King Tide

An Open Letter to my Sons

When I came down the stairs and turned, I saw it for the first time. It had a swelling, sweeping, overtaking air. I must have let out a little gasp in my alarm as I got closer to the windows, because my husband, James, turned from his marsh-facing post on our new living room swivel chairs and looked back at my pie eyes. It appeared as though rising water might be about to breech our bulkhead and march toward us through the backyard. We’d be helpless then to stop it from pouring into our newly renovated home along the Intercoastal Waterway —- our new sleepy beach town life turning into fodder for the Weather Channel.

When I got closer I could see our dock more clearly where we, for sport, watchfully measure the tides as they rise and fall —- an amazing seventy-two inches in an average cycle down here. The water that morning was feet higher than it normally was even at the highest part of high tide, even in a storm. What’s going on? I blurted out. James answered me as he swiveled back to keep watch: It’s a king tide, he said. Isn’t it beautiful?

This is normal course in our house. I tend to be generally on-guard for a potential apocalypse, and he tends to think everything is great and gorgeous. Indeed, it seemed much more lovely to me once I knew what it was --- that it had a name and was apparently locally ‘a thing’ and it followed then that like all tides, it would come and it would go and it would not apocalypse us.

I remember thinking to myself then that this king tide was a fitting backdrop ---- its quietly terrifying beauty and awesomeness and fleetingness had an emotional synergy with the task at hand that day: packing up my youngest son to be dropped off at college. “Tomorrow”, which word had never felt so bloated, so pitched.

Tomorrow:

I was about to let my final boy go and this would set us both sailing, into new lives.

A king tide is a relatively unusual phenomenon. It happens when the moon is full or new and closest to the earth in its elliptical thirty-day orbit (perigree) and at exactly the same time, the earth in its three hundred and sixty-five-day elliptical orbit around the sun, is also closest to it (perihelion) and finally, these two things have to coincide with a regular high tide. I think it’s usually an annual-ish occurrence around here. The word originated in Australia but is now regularly used in North America, especially in Florida apparently for some reason that I couldn’t quite decipher on wikipedia, where I obtain my limited understanding of most things.

The wiki entry I read actually begins as such: King tides are natural, predictable events. And maybe I should have taken that simple fact as consolation for my aching heart ----- that my new metaphor for change was teaching me that, even celestially, it’s the way of the world. The way things go is away. It’s natural and predictable, like an orbit and a tide, kids grow up. They eventually grow into those two big front teeth they had in second grade when they were practicing penmanship, they eventually do not crawl into bed with you after a bad dream, they do not any longer ask to “go outside” or “stay outside” or go “back outside”.

They have deodorant and carry their own passports and don’t think you’re particularly that clever. I have come to refer to the feeling my three boys give me now --- when wild love smashes up against the nauseous knowing that they’re on the loose in a broken and uncontrollable world – the act and fact of them becoming men and mirrors to me at the same time: adult children vertigo.

But I wanted to say something to you three in light of all this, the final launch. First, I’m sorry, boys. I’m sorry that I always, always read the parenting book I needed to read at least eleven months too late. I’m also sorry that I came to the game fabulously unfinished myself --- certainly misinformed about wide swaths of stuff and in so many ways, unarrived, in mind and spirit.

Whoops! See, even if your parents are only a degree or two off (I’m not in that group…), overtime you’ll end up in a tunturi, a vast frozen, treeless plain, (the tundra!), instead of Paris. The big problem was and remains this -- I was supposed to teach you guys life but some of its central aspects remain a mystery to me…still.

Despite it all, you three came out as if gems from a gem tumbler. And tumble we did. Upon reflection, it occurred to me that the whole journey started with terror (pregnant with Jamesy when the towers came down on 9/11), and it began to wrap up with our first launch at the dawn of a global pandemic. Maybe early on you learned that crucial life lesson ---- to hold onto the good you could find around you and release the rest. What an awesome adventure it all was —- Gate to Gate to Gate.

So, Yes! Take whatever I had to give or teach that was worthy or decent or edifying (start with Jesus and my marinades…) and toss the rest out of an open window and keep going. Careful out there of all the time and truth-stealers. And, Lord help us all, with the ever-present super-striving.

Dr. Timothy Keller said it so well here: You know that thing you’re after? Well, it’s after you.

Trudat, boys.

In other words, the world and its things will never, ever satisfy the deepest parts of you. And when you flip that coin on its head, what it says is this:

You are already and always enough.

Amen and Amen. But to really believe it --- (sigh and smile) --- is a life’s work.

My parting thought for now ——

Go Gunners!!! North London Forever.

I love you three so,

Mama