swimming with sharks

A Mexican island, a dead dancer, and eeny-meeny-miny-mo

Although my Instagram bio reads “a broad in Los Angeles and abroad,” mostly thanks to hosting a travel series that takes me on adventures over yonder once or twice a year, I haven’t actually been abroad or even on a plane since 2019. Luckily, California offers all kinds of adventures within driving distance (BUT YOU CAN SKI AND SURF IN THE SAME DAY IF YOU WANTED TO!!!!! is the crazed tourism copy that thunders in my head whenever I entertain the idea of moving away from LA), so the last 3 years have boasted a handful of short trips. Trips to wine country, skiing mountains, redwood forests, and cold oceanside swims, but the sweet feeling of leaving my literal and emotional square footage behind as I dip into a new culture, a new language, a new air quality has been grievously lacking since before Covid.

Last month, we reprised Islands Without Cars and filmed on Holbox, a small and truly outrageously gorgeous island off the east coast of Mexico. The simplest things are so sweet without the constant demands of small children. Airplane rides, such a chore of yore, have become inter-heavenly tubes of forced stillness. Going to sleep alone in a quiet hotel room every night, never cooking anyone a single meal or breaking up a single fight or helping anyone wipe their ass for 8 consecutive days? Bliss. A break to work, but nevertheless a much-needed break from the endless work of motherhood. Tyler discovered rats in our kitchen while I was gone - who cares, bliss for me. Nothing could get to me. I was free, now. I was in Holbox. An island whose name means black hole in Mayan. I was a pirate for peace on a tropical utopia. One eye patched to reality, I jumped off of a boat and landed face to face with a 40-foot whale shark.

(My view when we jumped)

A sob caught in my throat, the gurgled grunt of awe echoing up the length of the snorkel tube. My eyes bulged practically out of the snorkel mask. I have snorkeled many times, but have never encountered a creature of this proportion. Being confronted with its sheer, gentle mass was overwhelming. My skin sent up the flare for goosebumps to alight over my entire body. I was nothing, a little clownfish in a vast salty galaxy, hovering next to a wide-eyed leviathan. He moved fast, and we plowed through the water as fast as we could to race alongside him ‘til we lost him to the sea, my heart in my throat the whole time.

From google image, so you can see my friend in all his glory:

Amanda Hess wrote of The Lost Daughter et. al., “Lately the vanishing mother has provoked a fresh response: respect.” In these narratives, “children are not abandoned outright,” and work outside of the home is sometimes implausibly regarded as “the ultimate escape.” Hess concludes: “Even as these stories work to uncover motherhood’s complex emotional truths, they indulge their own little fiction: that a mother only becomes interesting when she stops being one.”

That last line has rung around in my head for a year now.

On our walk to get milk (*QUAINT ALERT*) last week, Rowan told me about his new dance class at school. “Our teacher told us about her favorite dancer of ALL TIME.”

“Oh really? Who was it?” I asked.

“I can’t remember her name, but she was a VERY famous dancer. She sang, too. She lived a long time ago and she DIED when she was very young.”

I racked my brain for who this could be. I don’t know too many dancers that lived ‘long ago.’

“Was it…Twyla Tharp?” I asked, knowing I’d seen pictures of her in leotards well into her 50s, at least.

“What? No.” Rowan shook his head.

“ANY other clues?” I racked my head for famous ballet dancers and could think of exactly none.

“Just that she was very famous and someone KILLED HER!!!!”

I was stumped. I begged him to ask his teacher again the name of the dancer so he could tell me. I forgot to go home and google “dancers who have been KILLED” because when we got home, there was a Dutch Baby Pancake to make (the best recipe is in here - I’ve tried several others, trust).

In bed last night, he whispered to me in the dark. “Mommy, I remembered the name of the dancer. SELENA!”

I guffawed. Selena! A dancer from long, long ago. Killed when I was 12 years old. A movie starring JLo, filmed immediately and released when I was 14, which I watched on the gross carpet of the Embassy Suites hotel room in Washington D.C. on my 8th grade class trip, in between the ecstatic high of flirting with the boys I had crushes on in the hallway, inviting them in to brush teeth together, my best friends wearing our huge bedtime T-shirts next to one another, stripped of eyeshadow, vying for attention on new, badly-carpeted turf.

“Why was she killed?” he asked so sweetly, so innocently.

“Oof. I think her BUSINESS MANAGER killed her.”

“WHY?!” Rowan asked.

“I think because she was jealous of her…” I trailed off, vaguely remembering only the Hollywood version of the story. “But really because she was sick in the head. She was mentally ill, and she shot her.”

Selena, the Bedtime Story.

“I don’t want anyone to be sick and shoot ME!” he curled into a ball and Sonic Hedgehog’d his way into my side.

“They won’t. I will always be there to protect you,” I assured him, one of the only lies I’ve ever told him (other lies include: the existence of Santa and fairies, that whatever restaurant we’re in doesn’t have juice, and saying the police will take Tyler and me away if he and Zoe don’t eat their vegetables/fucking dinner already).

“But what if someone kills you?” he countered. I sighed. I know that I am a dogtooth’s length away from the longer, harder versions of these conversations, but for now I want to keep the lies I tell him to hold the horrors of humanity at arm’s length just a little longer. To keep the lies centralized around creating more magic, not taking it away, bit by bit, dead dancer by dead dancer.

“No one is going to kill me. I’m always going to be here to protect you,” I assert blindly, which is a solid 45% of parenting (I’ve done the math, trust). “Now which do you want me to sing you tonight: California or Graceland?”

“Let me eeny-meeny-miny-moe it,” he offers, assigning neither of them a space in the dark, just pointing his small fingers to opposite corners of the dim room as he gets to the final moe and arbitrarily decides on which one he wants that evening.

California.

~

Still a lot of lands to see
But I wouldn't wanna stay here
It's too old and cold and settled in its ways here

Oh, but California
California, I'm coming home
I'm gonna see the folks I dig
I'll even kiss a sunset pig

~

I was all of 36 years old when my mom and I last sang that together, during which she casually defined sunset pig as a cop on Sunset Blvd. I had always envisioned that line as Joni being so happy to be home she’d kiss a pig on a ranch in whatever canyon she and her hippie friends used to hang out around Los Angeles back then, but my mom’s explanation made so much more sense. The casual lessons you still attain from your parents in your 30s hold such a sweet significance now. The lessons are ceaseless, they just switchback up the long mountain of insight from gentleness, to darkness, and back again.