kat moore / essay

Oceanography of a Mother and Daughter

Imagine the womb:

Amniotic water, electricity, a current leads to a beat, leads to a heart, leads to a body floating inside the mother. A cord latched to both bodies, what’s in the mother goes into the baby as the baby rests in water.

I was once inside my mother. Inside her slender body, inside the ocean of her. Whatever lives in the ocean is taken care of by the ocean.

My mother smoked. The haze coiling through the water when I still had gills. By 1977, she should have known better. Maybe she did. Maybe she didn’t. Or maybe her nicotine addiction was far too great. Or maybe I needed the smoke, the extra layer of fog to keep me shielded from the world outside, like when frigid air touches the warm water of the sea and smoke moves across the water like the spirit of G-d, the breath of life, exhaled from her lungs.

Then the water poured out of her and I was born. Her baby girl. The youngest of two. My older sister already five and waiting to meet me. 

My mother held me, rocked me, fed me from her breast. 

*

Imagine the beach:

When I was five, we went to Pensacola in the Florida panhandle.

I remember being in our small brown Chevette. Dad driving. Mom in the passenger seat. My sister in the backseat with me. A sunrise of pink plumes across the sky. 

I remember the clear water, the waves lapping over me and my sister as we sat at the ocean’s mouth, our legs sprinkled with sand. My mother in her white bikini. Her long torso. Her long slim legs. Her brown hair pulled away from her face, swooped back into butterfly clips. Her standing next to me and my sister. The foam of the ocean slipping over her small feet. I remember the sound of the water like a strong wind. I remember my sister’s laughter and my father out in the waves. I remember a cigarette between my mother’s fingers, the smoke curling up like a halo above us.

*

Imagine a pool:

A country club with rolling green hills and sand traps. A few ponds spread out, one with an alligator who claimed it its home. A clubhouse, giant like a mansion, set on a hill. A blue pool on its hip, busy with teenagers and children splashing. We had free membership to this club, a perk from one of my father’s distant cousins, and I swam in it every summer, had my birthdays there, until I was eight. I remember an E.T. cake with Reese’s Pieces. My mother must have ordered it. 

By six years old, I am already a strong swimmer. One day at the club, my little body glides through the clear cool water past two teenagers on two rectangular floats. Their legs kick, churn the tranquil water, and then the waves roll over me, dunk me below the feet of the teens. My head bobs up, I gasp for air, but the teens don’t see me, and the waves swell again and pull me under. In a panic, I swim straight up, burst through the surface again, trying to suck in air as the water slams into my face, clogs my throat, and then I see her, my mother, in her white bikini, her legs fast as she runs over the hot pavement and jumps into the pool. Her cigarette floats in the deep end as she carries me out of the water.

*

Imagine a lake:

A hot day of summer in 1986. My father fishes off a bank while my sister and mom lay out on towels, baby oil on their skin. We are in a lake park with restrooms, concessions, a playground, and a swimming area. I’ve been told by my mother to stay out of the lake, that it isn’t like the pool. I run over to the playground and swoop down the slide. 

I consider the swings. I consider the monkey bars glinting with the light of the sun. But I really want to swim. 

I see kids jumping off the embankment, a man-made ledge surrounding the lake. A spray of water as their bodies break the surface, and then they climb up the ladder to do it all over again. 

I see the boat dock, the slant of concrete into the murky water. It’s empty, the boats out in the water, the trucks with hitches parked away in the nearby lot. I walk over. I can see my mother and sister still stretched out, their faces toward the sun. I shuffle down the ramp, closer and closer to the small waves, until I arrive where the water kisses the concrete, and my feet begin to slide. Mud and something dark green ooze all over my white tennis shoes. There is nothing to hold onto. I fall to my knees to stop the slide, but I slip into the water. I move sideways to the ledge, but there is no ladder, no jagged edges to grab, only smooth wood. Each time I try to jump up and grab the top of the ledge, I slide down, then I am under again. I think of my mother on her back, cigarette burning between two fingers. Momma, I think. Momma, please find me. My head breaks the surface, I cough out water, and then I’m back under. I see the light of the sun and think that I’m going to drown, I’m going to die. No one can see me where I am. 

I see smoke dipping into the water like a ghost. 

Suddenly, an outline of a person blocks the rays of the sun. Arms thrust into the water, hands grab me under my shoulders and pull. My mother’s hair pulled back like she always wears it in the sun, in the water, her white bikini top, her cutoff jeans soaked by the lake. She heaves me up and over the ledge. She must have heard me. 

*

Imagine a desert:

No dirt or earth or painted mountains. An absence of water. An absence of smoke. The mother gave up her addiction, while another kind, a worse kind—the same kind that caused the mother to leave the father, whispers to her daughter. A mother and daughter separated by a dry gulf. The mother works two jobs—a secretary by day, a sales clerk at a department store by night. The daughter, a teen, skips her classes at school. The older daughter is away at college and the younger daughter and her mother are drowning on dry land. When the daughter speaks to the mother, rocks fall out of her mouth.  The mother doesn’t know how to connect with the daughter. Eventually, the daughter learns how to spit the rocks, take aim, and ping the mother in her heart. 

*

Imagine a bruise:

on both arms of the daughter, self-inflicted from sharps, the end of a syringe. 

on the mother’s finger where the daughter pried them open to snatch the keys to the car.

on the mother’s face, just above the eyebrow, a faint trace of purple when the daughter hit the mother with a cup.

on the daughter’s thighs and even deeper inside her from the men in drug dens, the dark houses without plumbing or light.

*

Imagine the ocean:

Clear waters of Pensacola. The daughter on the beach, arms raw, next to a man who steals for her, for them, for drugs. The money is gone. The sun is bright. In my green cat eye glasses, slightly crooked, the prescription outdated, I look out into the ocean. Some children play in the shallows, the seafoam tickling their heels. I haven’t seen the ocean since I was five. My shoes on shore next to the man, now topless, in his lucky hat, the hat he refuses to take off when outside, believes we will be arrested or worse if he removes it. I walk into the ocean. First my feet feel the waves, ankles chilled by the coolness of the sea. Then my knees are under the surface. Waves crash into me as I am waist deep, clothes soaked, and I feel it. Something powerful. I look out to where the water meets the sky, blueness colliding like the asteroids that formed the earth and moon. But water is older. Genesis says, the earth was without form as G-d’s spirit moved across the water. The water already here, already part of G-d. The waves slap against my skin and beneath each one is a tug, a pull, a force, tugging on my body, wanting to pull me deeper into the sea. I think G-d wants to drown me. Set me free from this unbearable living, arms red and purple, a sadness inside my belly, and the waves hit and pull, and tell me that G-d wants me. During this time, my mother prays for me. She drops to her knees in her living room and pleads. She has tried to pull me out of this, but still I drown. This time I want to stay in the water. But something, perhaps the words whispered from my mother, her prayers that drift like smoke towards the sky, finally reach heaven, and I turn back, slowly walk through surf and sand out of the ocean.

*

Now, imagine the ocean again:

The shore of Clearwater Beach. The seagulls swooping down to snatch food out of sunbathers’ hands. Children splashing. The pier with fisherman casting lines into the water. On the white sand, facing the light blue of the water. My sister in a blue chair, in a black and white striped bathing suit, big oval shades on her face, earbuds in her ear. Two empty chairs with towels draped on the backs, bags stowed under the seat. 

In the waves, my mother, in her black bathing suit with white curling lines across her chest. I float in the gulf next to her. We hold hands. Her tiny body, skinny, slightly shrunken from aging, floats next to my younger and much fuller body. The sun takes over the sky and causes the water to sparkle so clear that we see our toes brush the sand. Each wave, we giggle. My mother, who never like to get her hair wet, has her hair down today, and the saltwater soaks her blond crinkles into curls. I show my mom how it’s impossible to swim forward in a wave, and how the body, must relax and give itself over to the power of the tide. I now trust the water. I know it will carry me. It, like G-d, like smoke on the water, like the hands of my mother, will push me back to the safety of the shore, if I let it. The water dips into our ears, the salt on our tongues, smiling at each other, neither of us knowing about the wreck that’s coming, the speeding car, burned rubber, smoke on the asphalt, or that this trip is the last time I will see my mother alive. She laces her fingers through mine.

---

Kat Moore has essays in Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Image, Hotel America, Passages North, Diagram, The Rumpus, Entropy, Hippocampus, Whiskey Island, Salt Hill, and other journals. An essay of hers appears in the anthology Bodies of Truth: Personal Narratives on Illness, Disability, and Medicine. She was a 2021 Bread Loaf Writers Conference Scholar In Nonfiction and her work has also been supported by the 2022 Tin House Winter Workshop and a 2017 SAFTA Residency.