Open Swim

On Friday, we’ll load up the car with two weeks worth of can’t-live-without essentials and head north to Wellfleet, Massachusetts for our annual Cape Cod pilgrimage. For me, a New Englander by birth, this trip is like returning home. For that reason, it’s always a tricky mix of heaven and hell: half Fountain of Youth serum, half poison.

Last year, the seven-hour drive morphed into a kind of psychological labor much more torturous than my physical delivery of Jack. Early in the trip, I began experiencing panic attacks so intense it felt like my psyche had been drawn and quartered. None of my usual coping mechanisms (yoga, deep breathing, talk therapy) made the smallest dent in my anxiety. My soul hurt. And unlike its physical counterpart, this psychological labor promised no visible end. I couldn’t even beg for an epidural.

A year (and much therapy) later, I finally understand the root of this hurt. To understand it, I’ve had to rewind to one of my earliest childhood traumas: a one-week cross-country trip to Colorado that forever altered the course of my life. When I was 2 ½ years old—the age Jack is now—my otherwise obsessive parents sold their house, packed all of their belongings in storage, and headed west for the fresh start they both desperately needed. They left on a Monday morning and by Saturday arrived back in New Hampshire, homeless, unshowered and crazy-drunk on coffee and fear. They’d spent exactly two hours in Colorado before my dad had swung the car around and headed back east.

If my parents had been able to successfully negotiate the emotional hurdles of that trip, perhaps Colorado could have become a kind of pristine Wellfleet for our family. Instead, my parents fled, and when they did, skewered every last hope and dream. Meanwhile, I returned to my birthplace gestating a parasite I’d picked up in a cup of truck-stop water; for the next year, I slipped in and out of hospitals, where I vomited little chunks of blood and wasted away to my infant weight. For both body and soul, that trip and its aftermath were violent assaults. Lately, Jon and I have become obsessed with Alan Ball’s most recent foray into the dark, True Blood, and whenever Sookie is showered by yet another blood bath, I flash to my toddler self screaming in a car.

Last year, I tried to vacation the way I envision Normal People vacation. I packed up my favorite belongings and in the company of my two favorite people (my husband and my son) headed to a beach I find beautiful and serene. On that soul-rending car ride, I discovered two truths. First, I am not Normal. I am still somewhat blood-covered, and it will likely take awhile yet to wash out all that red. Second (and herein lies my hope): that optimistic, joyful little girl who climbed into a car setting off for Colorado is not dead. She is alive and full and eagerly on standby—so much so, I regressed into her toddler psyche in that seven-hour car ride last year. I felt her desperation, her debilitating helplessness…her despair. I’ve never been very religious, but in feeling her pain, I suddenly understood what it means to feel forsaken by God. On that trip all those years ago, she gave up on life. Three decades later—trapped in the body of an adult, a mother—she wants a second chance.

I’m terrified of this year’s trip. Friday symbolizes both the first day of vacation and the first step back into hell. I’m terrified to feel the return of all that blood. And yet blood—gory and morbid and horrifying—is also the source of life. I want to live. I want that toddler girl to live. My parents never made it to Colorado, but my journey isn’t over. I carry vital tools in my suitcase, and my companions are good and true. One day—soon, I hope—I might just make it all the way to the heavenly side of Wellfleet.