unicorns of the sea
On Mother's Day morning, I slept 'til 8:40, when two little kids breathed "HAPPY MUDDER'S DAY" in my face. They brought me breakfast on a tray with flowers -- a quiche Tyler spent no less than five hours making from scratch the night before.
"You can stop this now," I encouraged him on Hour 3, when he had only just finished the crust.
"You don't have to do this. I'm happy with just bread!" I hollered on Hour 4.
"No. You deserve this quiche!!" he insisted, tinkering with eggs and onions in the darkness, almost midnight.
The next morning, I got up to pee and came back to an empty breakfast tray. The kids ate my pancake and Mabel was 90% through the quiche slice, looking up at me with crust in her chops like I was interrupting something. I served myself a new slice and, wow, yeah. The best quiche we've ever had, Mabel and me.
At 3pm, Rowan came out of his Quiet Time and asked Tyler if Mother's Day was over yet. "When is it going to be Kid's Day?" I marched into his room and held him gently by the shoulders.
"Rowan. Every. Day. Is Kid's Day. Every weekend, we go places that you like to go, do things that you like to do. We make dinner that you like to eat. We watch the things that you like to watch on TV. Moms get one day. You get every other day."
He nodded slowly, regarding me with suspicion. "Oh."
Later, we all went to the beach for sunset and a picnic, but I lay on the couch with Rowan and watched videos about electricity while Tyler did what I normally do: pack everything for 4 people to eat and swim and change. In fact, I forewent all the things I normally do to get us all fed and out of the house, all day. I let Tyler do it all, because: Mother's Day. On Monday, Tyler was overcome with exhaustion. I can't believe how much you do, he said with tired eyes. I appreciate it. I do.
On the Malibu beach, at sunset, we discovered hundreds of pyrosomes, a creature I first became acquainted with on Catalina Island last year. Gelatinous and phallic, they are two-inch long bioluminescent zooids. Alone, they are harmless; slightly prickly little jelly guys that resemble sewing thumb thimbles.
Together, thousands of them form a colony and float together, a 60-foot long macrophallus filtering plankton and the odd penguin into its gaping maw. A science researcher called them unicorns: "Completely improbable, utterly mysterious."
One of my favorite aspects of motherhood that surprised me is scientific, academic. I'm learning things about the world right along with them; things I had forgotten, but mostly things I had really never known. Rowan and Zoe collected these sea unicorns until their hands and pockets were so full of them they couldn't pick up anymore, and then we threw them back into the sea, to "find their friends," according to Rowan.
Pyrosomes keep a vampiric daily schedule. When night falls, they rise up as an interconnected colony to the surface of the water, sometimes 2,500 feet, and then when dawn breaks they dive down, down, to the dark depths of the ocean.
Rowan's taken to asking wildly esoteric questions right before he knows I'm about to turn off the light for the night. Last night, as I held him close to me in his floral bedsheets in the cool darkness, he whispered, "Mommy. How does the world work, anyway?"