Race to the Waves

I have been afraid of this fall. For years, I could feel 2025—the year that would split our family in two—coming for me.

When the three older kids would be on the east coast and my husband, youngest and I would be on the west coast. When our nest would be as empty as it will likely get.

I was nervous. I was worried.

Worried my youngest would have a tough adjustment to high school and an even tougher adjustment to a much quieter house.

Worried my college freshman would have a tough adjustment as that’s practically implied in being a college freshman.

Worried that because of this, and plenty of my own issues, I would have a tough adjustment too.

So I planted my feet and waited for September to push me to the ground.

But somehow fall arrived and I didn’t fall.

I had over-worried, as is my habit and passion.

My son started high school happily. He’s on time every day, unprecedented in his academic career. The drive to drop him off is like a ten minute meditation, with the Sing 2 soundtrack playing in the background. Everyday we pass the same tiny red car with an old-timey rack on top meant to fence in luggage. Something about passing this car at the same time and place everyday feels comforting, like the world could or might or should be okay.

When my son gets out of the car, he walks off into the movie set courtyard of his California high school with its outdoor tables and palm trees all by himself, also unprecedented. High school feels different with my youngest. This isn’t a place of academic stress or social risk for him. It’s unlikely anyone here could dent his outlook, unlikely anyone could irreparably slight or betray him, or make him anxious about his future.

My son rides home on a school bus, and waiting for him at the mouth of our driveway feels very fall, very east coast. He steps off and tells me his day was “gooooood.” He comes inside to play and watch shows and he doesn’t say anything about the quiet. I don’t think he hears it.

My daughter started college happily too. I had browbeat her into low expectations. Dorm life might feel weird at first. Roommates could be hard. A campus can feel unwelcoming before it feels like it’s yours. But I was wrong about all of it; or maybe I was right, low expectations being one of life’s best tools. Either way.

So, this left just me for the tough adjustment!

And I’m fine! Really. Just fine. Barely aware of the twigs and sticks poking through at the bottom of this emptier nest. They’re not sticking me. I’m not stuck.

I’m just sitting here in the middle of the kitchen in the middle of menopause in the middle of life writing. So happily.

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As part of my over-worry package, I had stressed about what we’d do when we didn’t really need to be at home on the weekends. My youngest doesn’t have high school obligations on Saturdays and Sundays. He doesn’t have practices or meetings or games. He, we are uncommitted, free to move around. So in early September, after his siblings all flew east for school and life, my husband and I took my son to Hawaii.

A distraction! From so much change! For him and for us. Because you can’t be sad in Hawaii. It’s made for happy. Even the state abbreviation is a friendly greeting: HI!

We landed on the big island at night. The lava felt lunar and the dark felt creepy, as if we were three astronauts on a short-staffed mission to outer space. Could this expedition be at all successful without our usual crew?

Because this island had always been for family vacations. Whole family—all the kids and often the grandparents too. Stores and stores of our shared memories sit out here in the middle of the ocean. They wait for our visits, anxious to be remembered.

My oldest taking her first steps in a rental house at the top of the hill, strides at the very beginning of our family. My older son chasing a mongoose on the lawn, getting a little too close to catching it. My younger daughter rapt at a lu’au watching the hula dancers, memorizing moves to perform beside my beach chair the next day. My youngest almost ripping a gecko in half, mistaking it for a toy; or at least not understanding what tearing might do.

My younger daughter’s blistering sunburn, the one we refer to as the Conference Call Special because my husband applied her sunscreen while on the phone and therefore missed most of her back.

The time we landed and my youngest spiked a fever and started seizing. I felt the island-ness of the island acutely—not just trapped in paradise, but possibly about to outstep the medical capabilities on this dot in the middle of the Pacific.

I remember going for a run at dusk after the rescue drugs worked and it seemed we wouldn’t need to go to the hospital this time. My older son, ten at the time, started out with me, got a cramp and I ran him back to the house. But I didn’t go inside. I decided I would just run forever through the lava rock, and perhaps convince myself I was somewhere else, maybe the moon. Someplace with less gravity.

It was dark when I got back to the rental. The kids had been concerned. Had been saying to my husband, “Mom’s been gone a long time now…”

But my husband hadn’t been worried. He’d known I’d needed to get away. And he’d known I’d come back.

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The next day, my son, husband and I drove to a neighboring resort, the one where we used to feed the koi that swam under the entry way. The hotel foyer’s been renovated and those fish are gone now, also memories.

All around us, there were white goats crossing the road, canvassing the rocks. We pointed them out to my son, but he didn’t care, barely looked their way. He doesn’t believe in giving extra attention just because something’s unusual. Rare should be respected, treated just like the commonplace, given a nothing to see here sort of deference.

Conversely, my son gives uncommon attention to the highly usual so he did meet and greets with each of the many geckos we spotted. We named the first we saw skittering along the bathtub rim Gary and talked to him throughout our stay. Was it always Gary? Who knows. My son thought so, told him we were from California, that there was a gecko on one of his shows.

“Gary, do you know the gecko on PJ Masks?” my son asked.

Gary nodded.

Later, we noticed another, much smaller gecko that couldn’t be mistaken for Gary by the sink. We named him Georgie and assumed he was Gary’s son.

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That first day, we swam in the ocean for so long that my son got his first real sunburn—not a Conference Call Special but a reapplication lapse because he and my husband spent so much time seeking colorful little fish in the cove down the shoreline. My son turned a swirled red, a color I would’ve once feared. But this time I decided he was sun-kissed just because the day had loved him.

After swimming, while rinsing at the outdoor showers, my son introduced himself to a dad and his sons. He ran through all the names in our family, including his 5,000-miles-away siblings, and then asked his favorite, “And you are…?”

The man told us his name and the names of the two sons standing by his legs, looking like smaller trees that had sprouted at the base of a larger one. He motioned towards the water, and told us the name of the kid who was still out on a floating raft in the water. He described this son as neuro spicy. He described himself the same way too. We assured him that neuro spicy was one of our favorite flavors, that it was the very season and reason we were even having this exchange.

My son was bothered by something though. Someone missing. He asked, “But where is their mother?”

“Oh, she died last year. She had breast cancer. She was sick for a long time.” I looked at the sons again, neither of them even a teenager yet. Little bodies in swimsuits having a beach day, and yet tanned skin hiding little hearts that have been robbed and broken.

My son wouldn’t know that people often say “I’m sorry” in this situation. Sorry is for stepping on toes or spilling juice. Sorry is too small, too off the mark for huge loss. Better to name it. “That is sad,” he offered, looking the man right in the eye.

And better to relate, “My Boppa died in April. And my friend Brady died in 2024.”

“Oh that is sad too.” the man said. The best people in this world understand the improv of life. They match you, they honor your perspective, they don’t say sorry when they understand you don’t think it fits.

The man told us of a community memorial they’d gone to shortly after his wife died—everyone mourning someone of their own, but together. On a beach, with candles, and a bonfire. Surrounded by a sea that offers both a place to play and also a place to deposit grief. I amend my thought: Hawaii is so good at happy, and it’s better at sadness too.

As the world gets less and less nice, we’re reminded: you never know what someone might be going through. We should give leeway, assume benevolence. My son’s approach is different. He doesn’t wonder. He just asks. Or seems to sense. He finds out what people are going through.

Without his lead, we would’ve rinsed our feet in silence. Maybe said a Hawaiian license plate HI! as we turned our ankles under the spray and let a connection wash down the drain.

Instead the three of us climbed the stairs back up to the parking lot with something to keep.

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At dinner, we sit in the outdoor restaurant, a ukulele floating the soft air, the beach below done with its day’s work, umbrellas closed, chairs stacked. My husband and I each with a cocktail. My son with a pepperoni pizza and milk.

We ask him if he had fun today? Did he like the ocean? What color fish had he seen?

He has our undivided attention now. The spotlight many youngest might fear, but the beam he basks in.

Or so we keep telling ourselves.

My son takes a small bite along the ridgeline of a pizza slice, careful to avoid the crust. Crust isn’t pizza. Pizza is pizza. On his plate sits a pile of crusts looking like bones after a predator’s kill.

He gives us our answers: yes, fun; yes, the ocean’s great; um, yellow?

And then asks, “Next time we come can we please bring my siblings?”

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My son used to hate the ocean, that salty flavor and rolling churn was not for him. He would only swim in pools. And that predictability and confinement felt right, better to be in a controllable amount of water, with a visible bottom and defined edges. Terrible things can happen in water.

But this trip, my son spent hours in the ocean, and only lovely things happened. The three of us bobbing in perfectly temperatured water, with perfectly sized waves, the sandy bottom under us obvious and pristine.

Around us the beach lightly populated. Families with very young children, the kind not yet in school. And older couples. But no other teens. My son possibly the only teen visiting the island that weekend. A rare bird mid-migration.

Every few minutes, my son would swim out towards the horizon and call over his shoulder, “Race you to the waves!”

I’d look beyond him, see the water cresting in regular intervals, stretching out in front of him.

Waves to infinity, no real finish line.

Just like every race.

Just like life.

Race ya❤️

Jen.

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