When I was a little girl, my mom signed me up for swimming lessons in a town that was an hour from where we lived.
I had serious issues with my ears (remember? Toooot!), and even with specially fitted earplugs, swimming wasn’t really my thing. But the highlight of swimming lessons was that afterward, my mom would let me have a grape Crush when I ate my peanut butter and jelly sandwich and Lay’s potato chips in the park. (To this day, a grape soda makes me think of swimming lessons!)
But I have this super vivid memory of something so silly and inconsequential that happened one summer day right after one of my swimming lessons.
All of the moms in our little clan of mountain people that drove down into the valley for swimming lessons were gathered in a circle outside of the pool entrance. They were making a plan for heading over to the park for lunch, and I was standing in the middle of the circle. I had on some brand new summer sandals. I remember how much I loved those summer sandals. They were faux leather, and they had a very tiny wedge heel with a hole through it.
To me, those sandals made my feet seem grown up and fancy — and the hole made them kind of tricky!
As I was admiring my fancy feet, I started doing a little twirling in the middle of the circle while all of the moms talked, and I got kind of dizzy. When I heard the moms starting to get their plan worked out, my mom suddenly said, “Come on Sonja. It’s time to go.”
I was still looking down at my sandals, but I moved toward the sound of my mom’s voice in a tipsy kind of stupor. When I reached my mom, I grabbed on to her thigh to regain my balance. But something wasn’t right. I could instantly tell this wasn’t my mom’s leg. I didn’t recognize the orange and yellow daisy pattern of the shorts on this thigh…
A sudden feeling of panic swept over me, and when I looked up, Mrs. Murry was looking down on me. I could see my reflection in her big plastic sunglasses.
Mrs. Murry said, “Oops! Not your mommy — she’s right over there sweetheart.”
I remember being horrified because I accidentally grabbed Mrs. Murry’s thigh!
As I pulled away, and started searching around to try to find my mom, I felt wobbly and terribly lost. How had I lost track of my mom? I heard her voice — and I thought I knew exactly where she was!
Then, I spotted my mom. She was standing a few feet away from me. She had on her excellent hibachi sandals, and the green double-knit walking shorts I was expecting. My pretty mom looked over her shoulder at me. She smiled. Then she put her hand back so I could grab it. When I took her hand, everything stopped spinning.
But I still felt like I might cry.
Everything about that childhood moment is vivid and sharp in my mind decades later, and I’m not sure why. It was such a tiny moment in the grand scheme of all of the moments I’ve had in my life — yet, it lives in my mind as a moment when I lost track of the one person I thought I could never lose. She was there…and I could hear her, but something I did made me lose her for one long and very disorienting minute.
