A young mom sat with a child on her lap. The sharpness of her image cut across the sandstorm of happy bodies at play on the summertime beach. It was her silence that spoke louder to me than the ruckus of keyed up beachgoers. She sat far back from the surf the way a shy student might, hiding in the last row and close to the exit.

Her child was not an infant, nor a toddler; he lay across her lap like the mortal Christ in a twenty-first-century southern California pieta. The boy’s limbs were thin and twisty, clearly never having found good use and his feet were frozen en-pointe. His head was smallish, his skin pale.

Footballs flew with “back-in-the-day” heroics, frisbees rubbed fingers sore, cornhole and spike ball welcomed their koozies. A muddle of laughter, squeals, cries, and hollering played a dissonant soundtrack to the sculpted figures of mother and child.

Yet, as if a visitor from another world and another time, she held him in the delicate cradle of her arms and slowly rocked. I could only imagine that she hummed. Or quietly sang. Either way, I was certain the boy heard his mother’s song. His body jerked with an occasional twitch, yet he still had a calmness, one that no doubt leached from her soul to his. It was an arresting calm that slowed the tempo of the day before my eyes.

Here was a barely twenty-something mom who took her son with severe cerebral palsy and developmental delay to the beach one Sunday afternoon. As she stroked his shock of dark hair that fanned out at ragged angles, I saw his eyes, wide and staring. They looked fixated on nothing but the crashing surf, never once shifting. A scrambling frenzy of cocoa butter fun performed a light opera before mother and child, but what hung in their world was simply the wind, the gulls, the surf—and each other.

A warmth rose from my chest and into my head; it tracked a path from my heart and into my mind. I knew it to be unbridled affection. This young mom, a babe herself, was my hero. I wanted so badly to go to her and tell her so. To let her know that someone had noticed. Instead, I just sat down and looked away. I adjusted the bill to my cap. Why disturb their moment? The humble, loving, devotion of one human being towards her child.

A lifeguard jogged out to warn some kids about the rip, then talked to their parents who stayed sitting under a sunshade. A pair of cheeky gulls edged toward a bag of Doritos that lay gloriously unattended on a quilt of towels. A small boy, hunched and legs planted wide, feverishly dug in the sand like a joyful dog as his parents bent their heads to their phones. A child’s boogie board flipped in a shallow wave as the open-mouthed child surfaced a second later.

The next time I looked back at mom and son, she had already packed up and, standing, slung her bag over her shoulder. One more moment to cling to, to hold her treasure with a tender strength and slowly sway side to side. One more moment to breathe in and hum her love out onto her boy.

Will she walk my way? I suppose wouldn’t bother her now if I told her what a good mom she was. Her son splayed across her arms, she walked past me off the beach in no hurry at all.

Nah. I’ll just let her go. I think talking to her would be more about me. This is about her and her son. Why would I do that when the way they are is perfect?

 

Tom Csanadi is a recently retired pediatrician, first generation American of Hungarian refugee parents, who is enjoying a peaceful life tending to his chickens on the beach, painting and playing music of many forms. He is currently enrolled in the UCSD Creative Writing program.