Abigail’s Swing
Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet
and the winds long to play with your hair.
-- Kahlil Gibran
When the world gets too noisy for my daughter, she retreats to her swing or to a rocking chair. She puts everything else on hold, then rocks it into perspective. Or perhaps she prefers to be part of the audience, not a participant. In either case, she has always done this, since the moment she could sit up independently.
Me, I’m a bouncer. I bounce against the backs of couches, love to rock in rocking chairs, and recall, as a child, the transition of outgrowing my swing set as difficult. I loved my swing set and consider my time spent swinging a significant period in my life. Like Abigail, I loved watching my brothers and sister play. I liked being in the audience once in a while, not always interactive. Swinging was my moving meditation.
Abigail can swing for hours at a time. She needs to think, and this is her place.
“I need to take a break, Mom,” she’ll suddenly say to me.
“Okay.”
I would have no idea what was jarring her world, but I understood her need instinctively.
“Have fun. I’ll call you when dinner is ready.”
Moving backward and forward helps her mind open up to imagination, to the clouds, to the sky where her mind takes her body to fly. She loves watching kids play. She loves watching her brother entertain the other kids. She loves being the audience to his performances. Swinging is her moving meditation, too. It’s a peaceful place for her to think. Seeing the good and feeling the peace.
This movement of back and forth has helped her cope with any perceived stress she experienced.
“I lose my mind,” she told me once.
“I feel like a cloud floating in the sky. When I look backward, it feels like I am flying.”
Then we were building a garage, and half of the swing set was in pieces. It doesn’t balance right and she frets.
“I miss being on the swing.”
One summer night the kids spent the night in the fort that separates the two swings (a boy swing and a girl swing).
“The fort was fun, cold, scary,” she told me.
“We watched two movies and I got bit by a million mosquitoes, but I loved it! Can we sleep in it tonight, too?”
During treatment when our schedules got crazy, I brought Abigail to my yoga classes for my own practice. She was five and had mastered the concept of “quiet time” while I got “mommy time.”
She explained:
“I remember I would play puzzles in the yoga room until it became time for savasana. Then I would lie on your belly and fall asleep. You would scratch my back. Sometimes I would get a mat and practice next to you. I remember the other people would smile at me. I felt shy when this happened.”
School let out early on Fridays, and sometimes, if Michael and I couldn’t juggle the schedule enough, I would bring the kids to the hospital during my radiation treatments. No flexibility in that schedule.
“One time, during radiation, I remember the nurses were sitting with me and teaching me how to draw good ghosts,”
Abigail continued.
“Benjamin wasn’t there. I remember the puzzles. I liked the puzzles. One had a sunset and a sky. I finished one by myself.”
During the latter half of October, and with two weeks left in my radiation schedule, the kids had prepared their costumes and our house for Halloween. By now, hospital visitations were so thoroughly integrated into our routine that memories of a time when we didn’t need to schedule it into our lives seemed long, long ago.
“I remember watching Mommy on the radiation table with red, green and blue lights everywhere around the room. I think they were coming from the machine. I thought they were lasers. It was a little scary.”
I’m sure the theme of Halloween and my general appearance played a large role in their world of people becoming something that they’re not.
I wore my radiation costume:
“You were wearing a bandanna,”
Abigail told me,
“And you had no hair on your face. It was weird. It was cuckoo to have both parents who were bald. I felt embarrassed at times. I wanted you both to have hair. It would make better sense for me.”
We snuggled together on the couch in our living room prepared to read a book, she curled against my body. Although we both knew that a “normal” looking mommy lived in our past and not in our present--yet, the weight of her relief of knowing that I could still BE her mommy pressed into my side heavily. I held onto her, able to maintain the strength that she required.
My brave daughter.
