Water

My last baby was a colicky baby. I didn’t know she was colicky for four days because I had a C-section, and I was on prescription pain relievers after her birth. When I stopped the prescriptions, and the baby became sober, I knew immediately.

She started screaming.

She screamed bloody murder for hours. And days.

I rocked her. I nursed her. I swaddled her. I rubbed her belly and gave her massages. I ran the vacuum cleaner and a hair dryer to calm her. I put her in her crib, safe and sound though screaming, and sat on the front porch and cried myself.

Why would she not stop crying and how could I live with a screaming baby? I couldn’t sleep or work and we had four other kids to think about. I was at my wit’s end.

Nothing worked until I found out a bath soothed her. Both she and I could stop crying for a few precious minutes. A few minutes of relief in the warm, calming water.

Water.

I have an obsession with it. I always have. It makes me feel better when things are bad or uncomfortable.

I was born in raging water — during an actual hurricane.

It was September 23, 1975, and my 16-year-old mom went into labor in Metairie, Louisiana. It was also a full moon. Hurricane Eloise hit Alabama and Florida pretty hard, but it still produced high winds and rainfall in Louisiana on the day I was born.

My mom was given something called “Twilight” to reduce labor pains — it was a common birthing medication of Morphine and Scopolamine. The combination of the two drugs produced hallucinations in my teenage mom who jumped up from her hospital bed while in active labor. She ran down the hall, got in an elevator, and headed to the street to escape the hospital.

Can you imagine the sight? A pregnant teenager in an open-back gown sprinting down the sidewalk? In the rain…

A security guard eventually caught her and she delivered me within minutes. It sounds like a horrifying event for a teenager.

As the nurses worked to soothe my mom after all of the trauma, she told me the staff tried to get her to name me Eloise in honor of the hurricane.

She stuck with Jessica, but I think Ellie would have been cute too.

I never really thought much about my birth or the hurricane or the full moon, but the older I get, I think the way we come into this world may have a little to do with the way we participate in this world.

Water.

For the first few years of my life, I lived on the water. From Metairie, we moved to Gulfport, Mississippi. I lived with my dad in a trailer house just a few blocks from the Gulf. Our front yard was mostly sand and I vividly remember the “Mississippi Mud” cakes me and my sister baked in the hot sun. We could walk to the beach every day — it was back when poor folks still had access to property near the water.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t swim. It got on my dad’s nerves. He was in the Navy and learned to swim when they threw him into a pool. My dad gave me that same lesson — he asked me to come out into the Gulf and meet him where I could barely stand. He picked me up and threw me into water that was over my head. I panicked and started drowning.

*Don’t be too hard on him. He was a baby himself.

Daddy quickly realized his mistake and swam to rescue me. I didn’t cry because I was told not to, and I acted like it was no big deal, but it was. I have never learned to swim well, but I can doggy paddle and tread water. I won’t drown.

I still love the water.

I thrift a lot, and much of my finds at the thrift stores have been oil paintings. I didn’t realize it until I was maybe five or six paintings in, but they are all water. I realized the pattern and just ran with it. I have dozens of paintings on my walls depicting lakes and streams and oceans and great lakes and springs.

I search local thrift stores and I always visit these stores when I travel. I go to yard sales when I can find them and peruse junk stores when I travel. I found one of my favorite paintings at a thrift store north of Kansas City.

I saw the painting as soon as I entered…it’s huge. I could tell from a distance that it was a harbor scene. I am not an artist, and I don’t have the language to describe art, but as I drew closer, the scene grew more distant. You can only appreciate the scene from a distance…I know it was created with a knife, because I can see the way the paint was applied. It is on a piece of canvas cloth stretched behind the frame. I love it.

One of my paintings reminds me of Lake Superior. I am not sure what body of water it is, but I like to think it is a place I have been before — on the rocky volcanic outcrops of a Minnesota shore. Maybe it was during a winter gale? Maybe it was a spring storm? I am not sure, but this painting is my favorite. It hangs above one of my dad’s guitars — he gave it to me a few years before he died.

It’s all come full circle…the water and the memories. I still can’t swim well and I sure can’t play the guitar. Daddy once tried to teach me “Smoke on the Water” saying it was easy to learn…

Like learning to swim, Daddy?

We laughed at that one.

Smoke on the Water. That wasn’t just by chance. Water and memories. Water and trauma. Water and love.

Life is about making mistakes and learning and loving and finding your place in the world.

Finding your comfort. Finding your peace.

Finding your version of water…especially now.

~Jess