a mother's intuition

When I was three years old, I almost drowned. My mother and I were in Hawaii, where she was visiting her sister whose Marine husband had been stationed there. My mom and dad were having marital problems at the time - they separated shortly after we returned - so my dad wasn't with us.

I don't remember a lot of what happened, though I remember more than I ever thought a three-year-old could recall. Most of the memories are surely memories of memories though, since I think of the incident several times a year.

We had all gone out for a boat ride off the coast of Oahu. My uncle drove the boat, along with my mom, me, my aunt, and my grandparents. When we came back, we had to walk several hundred feet down a small bridge about the width of a sidewalk from the boat to the pier. I was given the job of carrying towels back to the pier.

My mom went to use the restroom. I think she must have had reason to believe someone else was watching me at the time, while that other person probably had reason to believe my mom was watching me. I'm not sure.

I do remember walking back to the boat by myself at some point. I remember leaning over off the little bridge to try to see a shark in the water. I remember falling into the water and trying to breathe, looking around, and being scared a shark would get me.

As the story goes, my mom was in the bathroom when a little voice inside her head panicked and said, "Where's Julie?"

She hurried out of the bathroom and called for me. She started to get more frantic, and then someone...her? my uncle?...saw my bathing suit bobbing up and down in the water. My uncle pulled me out, and being a trained Marine, gave me resuscitation and, well, saved my life.

I heard this story many times growing up, and I mixed it around with what I remembered, and learned it as a fact. It's part of my history, part of my family's history, like a folk tale you'd tell round the campfire on a fall night. My mom had an actual moment of mother's intuition. Pretty cool.

But then when I became a mother myself, I started to logic that moment away. She didn't have an a-ha moment so much as she realized she hadn't seen me in awhile. Her internal alarm clock rang because she had taken too long in the bathroom without me.

This is what my left brain decided. Until yesterday.

I put Maggie down on the floor yesterday after her nap. I did a quick floor scan to be sure nothing chokable was lying in her reach, then I went to load the washing machine in the next room.

As I was loading in the clothes, a little voice in my head said, "She has one of Sassy's dollhouse bowls in her mouth." What a specific thought! I tried to chuck it up as OCD and told myself if I did not get this laundry in, I would never be caught up.

I continued to load and the little voice said, "Stop it. Forget the laundry. Go make sure she doesn't have a little bowl in her mouth."

Fine. I put down the laundry. I figured I'd get everything done more quickly if I put the OCD to rest first.

I walked over to her, squeezed her little cheeks to look in her mouth, and darn it if she wasn't sucking on a little dollhouse bowl. A little wooden bowl about the diameter of a dime, but three times as thick. A little wooden bowl just asking to be a choke hazard.

The little dollhouse bowls went with Sassy today to live out the rest of their lives at Nana's house. And I got my childhood folktale back.

Hawaii, 1976







Aunt Jo



Mama