by Ginny Gilder
If the drive provides the boat’s power, the recovery gifts its grace. The perfection of yin and yang gliding across the water, a pair of opposite yet equal, precisely balanced qualities gives birth to elegant boat speed.
Exhale, inhale, but keep moving. Gather yourself for the next effort, the start of another cycle, connected to its predecessor by this time to breathe.
The oar handle rolls along your palm to your fingertips, the oar turns in the lock, and the blade feathers flat, parallel to the water. Reverse the motions of the drive, starting with your hands moving away from your body. Your arms straighten as your hands pass over your knees. Swing your torso forward to claim your full reach. Only when your body is set does your seat move, allowing your legs to compress snugly against your chest, ready for their next explosion of energy. Not a rest, but a change of pace.
Without recovery, there is no progress. Extreme effort cannot be accomplished without respite, nor is propulsion possible without a gathering of energy. Arms, back, legs: that’s the sequence of motion, a fluid, controlled process to get back into position from which you can explode with effort yet again. Recoil yourself into concentrated energy, step by step. Follow the established cadence. Exhale, create space for the next jolt of oxygen that’s desperately needed. It’s not anarchy, and it’s not desperate, no matter how desperate you feel. Every movement is orchestrated, deliberate, and necessary.
Recovery takes time. Don’t rush it.
I had to learn the hard way to slow down and breathe. Life gave me no choice.
My dreams of further Olympic glory died with my daughter. I leaned into the heaviness of Liala’s loss and slowly learned to accept her absence. I grew accustomed to the pain, relentless and ever present. My capacity to swallow hard ebbed away. I could no longer buck up and shut up when it came to my grief. If only I could have coped in that old way, perhaps I wouldn’t have felt so raw, but my well-honed muscles of denial had shriveled.
I tried to stay close to Josh. After all, he had lost his daughter too, but not only was I hurting, I was in the dark about myself. I wasn’t just haunted by my daughter’s death, but by the specter of my mother’s long-ago psychological dissolution. I didn’t know enough to confess that I was fighting off the past. All I knew was that I needed a partner in sorrow. I didn’t trust Josh enough to allow him to fill that role, and Josh didn’t know me well enough to figure out that he needed to fill that role. It was no surprise that our attempts to console each other fell short.
My mother tried to come to the rescue, but she could only travel so far, and I would only allow her to come so close. I met her at the airport following her flight to Seattle, six weeks after her first granddaughter’s death, the trip planned when all was on track and left unchanged when everything went to hell.
We had spoken on the phone briefly a few times since Liala’s stillbirth, and she had groped for the right tone and the right words. I tried not to blame her for keeping her distance. I wanted to understand her fear of grief. I had to understand it, so that the same monster would not swallow me up as it had done her. I had long believed that I was destined to be my mother’s daughter, that her impulses would be mine one day. She had viewed suicide as a viable option when life handed her seemingly overwhelming obstacles. I always assumed that I would respond the same way.
But now I wanted to chart a different course for myself. Rowing had provided me with a perfect training ground. On the water I learned to ignore my inner pleadings, perfected toughness, and became a champion at self-discipline. Now, all those races won and medals earned fell away. I faced the ultimate challenge, where my life was at stake, as surely as my mother’s had been all those years before when she slumped over the dining room table, clutching her pill bottle, consumed by her pain.
I still longed for my mother’s warmth, for a sense of connection. If she would only lead with her heart, I would abandon my reticence and my deliberate distance. This was a precious chance to erase our past, to redefine our relationship, and to reforge our connection.
But that wasn’t to be. Her initial words were, “I almost didn’t come,” and when she hugged me, it was with her arms only, no full-body connection attempted or allowed, no place for us to sway together in our shared loss. As if distance could keep despair at bay.
She couldn’t do it. I should not have blamed her for protecting herself, but I did. She gave me so little when I needed so much. It was the last time I would seek her out.
Oddly, I found myself calling my father, not once or twice, but regularly and often. He was the first parent to reach Seattle after Liala’s stillbirth, the last one I would have bet on jumping on a plane and making the cross-country trek to confront grief eye to eye. He arrived with my stepmother two days after Liala’s delivery. They spent a long weekend walking beside me as I took my first steps into the dark forest of deep sadness. They showed up at the worst of times. A priceless gift.
Long after that visit, when my sadness overwhelmed me to the point of near-total disconnection, I would dial Dad’s office number and retain my composure long enough to identify myself to the receptionist.
“Hello?” At the sound of my father’s voice, my throat would close up and my voice turn into a croak.
“It’s Ginny.” I could only whisper. Then I would cry. The minutes would flow by, my father on the other end of the phone, quiet, bobbing along in my flood of tears. He didn’t know what to say, so said little, except “Hello. Goodbye. I love you.” Sometimes he told me short stories about other people’s losses. No lectures or put-downs, egging on or teasing, just searching for words that would help when there was nothing to say. He kept my head above water.
Was this the same father who had sounded so brusque when I called him from the delivery room, who acted so coolly professional? He apologized, unprompted, on one of those first hopeless, helpless calls. “Ginny, that day, when you called me from the hospital, I had someone in my office. Someone I was firing.” He understood after all. His heart had broken, too. He would not run away.
Slowly, I began to understand my daughter’s gift to me. I could learn to live with my sadness, even if it blocked out everything else: I did not have to poison myself by swallowing it. I could breathe by acknowledging its presence. I could survive feeling it. No more denial, no more pretending.
My mother buried her pain, only to have it detonate inside her; that didn’t have to happen to me. In my quest for the Olympic podium, I honed my toughness and developed remarkable internal resolve, but only now did I learn I was my own person. I was not my mother. I didn’t have her psyche, hadn’t lived her life, and wasn’t doomed to repeat her mistakes.
Instead of killing me, losing Liala released me.
Inhale. Exhale. Cry. Release. Repeat.
My days of pulling hard on and off the water were over. I sold my single in the spring of 1988, another Olympic year. I stored my last set of blades, painted in USA red, white, and blue, in the garage, wondering if anything could ever fill the emptiness.
The experts predicted it would take two years to work through my grief, and they were right. But finally I found myself at the edge of that pitch-black forest on a faint path, streaks of sunshine pointing my way forward. I learned that even sadness would run its course eventually and leave me standing bowed but not broken. And then I discovered I was pregnant again, this time with a son who would live to tell his own story.
She taught me so much, that first child of mine, who was too impatient to wait for life to begin and had to rush on to her next engagement. She left me heartbroken, but on a corrected course, guided by a new internal voice, confident, steadied by hope, and not driven by fear.
I may have set a new course, but I hadn’t fully learned to row my own boat. I had conquered my fears of becoming my mother, but I remained my father’s goody-goody daughter, still trying to please him. Still trying hard to please the world despite the high price of doing so.
How many thousands of strokes had I taken? How m
any countless hours had I spent on the water practicing hard strokes, perfecting technique, learning balance? Nonetheless, I had not yet mastered the most important lesson.
Ten years after Liala’s death, I remained locked in a marriage that looked good on the outside but stank on the inside. Living the standard idea of happily ever after, I felt desiccated and desolate.
Not that life was all bad, by any means.
My dreams of motherhood came true not once or twice, but three times, each occasion filled with its own mystery and magic. Our first son, Gilder, made his appearance nearly three years after his older sister’s fetal demise, a few days ahead of his due date, late in the evening, so quickly that I missed my chance for an epidural. To manage the pain, I pretended I was racing in the Head of the Charles and kept counting out ten-stroke pieces to stay focused and calm. Because I didn’t know how long the delivery would take, I kept my imaginary racecourse progress measured, never allowing myself to travel beyond the first big turn by Magazine Beach. His live birth was a better reward than any medal.
Although fear of losing him plagued my entire pregnancy, Gilder’s arrival more than compensated for the ups and downs of those nine months. He was alive and well, small but healthy. His blue eyes turned hazel within his first month and he grew off the charts quickly. His light birth weight doomed him to a protracted period of late-night feedings, so I became intimate with the peaceful hours of deep night. Rocking him in a quiet house swathed in a silent world, while he slurped milk in little gulps, I discovered what I missed with Liala. The joy of holding my little boy intensified while crystallizing and salving my grief for my lost baby girl.
Gilder was an articulate, active two-year-old when we adopted round-faced, pudgy Max from an agency in Philadelphia that was committed to giving children of color the same access to a life of opportunity that Caucasian and foreign-born babies enjoyed. As I sat with my second child that first day we met, he was all of six days old. I stroked his soft, chubby cheeks and let him grasp my fingers. He was nearly ten pounds, almost twice Gilder’s birth weight, which gave me instant confidence. He was solid, my own little Buddha.
Nearly two months passed, while I held my breath and tried not to fall in love with Max, before a Pennsylvania court finalized the adoption on what would have been Liala’s fifth birthday. By then, Max was a cheerful, active baby. He was on the go as soon as he learned to crawl, difficult to keep track of, and impossible to stop. Early on I could tell he would be a handful, strong willed and independent. When he woke in the morning, he switched on—there was no halfway with him—and he stayed in motion until he went to bed, when he switched off and fell asleep nearly instantly. Whereas Gilder took over eighteen months to sleep through the night, within six weeks of his arrival, Max slept like the dead.
I loved my boys, the observant towhead who was fascinated by shapes and loved to read, and the brown-haired barrel of energy who explored everywhere with a wriggling physicality. Already one-year-old Max wanted to wrestle with Gilder, who preferred calmer engagements. The pair often ran in opposite directions, one pulling pots out of the kitchen drawers to bang, the other pulling books off the living room shelf to devour.
Six weeks after Max’s first birthday, a friend called with the news that she was pregnant. I took a deep breath. “What are you going to do?”
“Come on. I’m close to forty. I have two teenagers. I can’t afford another child.”
As we sorted through the options for an abortion, I heard the call-waiting signal sound on my phone line. I ignored it and kept talking with my friend until we worked through the details of what lay ahead for her.
We said goodbye and hung up. Another pregnancy would end at the wrong time, again.
I sat on a kitchen stool, thoughts of the unfairness of life pattering around me, soft raindrops of sadness.
Remembering I had missed a phone call, I picked up the phone and dialed my voice mail. The voice of the director of our adoption agency in Philadelphia spoke to me out of the blue. “Ginny, it’s Chuck, from Option of Adoption. Would you please call me back as soon as you get this message? Don’t worry, it’s not about Max.”
Of course it’s about Max! I’m not going to give him up. I’ll fight for him. Why do they want him back, after all this time?
Nerves jangling, hands shaking, I dialed. Chuck was waiting for my call and picked up the phone immediately, sparing me further agony.
“Ginny, I’ve spent the morning with Max’s birth mother.”
“What did she want?” I braced myself.
“She came in with another baby this morning.”
“What?!” Is this for real?
“Look, we need to find a home for this baby quickly. I want to give you and Josh first choice. It’s much better for Max if his sibling grows up with him, and I’m sure I can convince the birth mother to agree. You can have the weekend to decide, but we need to know by Monday morning.”
And then, almost as an afterthought, he added, “By the way, it’s a girl.”
I had always wanted a daughter, maybe for the wrong reasons, but I couldn’t lie to myself. Yes, I absolutely adored my two boys, but their presence in my life had not closed the gap I felt without a baby girl. I wanted to prove that a mother didn’t have to raise a daughter the way my mom had, breaking my heart midstream. I wanted to validate my belief that, despite my mother’s apparent experience with me, mothering a daughter, along with the inevitable hurts and upsets, could be filled with unquenchable love and a deep, unbreakable connection. I dreamed of holding my daughter’s hand and absorbing her experience, even if only vicariously and a generation removed, as I clasped her fingers and cupped her palm in mine: knowing she was lovable and belonged, trusting that, despite my own internal havoc, she could count on me, in good times and bad. Raising a daughter, I believed, would help heal the wounds my own mother had inflicted on me, unintentionally I knew by now, but still devastating.
My daughter finally arrived. Josh stepped off the plane a week later at 1 a.m., bringing her with him. I took my baby girl into my arms, our first embrace missed what would have been her older sister’s sixth birthday by an hour. The moment I cradled Sierra, gazed into her brown eyes, and absorbed her serious expression as she examined my features, I knew she belonged to me, and I to her. I could tell we would forge our own bond, based on mutual trust and deep affection, and I would accompany her as she discovered the world and herself. From that day forward, I marveled at the universe’s reversal of my daughter fortunes.
Josh and I ended up with three children less than forty months apart in age, all younger than age four, and life progressed from there. Outnumbered, often outwitted, we raised our three in a raucous household filled with music and sports. Two violinists, Gilder and Sierra, combined with Max the cellist. T-ball, soccer, and swimming filled afternoons, early evenings, and weekends.
Raising them took most of my energy and usurped all my patience. I never loved anybody the way I loved my trio. Snuggling together in the morning as they pounced on me, lying in their beds at night, reading, cuddling, talking, dozing off. Listening to their deep breathing at night and their chattering during the day, I felt the fullness of their presence in my life.
The memory of my first child made me grateful for all the moments the next three gave me, hard and easy. I rarely bypassed a chance to grab them for a hug or a kiss, and nestled them close when they sought me out for solace. They reawakened me to the little things, examining an ant on the sidewalk, discovering a turtle buried in the dirt, riding in the car with the wind blowing through our hair.
I convinced Josh to buy an eight-acre piece of high-bank, west-facing waterfront property on Lopez Island, one of the San Juan Islands that lies seventy-five miles northwest of Seattle, accessible only by private boat or ferry. We built our own summer cabin, raised a handmade flagpole with a tree cut from our property, fenced a square of land for a deer-free garden, carved out a baseball diamond, cobbled together a swing set and jungle g
ym, tucked a wood-burning hot tub at the edge of the woods, and constructed a fire pit at the far end of the wide front lawn where it sloped down to the high-banked shore. I convinced my big sister Peggy to come there, too, and she found a sprawling property less than two miles away where she brought her family for the summers. We even enticed our diehard East Coast siblings—the grown-up Littles, Miss Muffet, now Britt-Louise, and Richard III, whose only response to his old nickname “Dixie” was stone-cold, disgusted silence—to trek across the country now and then to our West Coast version of East Hampton, minus the warm ocean and wide sandy beaches. There we launched the next generation’s accumulation of their own sweet memories of lazy summer days filled with nothing but exploration and pleasure.
The years ticked by. I poured myself into creating the happy family I had missed out on as a teenager and did my best to ignore the knot of tension that settled low in my belly. After a while I couldn’t remember its absence and accepted my constant low-grade anxiety as part of me. If I could just maintain my focus on my children, I told myself, I’d be fine. I did my best to ignore the internal ache from building pressure and the accompanying refrain, “Is that all there is?” that I found myself humming in odd moments.
18
Rowing is fraught with the potential for disaster. For a sport so focused on command and control, it’s really quite impressive how suddenly and completely a perfectly good row can go wrong. Little things happen, imperceptible to the casual observer, and all of a sudden, it’s crisis. An oar digs into the water at the wrong angle, jerking the boat to port. You overcorrect and suddenly your shell is fighting a losing battle with physics and gravity. Unprepared and unprotected, far from shore, your options may be limited and extremely unsavory.
Imagine falling in love with someone else right before your husband’s eyes. The irony is that my intentions were pure: I was trying to enliven my marriage, not kill it.