Captain Reverend Mother

When my youngest was three, he sat down at the kitchen table in the house we had just moved into, boxes stacked along every wall, and told me he missed me.

This confused me, since we had spent the past two days side by side, unearthing our worldly possessions from their temporary cardboard homes, so I asked what he meant.

He said, “I missed you from before. When you were on the ship.”

The ship was an aircraft carrier, the assignment I reported to months after he was born. For the first two and a half years of his life, the Navy decided when I was home. I appeared for a few weeks, learned his new words, and left before the next ones came in. He bonded with my spouse, who is better with small children than I am anyway, and who had the advantage of staying put.

“I missed you from before.” He was three. I have been carrying that sentence around for eight years. I likely will carry it for life. At 58 years old, I only have a few regrets. Missing his infancy and toddlerhood is at the top. (Also on the list is not having mastered another language and not raising my children to be fluently bilingual.)

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The only thing my youngest wanted for his birthday this year was to see the Blue Grotto, so we took him to Capri. (BTW I took a page from the Italians and spent August off the page.)

We went first thing in the morning and had the water nearly to ourselves. You transfer from the big boat to a little rowboat in open water, then lie flat in the bottom while the rower reads the swell at a hole in the cliff barely bigger than the boat.

I lay there running the operational risk management checklist, because that is what we military are trained to do. My son lay there delighted. Our rower made his own calculations, by heart, after 36 years of this, and somewhere in the trough of a wave he hauled and shot us through the gap.

Better writers than I have spent hundreds of years on this cave, and I totally get why. Your eyes adjust to the dark above and there below is a blue you have never seen anywhere, the whole sea lit from underneath.

We got five minutes, side by side, my son’s face lit blue from below. That face was the birthday present, and it was mine. Our rower sang O Sole Mio, because of course he did, and the acoustics turned him into one of the Three Tenors.

Leaving, you are suspended in that blue one moment, the most womb-like light I expect to see this side of heaven, and pushed through the stone passage the next, into a glare so white it stings.

As we emerged, I thought, this is the closest I will ever get, as a grown adult, to being born. And the child beside me, blinking in the same sudden light, came into the world through me eleven years ago, and here we were, pushed out into the brightness together. My heart swelled like the sea itself.

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My youngest plays soccer/football. That is his sport, his tribe, and his identity (as evidenced by 95% of his wardrobe being footballers’ jerseys). A classmate, also on the soccer team, talked him into trying out for the swim team too. I was thrilled beyond reasonable proportion, because I swam and this means something that belongs to the two of us. Plus, hours of exercise and car rides replace screen time, hallelujah!

During one of these drives, he explained “The Avengers” to me. All of it, twenty-five minutes there and twenty-five back. Scarlet Witch and what her power costs her, and Loki, who is complicated, and Doctor Strange, who holds more power in his fingertips than Thanos, a point he made with real heat (as though I might argue?!), and the six stones versus the two, and who is dead, and who is only pretend dead, and who came back, and how. He has seen four movies. The fifth arrives in December. He is counting the days. So am I.

Most of the plot went over my head. I asked follow-up questions to keep him going. He corrected me occasionally and was visibly pleased.

Somewhere around minute forty of our conversation, it occurred to me what he was doing. Here was a story with years of backstory I had missed, and a boy determined that I catch up on all of it. He was doing for me what I cannot do for him. Filling in the gap. In his world, missing the first two and a half movies is a fixable problem.

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There is no recap of his early years for me to stream. What I have instead is a rowboat built for two, a swim team, a car, and a kid who decided I am worth explaining the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe to, in order, with corrections.

The Navy owed us two and a half years. Water in its various forms has been making the payments.