I’ve always been slightly jealous of my children’s pride in their father’s childhood in New York. His stories made it seem so exotic and they were fascinated by his tales of NYC in the 1950s. Hey, my family were homesteaders, they lived in freaking sod houses and broke the land and settled virgin country, for God’s sake. Those things somehow never measured up to New Years in Times Square or swimming all summer in the Atlantic Ocean. My childhood in Minnesota and the northern plains growing up around skiing and skating, lakes and fishing should have seemed ideal to outdoor oriented children like ours who loved camping and playing outside like kids from a different generation. Yet, my Minnesota stories somehow trailed off in the telling to an increasingly indifferent audience. “Daddy, tell us about Big Ma, the bootlegger again,” they’d clamor as I tried one more time to glamorize how my grandmother ran the post office in Charbonneau, North Dakota. . . This strange competitiveness with my husband for who-had-the-coolest-childhood afforded me one of my most embarrassing moments of mothering. Ironically enough, it occured at a beloved lake.
It was on one of dozens of camping trips we took to Gull Point State Park in Okoboji, Iowa with our young children and grandchildren. This campground, its accompanying trails, playground, and beach were fixtures in our children’s summer adventures. This trip was no different. On this particular summer afternoon, the sun glinted off the calm lake water as I stood on the beach surveying the kids playing. I could feel the warmth of the sun’s rays on my shoulders as shouts of swimmers echoed off the trees along the bank behind me. I looked down, wiggled my toes in the cool perfectly clear glacier formed West Lake Okoboji, the sand squishing up between my toes.
Tyler, Ellie and Nicholas stood nearly chest deep in the water in this protected inlet, and I soon could see that they were trying to skip rocks. This was a losing prospect. It is nearly impossible to skip rocks from that depth. The angle is all wrong. To adequately skip a rock even one skip, the plane surface of a pancake thin rock must smash flatly on the water’s surface to make it bounce. This demands a special sideways flick of the wrist that sends the flattened stone skimming above and then along the water. These kids were clueless.
“Let Mommy show you how to skip rocks,” I said grandiloquently to Nicholas. I unnecessarily reminded Tyler and Ellie, “Grandma grew up in Minnesota. I know how to do this.” I approached them, and Nick handed me a perfectly shaped and sized rock for skipping. I stood closer to the shore illustrating that they couldn’t be so deep into the lake and achieve the appropriate angle. I held the rock between my thumb and index finger in my right hand, cocked my arm out at the elbow, then quickly snapped my arm and wrist chucking the rock as hard as I could directly into Nick’s face.
He dropped like a 50-pound sack of potatoes into the water then bobbed up screaming and sputtering lake water, his hand over his eye. Tyler squealed in delight and Ellie began to cry. I rushed to him as fast as I could flailing through the water, cupped my left hand behind his head and clapped my right hand over his mouth as we now had drawn the attention of all the other beach goers. “SHHHHHHH” I said as I pulled his hand down to make sure he still had two eyeballs. It was fine. An angry red welt was forming under his left eye, but it’s not like the skin was cut or anything. Geez. Calm down. I looked furtively left and right over my shoulders, hoping no one had witnessed by mother-of-the-year nomination ending behavior.
I’m not proud of this reaction where I was more concerned for my public embarrassment than my child potentially losing an eye, but, the reaction was genuine, and the regret has served as a reminder of my hubris on a couple of different levels. I needed to learn to let go of the competitiveness with my husband--just let it go, if not for my own well-being, then for the safety of my children! Clearly, it was time to quit worrying about who was scoring more points with the kids with their legacy stories. So I did just that; I quit thinking about it.
My son came to me recently stewing over designs for an addition to one of his tattoos, an addition he wanted to thoughtfully incorporate all aspects of his own personal background, including me, and my side of his family. It reminded me again that my children are their own people made up of their own experiences from their individual childhoods. My husband’s and mine are largely irrelevant to the memories they will share with their own children down the road. So it turns out that my big mistake wasn’t the rock to my son’s face; it was obsessing over and competing for the best childhood. Still, I can hope that among the stories my son shares with his own children some day will be the one of his dangerously reckless mother nearly putting his eye out, teaching him how to skip rocks.
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