Whatever Held

They had just turned ten and eleven, and the oldest had just turned fourteen, the day I think of when I picture the three of them together. We were at Point Lobos, down past Carmel, where the big rocks meet the ocean, and my three were up on them, climbing, all three hanging on to the same rock at the same time, yelling and laughing and working out who went where and who helped who up.

It was the kind of loud, scrambling, completely absorbed good time kids have when they’ve forgotten anyone is watching. I was watching a little back from them, camera up, which is where I usually was. Not in the pile on the rock, but a step away, keeping the record. That’s been my position for
most of their lives, I’ve come to realize, slightly behind the three of them, loving the sight of it and documenting it so it wouldn’t be lost. Because that is the thing I most want to say about them: they are a unit.

They are very close, and I mean the real kind, not the greeting-card kind. The kind with teasing and giving each other a hard time, with loud complaining when one of them feels another has done them wrong. That part is just white noise to me now, the ordinary background hum of siblings who are secure enough to bicker and never once doubt the floor underneath it. They give each other grief precisely because nothing is at risk in it. These days most of that hum lives in our family group chat, which goes off at all hours, all of us in it, me and the boyfriends and girlfriend too, a conversation that never really ends.

The two girls are dark and light. That’s the shorthand in my head, and it fits them, one earthier and one softer, one drawn to animals and the outdoors and one to beauty and cozy warm rooms. Two temperaments that shouldn’t necessarily go together and do, the way they’ve gone together since they were tiny and I signed them up for everything as a pair. They balance each other, and they always have. And my son, the oldest, is
protective of both of them, deeply. He learned early that someone in this family had to look out for the others, and he took the job and never put it down. Right now he and his sister are the tightest of the three, though that moves. It rotates. Who’s closest to who shifts with whatever’s happening in their lives, the triangle constantly rebalancing, the closeness traveling around its three points. But the shape always holds.

Every July we go away together for a weekend, because two of them have birthdays a day apart and somewhere along the way that became a tradition none of us would think of skipping. They’ve started helping plan it now, which I love, and we all go, the kids and me and whatever boyfriends and girlfriend are part of our lives that year. It’s grown into its own little traveling version of the family, and every summer I get a weekend of all of them in one place, loud and together, and come home with a fresh set of pictures for the record.

Here is what they may not fully know yet, and it’s the reason I wanted to
write this one down. They went through the hard years together, all of it, the parts I’ve written about in these pages and the parts I haven’t. They are the only three people on this earth who were inside that particular storm, and it did not scatter them. It fused them. Whatever else those years cost, they bought my children each other, permanently, in a way nothing can undo. They share a childhood no one else will ever fully understand, and they came out of it holding on instead of letting go.
I won’t always be here. That’s just true, and I’ve made my peace with a lot of hard things in writing all this down, and that’s one of them. But the thing that gives me the most peace is that they will still have each other. None of them will be alone the way I have so often been alone, because I made three of them and I made them close, and each of them will always have two other people who were there, who remember, who hold the same history.

That’s the best thing I ever did, I think. Better than any single thing I did for any one of them. I gave each of them the other two. Three kids on a rock over the ocean, hanging on together, yelling, laughing, and their mother a step back with the camera, making sure it would last. It will last. They’ll hold onto each other the way they held on to that rock. And that’s the one thing I’ve never had to worry about.