A couple of weeks ago, our family went on a trip to Lake Mead. We did this same houseboat trip last year, and some of my extended family thought it sounded like a great idea to get the gang together and go back, and so we did.
I was craving this time. Having gone back to work full time in June, I was missing my kids. I mean, Kai can take me or leave me right now and spends his days practicing being world weary, with a lot of heavy sighing and declaring things “typical,” or “predictable,” or characteristic of “these days,” like he’s 72 and not 12.
But Ryan still likes my company and I was looking forward to giving her my attention.
And she is happy to have it for the next 5, 4, 3, 2….
Ryan is kind of a darling in this part of the family. She has a great relationship with my brother and my sister-in-aw. She was the flower girl at their wedding. She, unlike her brother, responded to MY brother’s overtures of teasing and horsing around, and to my sister-in-law’s affection. She’s gotten too big to ride on his shoulders, and is as likely to roll her eyes at his effort, but they are still buddies.
For now.
That’s all any of us have with her—the now.
She is still little enough that when we first beached the boat, she asked if we could *finally* swim. She was the first down the slide, she’s the first to encourage everyone to come in with her. She would put her head in the water and narrate what she saw.
“I saw ton of fish!” She exclaimed happily. “They wouldn’t let me in to their school.”
My brother was worried that the laws in Nevada regarding the use of life jackets would upset her, because Kai might not need one. I looked into it and discovered that life jackets are required for all kids 12 and under.
“No problem,” I told him, “It’s the law for both of them.”
But Ryan is…really good at swimming. And hated the life jacket.
“Please, mom?” She asked, “It really rubs me and it hurts.”
I had to weigh my comfort against hers, my imagination of what could go wrong with letting her stretch her muscles and really enjoy herself. I would have been fine at her age, I reminded myself.
Eventually, I let her take it off.
She swam for hours at a time, and the rule was a grown-up had to be watching or with her. Most of the time it was me.
Rufus Cove, Lake Mead with Spider Island in the middle distance.
Lake Mead is a canyon full of water. Literally. Hoover Dam was built to hold back the Colorado River and prevent flooding in the Southern California farmlands, back in the 30s when we thought things like water were infinite. When the dam was finished, the canyon filled with water, making the lake really, really deep.
The depth of this water crossed my mind over and over as Ryan swam, finding me in my inner tube, then diving under to look at fish or turn somersaults or fly off the slide.
“Let go,” she’d say to me, asking me to loosen my grip on her.
And I would let go.
She’d fall back, Nestea-style, into the green murky depths.
I could still feel her fluttering heart beating sure and steady under my fingertips long after she swam out of sight.
One morning we swam out to an island in the middle of the lake. I made her put on a life jacket, and I wore one too, both to model good behavior and also to manage my anxiety about being in such deep water so that I could parent my children if I needed to. Kai declared it boring, but Ryan was into it until she went up on the surface of the tiny island and found it full of spiders.
However, later on in the day, Ryan and I took a swim by ourselves out to the newly christened Spider Island, and found a lovely sand bar that’d we’d missed before, a place where we could sit comfortably and explore. I let Ryan take off her life jacket.
“What should we do?” She asked.
“Do?” As a grown-up, I’m always happy to do exactly nothing.
“Yeah! Do you want to play Sand Bar? I’ll make you a drink!”
I was vaguely aware that I shouldn’t play anything with “bar” in the title with my daughter, but decided to roll with it. She found a shell, filled it with sand and put a smaller shell in the sand as a garnish.
“Here you go,” she said.
“Thank you,” I said, and pretended to drink it. “Delicious.”
“Should we have a contest? We could see who makes the better drink!”
And I mean, it was vacation.
So we searched for shells. I found a spiral mollusk thing and turned it into a straw. I found two different types of sand and divided my drink into dark and light. Ryan took my straw-mollusk home to Chicago.
Ryan is on the cusp of so much change-slash-horror in the next few years—of her body betraying her, of her psyche being invaded by outside influences. I’d call it the end of innocence but that puts a weird cultural label on puberty, the heavy, heady onslaught of adulthood. She is still a very little kid. She’s still willing to be vulnerable, willing to be silly, willing to be a cuddly, willing to play pretend with her mother.
When the trip was over, we pulled up stakes and motored the houseboat away from our cove. I watched Sand Bar Island, nee Spider Island disappear, wishing already that Ryan and I were back there, playing pretend.