split skin mommy

with jetpack

June came, full of promise. The months ahead felt like a heavy stone fruit in the palm of my hand; how sweet it would be to sink my teeth into that pale, pink skin of a long summer. I planned adventures and togetherness. I was burned out from drafting a book, so I stopped writing, submitting to a season that’s always the “last” of something. I wanted reflection and fluidity, so I accepted structural collapse; I’ve learned that fighting to work with lots of kids around is as exhausting and futile as it sounds. I wanted to enjoy letting my brain loose in this fulsome, sweet era. Just be with it. Submit. Eat the peach.

But someone bears the weight of all that ripeness. Every June I forget that redolence turns oppressive on a dime. And every August, I remember.

image from rijksmuseum

For the first time in our family life we traveled. Then, we traveled some more. We spent the end of August with my mom by a lake where we could swim and fish and play Uno in a treehouse. What a privilege to stop time for these adventures. I felt our family mythology blooming across my skin.

Or maybe the feeling was electricity from the thunderstorms. There were too many, and they filled me with dread and grief. These were Southern-style storms: where every afternoon, the pressure builds then releases. But we were in New England. And the pressure did not release. Make these memories, quick Ma, before climate change destroys them. I layered that sad urgency onto my meaning-making, and I found it hard to breathe.

Or maybe that was the Covid we caught in the penultimate week of August. Suddenly nobody went out; nobody came in. The boys began screeching, hair-pulling, drop-kicking; running around my mother’s little kitchen like heathens in ribbed tanks and fake gold chains—apparently fashionable now, to the elementary set. What was this bawdy soap opera / WWE beatdown presented by tiny over-actors? And where had I gone? I felt myself doing dishes and drifting out-of-body.

At the start of the heatwave, I spotted a large, thin insect caught in a spider’s web in the bathroom window. I’m calling her a damselfly, though she was more like a giant mosquito. She fascinated me. She was so capable looking—athletic and lithe and with that long tail that might be a stinger. But for all her beauty and power, she was impotent, splayed in a silk trap.

She seemed pale and drained, and I identified with her instantly, having been feasted on by a baby all season. “But these last days of nursing are so precious!” I’d remind myself. All summer I’d felt the preemptive nostalgia wrapping itself around me like strands of silk.

The thing about getting stuck—I know my damselfly would agree—is you don’t know it’s happening until it’s happened.

Indeed, who was that woman in a kitchen piled high with dishes, an apron tied around the bathing suit she never took off? She was exhausted, edging on resentful, but so scared of letting go: that end of late-summer ripeness, her last season with a baby—all the juice and sugar gathering like barometric pressure in that stone-fruit skin so that every moment felt explosive in-hand; too precious to bear. And just when we were ready to let it pop—fuck it, Christopher let’s leave the boys with grandma and go dancing—two lines appeared on the Covid stick. Gray clouds circled overhead, perfect metaphors for a lost Labor Day Weekend.

I saw the damselfly every time I went to the bathroom.

To humor myself, I started picturing her with a little jet pack. I imagined a tiny, red machine I’d slip over her wings so she could bust out of that seductive softness. Her web was a predator’s trap; I’d made mine. But still, we must feel a little bit the same. I wondered if maybe when the air got less humid, she could flap herself free. Me too, maybe. 

I’d brush my teeth and stare at her dart-tail and her diaphanous wings, thinner than tracing paper. At 2am I’d plod to the bathroom having forgotten her, and when I turned on the light she stared at me, flayed, caught in the act of flying… a pure white, prehistoric terror.

One morning, chest burning, packing my toothbrush to go home, I leaned in close to examine her. My hopes for her escape were lost. Her immobility was absolute; her body transparent. She would not get away. She had already been sucked dry.

Oh, but wait. I leaned closer and let my greasy nose press the pane.

My stomach did a little twist—it was comedy, and it was horror. The damselfly had never been there. There was no body inside her. I’d been looking at a molted exoskeleton; identifying with her afterimage. She had already transformed, slipped free, and flown. I looked it up. Her little husk is called a ‘split-skin.’

On Wednesday, the boys went to school for the first time in twelve weeks. They wore uniforms–the knees ripped on some of the inherited pants, but otherwise clean. You’d never know how feral we became. You’d never know, in the clarity of a cool, September day, how the last, loose weeks of a sentimental summer could become such a trap.

If you, like me, sank all the way into a nostalgic heft, you'll know how a few quiet hours with cool air gathering at your ankles is, frankly, a jetpack. It’s possible that all that density was worth it for this uplift.

Though sometimes I wonder… was I in that kitchen at all? Was that witness, hovering just outside myself, the real me? Maybe I was just a split-skin mommy, biding the sweetest, ripest, stickiest season so I could get free and come home.

To myself.

Tell me: do you experience something similar with literal or figurative seasons? Do you have eras—like the day after Christmas, or a Sunday afternoon—that you love to sink into, but then need to bust your way out of?

And as always, your hearts are most appreciated, so tap that ❤️.

xx

Isabel