Nautical Dusk

Ellene Glenn Moore

Moored Outside Menemsha Harbor on the Evening of my 30th Birthday

The light lingers long after that final pinprick of molten sun disappears behind the water. It stretches through the darkbright of civil dusk and through the brightdark of nautical dusk and through it all my daughter cries and cries from where Andrew and I have laid her down to sleep in the v-berth. I come to her periodically to soothe her malcontent, to sing again her bedtime song and nuzzle her in my arms, but still she has not nodded off. My brothers- and sister-in-law, our cohort and crew on this birthday indulgence of mine, surprise me with slices of blueberry pie from a shack in Menemsha—they know my preference for birthday pie over birthday cake—and a bottle of sparkling wine procured and pirated onto the boat before we left Nantucket. But I find I can’t enjoy them, or don’t want to, until my daughter falls asleep. I am too much set on edge by her cries.

For some months now, Andrew and I have enjoyed the much-sought status of “sleeping through the night” that all new parents discuss with worshipful hope. This wasn’t always the case. For most of her first year my daughter had to be rocked to sleep and laid gently in her crib, before hastening to wake every hour-and-a-half through the night, crying out to be held or nursed. And because Andrew had morning meetings, a commute, and a paycheck, while I had nothing but breastmilk and guilt, I fielded all night-wakings. Naptimes, too, were a nightmare on aching feet. The wind comes in from the sound, my daughter cries, and I remember: I stand with her wrapped against my body until she falls asleep and then slowly lower her, little arms still pinned inside the wrap, into the crib. She wakes almost as soon as I exit the room. I pick her up to shush her, jiggling her a bit in my arms in a vain effort to mimic womb movements, but still she wails. I do what my therapist and the internet (my other, more judgmental therapist) tell me to do when I feel my frustration mount and put my daughter in her crib before walking away to cool off. I sit on the porch with my ears covered, but I am now hallucinating her screams and imagining her fear of being abandoned and I feel ashamed, so I return to take her out of the crib and set her on her playmat and walk to the next room to cool down, but she can still see me and now that she is crawling she understands that she can follow me, which is both better and worse for her because for some reason I keep walking away. This makes no sense to her. Ma mamama she says. MAMA MA MAMAMA! Maybe I can’t hear her because she isn’t screaming loudly enough. An easy fix. She trails me from the kitchen to the bedroom. I exit to the living room and she pivots, sitting back on her heels. This is very strange; mamamamama was here, so I came in here, too. But now mamama mama mamamama is over there! She wails and tries again to crawl after me. I return to the kitchen and take a deep breath. She is a siren. Bedroom again. I ball up my hands and drag a knuckle back and forth across my forehead before pounding the fleshy side of my fist into the top of the dresser four times. Now the dog takes up the mantle of protecting her house by barking at the front door—it works because the erstwhile intruder has stopped after only four raps at the door. Amazing! She is a valiant dingbat. My daughter reaches my leg and foists herself up, her tenacity rewarded at last. I rest her on my hip and I cry as earnestly as she does.

Although I know she is fine and I know she will sleep and I know that my intermittent attempts to soothe her will eventually outlast her need for them, hearing her cry out every time I set her down in the v-berth ignites a still-raw part of me that recalls the terror and exhaustion of those first months. During that time, I developed a kind of myopic mania around the topic of her sleep, convinced that I had the power to fix the problem if only I could do everything right. I bought books and watched videos, I downloaded apps and tracked her sleep to the minute as my desperation and exhaustion and shame coalesced into an impotent rage. I finally came to Andrew and said to him, I am not okay, cracking open the veneer of serene motherhood and exposing the turmoil beneath that frightened me so much. We made a plan: I bought noise-cancelling headphones and sat outside on the porch at bedtime, and Andrew took over all middle-of-the-night wakings. We were amazed at how quickly she came around to sleeping through the night once I and my frustrations were removed from the equation. I was amazed at how quickly I recovered myself once I was compelled to let go of my self-ordained duty to fix what is broken. It rose off me like steam. Such is the trial of parenthood, or of my version of it, or of my every endeavor. Perfection resists my best efforts, to no one’s chagrin but my own.

As my daughter’s cries fade in and out, I can hear the crowd of summer folk murmuring and laughing across the water. And as if the notion of gathering each evening to watch the sun set over the sound were not quite perfectly lovely enough, someone on the beach has brought paper lanterns to light and let float over us, over the water and possibly all the way to mainland—who knows? The first few fail in the wind, plummeting into the darkening ripples like gannets plunge-diving for food. Or like exhausted passerines, I can’t help but think, blown into the sea by a spring storm. It happens like this, sometimes: a too-big wind that jets perching birds over the endless waters, with no branch in sight. 

My daughter was born in the middle of a spring storm. Water droplets vortexed off our windshield like stars in warp speed as Andrew sped us north on I-95 to the hospital, where I exited the car with several bags of vomit. Tied down, it seemed to me at the time, to the hospital bed itself, I rocked from side to side to escape my pain. The charge nurse glanced periodically out the window, watching the shadows of palm trees whip back and forth in the wind and congratulating herself out loud on her plans to escape this bad weather for a weekend trip to Exuma, just as soon as her shift was through. When it was over, I held my wet daughter in my bare arms and the stifled sun struggled to gleam over our mutual exhaustion.

Some days I feel as though my exhaustion has consumed everything in my life. My joy, my relationships—myself, I’d like to say, if only mothers were allowed to say such things. Certainly my work has receded into the distance, supplanted by the myriad and imminent needs of an entire human being that now exists outside of myself. Where once on a trip of this length I would have set aside daily protected time to write in my travel log (a precious habit I picked up after reading Bashō’s Narrow Road to the Interior), so far I have but one futile page, scribbled the morning of our first day under sail: 

Unpacking provisions in our slip in Portsmouth, someone leaves a bag of our trash on top of the dockside step stool that sits next to our neighbor’s boat. Because I am consigned to deck with my daughter as others busy themselves around me, I see our neighbor regard the trash bag, standing upright against the steel lifelines, as he ponders how he is going to step down from his vessel. I, too, regard our own step stool with my daughter in my arms. Our concerns are only slightly different. A cigarette smolders, hanging at the corner of his already lopsided mouth. Baseball cap with a ratty brim, knees scabbed over in calcified lesions like packs of salt crust over fish in a slow oven. He is golden in that attractive but slightly off-putting way of people whose provenance is the sea, and perpetually hunched against the promise of tall water. Finally, he clamps down on the cigarette and enunciates through his teeth, “Can you remove your garbage from my step, please?” I make sure to smile at him many, many times before we cast off. When he offers a knife of advice as the boys fumble with the shore power connection, I catch his eye one last time and smile hugely, saying “Thanks, Friend.” He turns away quickly, his jaw tightening into an embarrassed grin that’s between him and the sea and sun.

This will be the record of this week. My daughter, garbage, and a perverse desire to be well-thought-of by someone I’ll never see again. In the months after my daughter was born, my mother asked me if I was writing. Of course I wasn’t. “Oh, you really ought to,” she blithely authorized. “This time in your life will be so rich with inspiration!” Even now that my daughter’s sleep has become more dependable, I hesitate to start anything in that brittle and occasionally brief moment of silence that follows singing to her and laying her down to sleep in a dark room—where she may stay, only if her mouth doesn’t hurt and she doesn’t awaken afraid of the dark and her feet don’t get tangled in her blanket. It is a question of deciding what has value. Of deciding where and to what extent I will be present. Perhaps this is what writers mean when they dwell on the relationship between content and form; my work now takes the shape of the space I have to write it. 

I am aware that I think often of my own mother, an enterprise which is built-in to the design of motherhood. In particular, I recall coming across a box in the hallway bookshelf of my childhood home. When opened, it revealed stack upon stack of square, palm-sized cards, each depicting a Chinese character and, on its reverse, the English translation. When I asked my mother about it she pursed her lips and said, “Oh, yes. Those were mine. I was learning Chinese before you were born.”

Those are startling words: before you were born. Immediately I comprehend that I am sifted into a hierarchy, fixed in time as a fulcrum. I will tell you that the birth of my daughter carved a canyon right down the middle of my life. Two billion years of decrement realized in ten hours and fourteen minutes. Listen, it is a canyon. On one side my most precious commodity, and only limitation, was ability. My capacity to create something of value was synonymous with actually creating it, because I had only myself to blame or praise. On this side of the canyon, my most precious commodity is time. I wake up before my daughter (maybe, if she’s not too hot, if the day is overcast but not raining, if the dog doesn’t get spooked by the neighbor’s car door) and try to get some morning pages in. I dry her butt, get her dressed, and breastfeed her in bed while I check email (maybe, if she doesn’t bite my nipple or attempt to remove my hair from my head). Then: cheerios, banana, feed the dog, yank my daughter’s hand out of the water bowl, pick up toys, put away board books, change her diaper, tear open a snack bar, kiss her fat cheeks, retrieve my shoes from the trash can, yank her hand away from the dog’s butt, pick up toys, retrieve a book from the dog’s water bowl, attach her to my back and walk the dog, cheese, beans, crackers, milk, much of it on the floor, resign myself to the dog having a much more varied diet than is probably recommended, pick up toys, yank a delicious nest of dog hair from her mouth, story time, lullaby time, nap time. I sit in bed, which is also my desk, and return to those morning pages (maybe, if my daughter isn’t going through a growth spurt, if she doesn’t suddenly decide she despises her blanket, if she doesn’t fall asleep on the side of her crib that is directly in the path of cold air blowing from the AC register). It’s 1pm. Which is not a comfort, because the time that settles into the corners around that which is necessary is as brittle as it is brief. The same can be said for me, displaced, settling into the corners around that which is necessary.

That is a startling word: necessary. Already I have forgotten my point about deciding what has value, about choosing where to be present. For a year and a half my daughter and I have existed as an ecosystem of two, lovely and dyadic and necessary. But there are other ecosystems, other shapes and spaces into which I would like to pour myself. That is the true source of exhaustion: lingering at the edge of the canyon. I’m not looking for a bridge. I’m looking for a signpost that doesn’t point to a sheaf of papers stuffed in the bottom of the hallway bookshelf, as remote and startling as an unfamiliar tongue. What I want to say is this: in motherhood, the most perfunctory questions are elevated to acts of audacity, because every choice is zero-sum. Every moment I turn towards my work, or towards pie and prosecco, or towards those paper lanterns that now brighten and diminish across this expansive dusk, I am not turning towards my daughter. I want to tell her, “Look. Look, I am not forgetting what has value or where to be present. You must not forget, either.” But I cannot, because she is mercifully asleep now, and there is, in fact, pie and prosecco to be had, and “Happy Birthday” with bad harmony, and paper lanterns drifting, like my daughter’s dreams, to where I cannot comprehend.