Night Swim, Brittany Gibbons x DALL-E 2
— 13 →
I had thought the number thirteen was unlucky. Each thirteenth day of a month I would drag myself out of bed knowing something “bad” would happen, and I’d look for signs to validate my suspicions. Like how my mom and I would always get into an argument or a fight and I’d end up sobbing in my room.
But then I realized thirteen isn’t unlucky, and my mom and I hadn’t fought because of that number. We fought on those days because we had a high chance of fighting on any given day.
← 12 →
When I was twelve, I heard my mom scream from the bathroom. I ran to her. She opened the door, red faced, then grabbed me by the scruff of the neck.
As she pulled me to the sink, I regretted coming to help. Earlier in the day, she had locked herself in her room with the lights off for hours, which meant she would be in a mood. I should have known to stay away.
“Do you see this mess?” she asked.
I smelled faint bleach fumes, or maybe it was Pine-Sol, the aromatic remnants from when I had cleaned earlier. As I tried to squirm from her grip, the friction from her hand burned my neck. Unable to break free, I stopped and said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, I don’t see a mess.”
I answered honestly because, according to Mom, it was one of my most admirable characteristics. Being twelve, though, it probably came out as teenage angst. And that teenage angst is why she put pressure onto my head and forced my face into the counter to “help give a closer look.” At least this is my rationale, because otherwise her actions seem so illogical. She released my head when she realized the mess she was pointing out was being covered by blood spewing from my nose.
← 9.8 →
My mom is an accounting clerk, and I remember her getting ready for work before the break of dawn every day. With a nineties perm and a crisp power suit skirt, she’d grab her purse and kiss me on the cheek. Then, armed with a calculator, she would slip sneakers over her black nylons, loop the backs of her black high heels through her fingers, and head out the door into the chilly morning.
When she came back in the evening, she’d leave her heels and jacket in her room, untuck her blouse and go to the kitchen to cook dinner. I’d linger, but then sneak to her bedroom as she chopped onions. I’d slip on her heels, then stumble to the calculator on her desk and type random numbers and functions. Watching the flashing digital screen fluctuate, I’d rub my chin, pretending to be my mom at work until she called me for dinner.
Over dinner sometimes, as the fragrance of sautéed onions wafted through the house, Mom would recite math problems to me. I’d sit for a few moments after she posed a question, pondering a solution. Then I’d blurt out an answer. It was like a game, and for every correct answer we’d beam, mirroring each other’s grins.
I had tried to predict when this version of my mom, the “nice mom,” would appear. I assumed this was an equation I could control, and the variables were how sweet, funny, smart, and likable I was. If I could increase those, I could increase the time this mom would visit. But after testing my theory for years, the results—a bloody nose, shouting, screaming—showed me my variables were incorrect.
I realized it didn’t matter what I did because, even if we got along, her mood could drop at any minute. Almost like an invisible force had acted upon her. Something as natural as gravity at 9.8 meters per second squared, pulling her, and me, down. Depending on the moment the strength of this force could fluctuate, and Mom would determine I was too loud, too quiet, too fast, too slow, too close, too far, too this, or too that.
← 5 →
In the middle of an argument, I tossed my hands up, sighed, and asked Mom how we could stop fighting. She said, “You seem unhappy about our relationship. When I don’t feel good, like how you seem to feel now, I go to therapy. Would you like to go too? It’s helped me recover from the traumas in my life, and maybe it can help you. It makes me sad you don’t feel good because I’m doing what I can to be a good mom and I want you to always feel loved.”
Well, that’s how I interpret her words when thinking about them as an adult. Instead, she actually said, “Should I take you to a shrink? If you feel so bad, maybe there’s something wrong with you. You’re ungrateful and don’t know how good you have it. I can tell you stories about my mom that’ll make your skin crawl. Or maybe I can tell you about foster care. You’ll never complain again.” Even though she’d threaten to tell me her stories, she would stop there, a barrier only she could cross.
Sometimes on drives together, I’d grab her knobbly, blue veined hand from the stick shift, gently massage the meaty part of her palm, and ask her to tell me about what had happened. But she’d shake her head. “Later,” she’d say. Then, we’d scream, fight, cry, have dinner, exchange math problems, scream, fight, cry, repeat.
I remember, the day after Mom had smashed my nose into the counter, she shared her Edy’s chocolate ice cream and let me stay up later than normal watching television. With a chilly bowl of half melted dessert in my lap, I sat alone on the chintzy couch in the dark living room and flipped through the channels. My eyes had glazed over as the flashing lights created a strobe effect. I spooned myself some ice cream and, while savoring the sweetness, I realized how Mom had used her accounting background to manage our relationship.
In accounting there are 5 categories: assets, liabilities, equity, debts, and surpluses all backed by a basic form of currency. This sweetness Mom offered, the ice cream and relaxed rules, were her form of currency. And she used this currency to pay debts. In this method, she had made a key assumption that her anger was only a debt if it were visible to others, like a bloody nose. I like to think she felt guilty and wanted to rectify her actions. Realistically though, she may have just wanted my silence and complicity. I gave it and, by default, she became the accountant of our relationship, the sole arbiter of debts and surpluses.
← 2.71828 →
With all the computing power we have in the modern world, predicting the weather is still an intractable task. Yet, there remains a community of meteorologists who have dedicated themselves to discretizing and characterizing parcels of air in an effort to understand the essence of nature. Something attracted me to this wild sense of optimism, so I chose meteorology as my undergraduate degree in college. Also, after trying to predict my mom’s moods for years, I think there was a part of me that felt at home in this field.
In my meteorological courses, I learned about 2.7128, an irrational number, also known as Euler’s number. At first, I thought irrational meant numbers are unreasonable. But it just means they cannot be written as a simple fraction.
My professor told us that scientists and mathematicians use Euler’s number essentially in every field. One common application is carbon-dating with radioactive decay, or the measure of time it takes an element to lose half the mass of its radioactive components. This decay happens when an element, or a parent isotope, releases nuclear energy. It becomes a different isotope with less radioactivity, also known as a daughter isotope. This implies the daughter, even if still radioactive, is more stable than their parent counterpart. This measurement helps identify how old rocks are, which is important for writing the history of Earth.
I’ve wondered if you could apply the same concept of radioactive decay to the effects of trauma. Each type of trauma would have a different half-life. Maybe abuse would have a half-life of fifty years. So, year after year, while the effect of trauma decays in a parent, they impart just a little damage to everything surrounding them. Those closest would accumulate trauma which would have a half-life of its own, repeating the cycle, with each generation less traumatized than the last. Just like my mom with me, and maybe this explains what happened with her mom with her.
← 2 →
Sunlight poured in through the room when I woke sprawled across the bed. Matt, my partner of about a year, puttered in the kitchen. I looked at the clock, 2 PM.
He heard the sheets rustling and joined me. Sitting on the bed, he leaned over and brushed the frizzy hair out of my face. He asked if I wanted to go for a walk through the park to people-watch and get some fresh air. Such an innocuous request, something you would ask someone you love, who you wanted to spend time with.
But I didn’t want to go. I thought to myself, Why did he want this out of me? If I say no, he’s going to get upset, everyone always gets upset with me. Well, maybe Matt won’t get upset. But why do I always have to do things to make other people happy? He probably thinks I’m too tired, too depressed, I’m too this or too that.
I pulled the black comforter up to my chin, “I don’t want to go. Maybe, I just want to stay in bed, alone.” I picked at the pilling fabric as he looked at me, unsure what to say.
←1.2929→
Buoyancy means the ability of something to float. Objects with lower density rise, higher density sink. In the atmosphere buoyancy can cause parcels of air to float up to cooler temperatures. At these cooler temperatures gaseous water vapor condenses into liquid onto microscopic particles of dust and pollution. If enough vapor accumulates on a particle, water droplets form. The density of air, at 1.2929 kilograms per meter cubed, is almost one thousand times less than the density of water. This means those droplets, the parts of vapor that had been squeezed out, will sink and fall to the surface as rain, landing on our homes, rushing into rivers and oceans, and running through our taps.
This is what I had thought about as I swam freestyle alone in the rain at a local outdoor pool. Back and forth, back and forth, through the blue water. Taking a deep breath of air, I saw the dark cloudy sky speckled with the reflections of countless misty droplets falling to the ground. Back and forth, back and forth, the surface undulated with ripples from the rain. Steam rose off the water. Back and forth, waves from my kicks and strokes ricocheted against the walls. Back and forth, through my blue tinted goggles I saw the red digital clock beckoning me to remember my day-to-day life. I gasped for air. Back and forth, back and forth, faster through the blue water.
Cheeks flushed, lungs burning, I took a breather at the edge of the pool. With each deep breath, I felt my body rise, just a little, as the microscopic sacs in my lungs filled with air, like tiny life preservers keeping me afloat. Then I took a final deep breath, held it, leaned forward and let go of the edge of the pool. Cool air kissed my shoulder blades as I bobbed on the surface in a dead man’s float position. Then, I released the air from my lungs, a forest of bubbles obscuring my view. Denser than water and losing buoyancy, I sunk. Two feet, five feet, nine feet, the pressure mounted.
Suspended just above the pool floor in the watery silence, my arms were covered with pearl-like bubbles. Knowing they were less dense than water, I wondered what those bubbles were doing following me down there.
I looked upward. The surface was like a tempered glass ceiling. Beyond that, the dark speckled sky was a distorted canvas. My ears hurt from the pressure but staying there suspended at the bottom of the pool seemed like an option, inertia making it easy to remain where I was.
But my lungs demanded relief and a visceral response kicked in. I felt claustrophobic and my heart raced. Then, I pumped my arms. I kicked my legs, fighting gravity to get to the surface. So distant, so unattainable. I imagined those tiny life preservers in my lungs filled with water, my purplish, waterlogged body having no heartbeat, sinking.
I gasped when I broke the surface, and a warm wave of endorphins flowed through me. As if with every kick all the anxiety, every thought of insufficiency, had been left at the bottom of the pool. I craved this feeling and lightness. But ever since my mother and I had stopped talking, that feeling had become more and more infrequent. Every day I felt like I was surrounded and trapped by my thoughts, an element that could either suffocate or nourish me.
←1→
In my first session, my therapist asked me about my mom to get to know me better. I said, “I haven’t really talked with her for the past few years. I feel like I should though.” I paused. She paused. Then more words and stories tumbled from my mouth:
“People say hate is a strong word, but I think it’s the right word for how I feel about Mom.”
“I remember screaming at my mom as a teen, calling her a bitch. Another time I kicked a hole in the wall during an argument. My mom is pretty bad. I’m not much better.”
With more and more stories I exposed how my emotions had overflowed, radiated beyond me in half-lives, toward my mom and others, and then had turned inward as a form of shame. Shame, because I was uncontrollably angry. Shame because I couldn’t resolve our issues. Shame because I was ungrateful, or I was too this or too that. Shame because if my own mother wouldn’t love me, who could?
As I told my therapist my story, I started gasping, taking shallow breaths. She asked me to take a moment to experience these feelings. Then, she told me about deep breaths and how they activate the vagus nerve, which extends from the abdomen to the brain stem. The activation then causes a series of chemical reactions telling the heart rate to slow down.
She told me, “Try it. Breathe in.”
Breathe in, I thought.
Thump-thump. More air.
Thump.
Thump.
I
float.
Those tiny life-preservers keeping me alive in more ways than one.
In later sessions, my therapist taught me about “radical acceptance,” which means to accept life as it is. Applying this concept to myself, I learned to accept the intractability of my mom’s equation. And like a parcel of air releasing water vapor as droplets, I could give up trying to find the solution. I could drop it and, by leaving it there in a tiny puddle in that room, I no longer had to optimize for two equations. I only had to optimize for one — mine.
0→
Wrapped in a blanket on the blue and white crosshatch couch in our house, I combed my fingers through Matt’s black hair as he napped, his head on my thighs and mouth half open about to drool onto my pajama pants. The gas furnace hummed next to us as I glanced toward the fireplace mantel at the book I wanted to read. Just next to the book, I could also see a crumpled piece of paper, half the size of my palm. From memory, I quietly recited the five words I had written on that scrap paper several years earlier:
Flexibility
Growth
Love
Stability
Family
These are my life values, the framework of my own equation, which now includes eating poke for lunch in a dog park to gossip with a friend. Swimming several times a week. Taking a walk around the block just to smell the neighbor’s lavender. Or letting Matt nap in my lap, even though I want to read a book. A part of my equation also includes talking with my mom, but only occasionally.
I always plan to video chat with her on Mother’s Day, her birthday, Christmas, or New Year’s. But it never happens. I end those days taking deep breaths, reminding myself I haven’t failed and that I’ll call her eventually, on a day when I feel good and ready to see her, and hear her voice.
When I do call, sometimes my number will be blocked. And that’s okay because other times she will pick up. And when she does, her dark brown hair will be entirely grey because she’s stopped dying it. Her voice will be raspier with age, the smoking from her younger years catching up to her. She’ll have to wear glasses just to see me in the video. She’ll have a few more forehead wrinkles, and her neck will sag a little from the effects of gravity. I wonder if she’ll notice the new wrinkles around my eyes.
After our last call, I did a calculation. Assuming we maintain this frequency of communication, and assuming my mother lives the typical life expectancy, we have thirteen hours left to chat with each other. A friend once told me how thirteen hours was a sign of our unluckiness. But I don’t feel very unlucky. My estimations tell me I still have time left with my mom. I don’t feel very lucky either, because I wish I had more. •
••••••
Special note: If you enjoyed this “Countdown” essay, please also check out Eula Biss’s essay, “Pain Scale”. It is an incredible work of art and was an inspiration for this essay.