Here is a short piece I wrote over 20 years ago.
Living on the Edge
“Let's go to the diving board, Mom!” I had just emerged from the changing rooms at the public pool, blinking in the brilliant summer sun. I followed him, the low board in mind. By the time I reached the deep diving pool, he was halfway up the ladder leading to the high board.
“Come on, this is fun!” Well, I breathed, this is good practice for Ratanga Junction Theme Park, something else I hadn't intended but had been manipulated into promising. The diving board, after all, doesn't look so bad from the bottom, child's play really as anyone can see, with children scrambling up and jumping off all the time. I forgot that it looks much worse from the top. At the top I remembered, the board rearing unstably under my feet.
Oblivious to my distress, my son ran to the edge and jumped gleefully into the void, leaving me alone and reeling. Some aeons later I heard the splash. He surfaced beaming.
“Come on, Mom!”
“Jon”, I informed him, “I can't even let go of the rail. I'm going back down.”
“No!” he cried. His social mortification was unable to motivate me. I consider myself a devoted mother, but there are limits. I descended the stairs, mumbling in his general direction: All children are embarrassed by their parents at some point sweetheart, it might as well start now. But he had gone, swimming off as far away as he could, pretending he didn't know me.
At the bottom of the stairs was a backlog of children impatiently waiting, their faces upturned, watching my bathing-costume-clad rear descend lurchingly towards them.
One young girl smiled at me like sunburst as I reached stable ground. “Don't worry”, she consoled. “It doesn't matter, really.”
Later, while swimming widths, trying to placate myself, it occurred to me that I could never commit suicide by jumping off a building. I'd be too scared. Also, I'm too afraid of guns to pick one up in order to shoot myself in case it went off. And I've never believed in pills, so swallowing bucketfuls wouldn’t do a thing.
This is theoretical. I knew when I had babies that suicide was forever closed to me. I would have choose the long detour of depression whenever it came my way, clinging helplessly to the rail for years, clogging up the diving board of life. My inner child isn't as brave as my outer one; she fears heights and death more than scorn and derision. She knows she doesn't have to jump.
That day was a defining moment. My son gave up on me, hopefully temporarily. We've reached that great divide between the land of mid-life and the land of early adolescence, both teetering on the edge, trying to learn about danger and safety, life and death. We shout things out to each other, half our meanings falling into the void; my arms ache to hold him, but he has fallen away and rightly so, into the arms of his own life.
I wonder about that wise young girl who knows there are two ways down from a diving board, and it doesn't matter, really. For the moment I am content to worm my toes into the earth, to take root and wait, while on the other side of the canyon my intrepid son, helmet tucked under an arm, waves to the cameras before boarding a rocket to Mars.
Dawn Garisch