s beam into the dark, night after night. I have set off every red flare. I have memorized and deployed every lifesaving signal.

Still, nobody has gotten into this boat. And nobody has gotten in because this is my healing fantasy, and it is just that—a fantasy.

It is like I tell my three-year-old when she asks me if her favorite bedtime story is real.

No, Baby, I say. I’m so sorry.

This is just a made-up story.

See? I point to the illustrations, all pen lines and bleeding watercolors.

Pretend.

Not real.

The writer describes herself as a lifeboat, a rescuer. What does this tell the reader about the writer’s psyche?

A. The writer has become fluent in mothering others throughout her lifetime.

B. The writer has become fluent at abandoning herself throughout her lifetime.

C. The writer has become fluent at filling the nothingness with her own self, in hopes it may lessen the sting of the absence.

D. All of the above.

In the ER, one mother is slumped forward in her chair, her head between her knees, and I can’t tell if she’s going to pass out or if she’s merely fallen asleep that way.

Another startles me by calling out for her daughter halfway down the hallway, who has the same name as me.

Yet another has come in and out of the double doors more than a dozen times, walking briskly in her sandals, toenails painted flamingo pink. She is standing and sitting and shifting and pacing and I have watched her long enough, now, to recognize how she, too, is mothering someone who is not hers to mother.

I say the same thing to each of them.

“This is horrible, isn’t it.”

My voice does not go up at the end, because it is not a question so much as a weak offering—a rope thrown from one lifeboat to another.

Look, I am saying. The world is at least fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative estimate.

Look, I am saying. For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.

But look, I am saying. This place could be beautiful, right?

I am trying to make this place beautiful.

A lifeboat is also called a tender.

Tender like the skin on a child’s forearm, all fish belly and delicate.

Tender like a woman’s body in a waiting room chair—all pin-prick nerve endings and bloody cuticles.

Tender like a girl on the shore who knows only waiting and scanning and the blank horizon beyond.

Tender like the words I have only recently been able to see clearly—blurry, black letters sharpening against the page.

The first time I say the words out loud, it is like someone has torn open a seam in me—I can almost hear the fraying, the ripping, the unraveling of thread.

When I open my mouth to speak, it is not from my own rational mind, but from a guttural place deep in my belly. I am reckoning with some shapeless thing—a wordless black hole, a young place that is all white-hot emotion.

My voice shakes with the strain of it all, and I grip my own arm so hard, my fingernails leave a line of little, pink commas.

What I say:

How long have I been everyone’s mother?

What I do not say:

And where is mine?

The writer describes herself as a lifeboat, a rescuer. What does this tell the reader about the writer’s psyche?

A. The writer uses this particular narrative because it describes how she sees herself, or how she perhaps wishes to be seen, or both.

B. The writer leaves conspicuous absences in her narrative—ways she has caused pain, or ways she has been complicit or neglectful or self-serving. The writer could describe herself as the ocean instead of the lifeboat, but she does not do that here.

C. The writer is doing her best to examine her own consciousness. She is undressing her mind. She is trying not to flinch.

D. All of the above.

I am walking to the hospital parking lot when I run into the woman from the waiting room—the one with the sandals and the flamingo pink toenails. I never asked her name.

“Did everything get figured out?” she asks me.

“Kinda,” I say. “You?”

“Kinda,” she says.

We offer each other weak smiles.

I ask if I can give her a hug and when she opens her arms to me, we don’t say anything.

It is enough for our bodies to soften into each other’s.

It is enough for us to understand, in this moment, how even the most horrible places can be beautiful.

All the way home, I twist my bracelet around my wrist.

All the way home, I think about rowing back to the child on the shore—letting my lifeboat wreck on the rocks, giving up on launching myself into the waves, finally accepting that maybe the best person to take care of this kid for good is me.

I want to tell her, I’m here and I’m sorry and No more waiting and I know how to show up for you, now and Please, please forgive me and Please, please trust me.

But I won’t say any of those things. Not at first.

Probably, I will begin by telling her a story—the story of what we will believe in next, in order to survive. In order to live.

This place could be beautiful, I will say.

We could make this place beautiful.

And when she asks me if this is a true story, I will tell her the truth.

Yes, Baby, I will say.

This is a true story.

See? I will point to the pulse on her fish belly wrist.

I will show her how it beats in time with mine—how beauty is always right there, pulsing beneath the surface.

Not a fantasy, I will tell her.

Real.

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