The Ephemeral. The Eternal.
Photo Courtesy | Melissa Sonico
BY MELISSA SONICO
Lately I’ve been consumed with the connection between legacy and identity. Who am I? Who will they be, my children? With me. Without me.
It has to do, I think, with a heightened awareness of mortality that only surfaces in one’s consciousness somewhere between having a first child and the moment the last one is no longer an infant. Witnessing the firsts, the rites of passage of another human life, makes you acutely aware of that passage, makes you realize you inevitably will not be around for most of that person’s lasts. I’ve got a hodge-podge pile of firsts: hair clippings and bellybutton stumps with no real designated spot to put them yet, maybe ever.
It may also have something to do with the current state of uncertainty in a world still stifled by pandemic and racial unrest. I find myself at a point in my life where all I have is time, just not a lot of it. It wasn’t so long ago—or was it?—when discarding things was uncomplicated, ties easily severed.
I sit with my husband on the beach in Big Sur getting burnt because who needs sunscreen when there’s cloud cover? We watch our son yards away, climbing the same rocks we’d climbed five years ago when he was still a stranger in my belly, and already I’m stowing away the crab claw and driftwood and seashell collection he’s left behind on the sandy blanket.
Our almost three-year-old daughter roots around my blouse, expertly pulling on the fabric’s neckline to nurse. The shore is pretty much deserted anyway and I’ve shrugged off what little reservations I once had about breastfeeding in public long before now. Brushing off plump sandy toes as I watch my husband join our son on the rocks, it’s easy to get lost in the familiar rhythm.
My husband is understandably anxious for our daughter to stop breastfeeding, and I suppose I am, too, occasionally—and sometimes impatiently, I’ll admit. With our son, we sat down with him and discussed the expiration date of his nursing sessions with me: his third birthday. He was reluctant but diplomatic during the weeks leading up to it, and on the morning he turned three, he had his last drink and happily turned his attention to the pile of gifts and gummy bears my mother had stopped by with.
Our daughter is a different beast entirely. Strong-willed where our son is easy-going, I imagine she won’t give in so complacently and, honestly, I can’t blame her. The feeling is more complex this time around. More final. Because she is our last child, we’ve decided. An easy decision then and now as well, but that finality is pressing against me with more and more weight these days.
I find myself wedged in place— longing for two separate, ephemeral feelings: this brief, singular intimacy shared by a mother and her child, and the possibility of things to come. Whatever they might or might not be. This turning point is frightening and exciting all at once, and I’m not ready for it. I tell myself, who is? and the answer helps.
I once overheard or read something somewhere about the personal brushing up against the eternal. I don’t remember exactly what it was in regards to, but at the time (and even now) it felt important. Who was I before? I’m still the same person, changes or no, and will continue to be until I simply won’t be.
It’s almost a physical pain to think of my family without me. Equal parts selfishness and helplessness that I might not share in everything they experience in the future. So, with the end of this particular journey together looming, I look forward to each of the next times she falls asleep attached to me, her sticky curls plastered to my arm. And I attach my whole being to that moment, and the one after that, until the final time where I’ll breathe a sigh of relief and resignation, and she’ll protest, and we’ll both cry, maybe.
Rumpled and smelling like salt and wind, my husband drives us back to the campsite while our daughter spits up most of the milk she just drank. She shares motion-sickness (the roundness of her eyes, the tilt of her smile) with her father, who wrinkles his nose as the sour odor spreads through the car while our son whoops in disgust. She scrubs at her car seat harness, a napkin clenched in her clumsy fist, doing her best to blot her own mess.
It stinks, she says.
MELISSA SONICO is a mother, a writer, and English professor, a jewelry designer, a content creator. She lives in Southern California with her husband and two children. Her fiction and nonfiction can be found in the Pacific Review, Darling Magazine, and others. Find her on Instagram @melissasonico.