To the Mother Whose Toddler Wrecked Her Castle
Your family of four appeared to be socially distancing with itself. While you and your toddler sat near the waves, your husband and the four-year-old parked themselves on the bleached, velvety-dry sand that scalds.
With a blanket and a blue umbrella, my family had staked our claim to the right of you. We spent the necessary eons fussing over hats and sunscreen, then grabbed hands and screamed across the burning sand, to the ocean. I noticed you only later, as my girls dug trenches and the sun dried my legs, pale from months of sheltering in place.
I confess, I watched you longer than a stranger should. I admired your miraculously cellulite-free butt. I marveled at your swimsuit, a black two-piece connected by a buckle that clipped over your navel. But mostly, Vacationing Mom, I was mesmerized by how miserable you seemed.
“Why are you trying to tear down Mommy’s castle?” you said flatly, your rear on the damp sand. “Stop it, Connor. Stop tearing down Mommy’s castle.”
Connor, the wild-haired toddler, looked baffled. And also hell-bent on putting his hardy foot into the mound of sand you’d finished in five minutes.
“That’s mean. Stop it. It’s mean to tear down Mommy’s castle.”
Connor did not look mean. He looked exactly how toddlers do when they feel nothing but their immediate present. Open, curious, awe-struck by every quotidian wonder.
“Stop it.” The flatness of your voice was more heartbreaking than had you shouted. “Stop tearing down Mommy’s castle.”
Connor heard you. Connor’s body could not listen. Your castle was destroyed. You sat beside the sandpile with a numbness I know all too well.
Ten years ago, before I’d carried two humans separately in my body, I would have judged you. Before I let my body become a doorway for those humans, and then a buffet, and a bed, and a whole host of other things my body had never before been for others, I would have thought: Bad mom.
But nine years into the role, I know how consuming, how depleting it can be. Yesterday morning, I sat beside my seven-year-old during an hour when nobody else was awake and drew a conch shell with her. This likely sounds pleasant. As soon as I drew my first line, she declared it all wrong. Demanded a re-draw.
I, too, went numb. I had woken early to seek a sliver of solitude in a crowded quarantine. But upon blinking back sleep at 6 a.m., on the eleventy-hundredth day of zero childcare, I found my girl’s eyes alarmingly open. “Good morning!” she piped. “Can we draw together?” And so we did.
Let the kid tear down your freaking pile of sand, lady, I would have thought ten years ago. Join in the sabotage. Have some fun. You can make another in minutes.
But context is everything. And I know how complex battles of parenthood and identity play out on the small, sad terrain of things like sandcastles.
I tried the other day to make a drip castle. It took persistence, the right ratio of sand to water. Overall, your efforts had resembled a mound of poo, but in one glorious spot, the sand cascaded like artful icing. Maybe that castle was the only thing you’d made in weeks—other than the PB&Js, and the beds, and the agendas for the Zoom meetings you squeezed in between Lego pieces. Maybe you had dreams of making other things once. Sculptures, or movies, or just spreadsheets for a tiny pipe-dream business selling handmade soaps. Maybe you channeled your latent yearnings into a foot-tall castle.
Or maybe you’re just unhappy. I don’t know.
“When I carried my two kids in my body, I expected my cervix would one day open, but I never expected the social netting of childcare and public school to split open, too.”
Your husband had long arms, a trucker hat, facial hair that looked less like a beard than a bad week. He called out to you from beneath the umbrella.
“I can’t hear you,” you replied, your face a cold plate. Some might call it “Resting Bitch Face,” but it would be fairer to call it “My Soul, My Inner Source of Love and Light, Has Been Freeze-Dried into a Rock-Hard Raisin Face.”
He tried again, speaking sentences that were warbled by waves and wind. It was fascinating, how utterly inaudible he was.
You were not fascinated. You looked pissed. You said, “It is literally impossible for me to hear you right now.” You turned your back to him, toward the waves. Your family remained socially distanced.
The nuclear family can be a beautiful thing until it breaks. And it breaks for many private reasons. But it also breaks if the world sits too hard on it.
When I carried my two kids in my body, I expected my cervix would one day open, but I never expected the social netting of childcare and public school to split open, too. We have fallen through it, all of us, landing isolated on our own sandy islands.
A few weeks ago, I too said to my husband with irritation: “I can’t hear you!” because he was calling out from the living room, and I was in the kitchen, and not a single person other than us had cared for our kids in five months, and there are sometimes too many rooms between people, and not enough space.
Vacationing Mom, did you know that the very first Christians sold all their possessions, pooled their resources, and gave to each other what they needed? I mean to say, much to the dismay of certain suited politicians who preach self-reliance wrapped within In God We Trust, even the original Jesus-followers knew: a single family can’t deliver the weight of all wellbeing.
I wish we could pool our resources. Shrink the space between our blankets, talk bathing suit styles while our children distract each other with play. Or I’d watch your boys for a bit while you and your husband take a long stroll down the beach. You could amble toward the cape, where a lighthouse once stood. It crumbled just four years after the last century’s pandemic. But it once sent silent yet unmistakable messages of flashing light across leagues of choppy ocean.
Your family eventually merged camps. As the sun tipped over its high-noon height, you broke your social distancing, and your husband and four-year-old joined you and the toddler near the receding waves. When the “Planet Ice” truck came around, you bought four Styrofoam cups.
You huddled facing one another, two parents and two children. None of you smiled. But you each faced the invisible center—the space between that binds but doesn’t quite bridge. Spooning orange and red and yellow ice into your mouths, each of you was silent. Or at least you seemed to me. Upwind, I couldn’t quite hear you.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Heather Lanier is the author of Raising a Rare Girl, a New York Times Editors Choice. Her essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Wall Street Journal, Brevity, Salon, The Sun, and elsewhere. She is an assistant professor of Writing Arts at Rowan University. Her TED talk has been viewed over two million times.
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Header photo by Dallas Reedy.