baby/shark

When I first moved in with Andrew, I opened his closet to borrow a shirt and found a piece of paper taped on the inside of the door with a quote:

“Do sharks complain about Monday? NO. They're up early, biting stuff, chasing shit, being scary - reminding everyone they're a f*ckin’ shark.”

I laughed a little – it’s a frighteningly accurate reflection of Andrew’s work ethic. I also wondered if I had gotten engaged to European Patrick Bateman.

Andrew does nothing by half measures. Fortunately, he uses his forces for good instead of evil. Since he has become a father to our baby Skye, I have seen his focus – and surrounding quotes - evolve. While I still overhear his commanding (f*ckin shark!) voice on Zoom calls, I also eavesdrop on him “conversing” with Skye. Imagine:

“My little love, did you realize you have carrots on your jumper?”

“No, Daddy, I didn’t realize I had carrots on my jumper, Lionel the Lion telled me I was all clean.”

His fervor for work has translated directly into enthusiasm for parenting. But he has not left behind his love of sharks. Ancient megaladon teeth adorn the shelves of his office, and one wall is entirely covered by a sprawling painting by the South African painter John Stein. It’s a moody rendering of the lighthouse at Kalk Bay, in colors of wet leather, barely illuminated by the suggestion of sunshine, as though the harbor has just emerged from the ravages of a thunderstorm, or is about to be overtaken by one. We found it on the wall of a bookshop when we were visiting Kalk Bay last summer.

Andrew has fallen in love with South Africa – its energy, its people, and its sharks. He traveled there over 20 years ago to dive, and it’s where he first discovered his love of sharks. Not nurse sharks, those puppies of the underwater world that populate the reefs of Key West, but great white sharks, tiger sharks, and bull sharks. He has been back dozens of times – often departing the harbour at Kalk Bay - to visit these creatures with whom he feels a true and deep connection. Though it’s counterintuitive, Andrew’s fear of the water is positively affected by the presence of sharks; they calm him. I would think this was a ridiculous claim had I not seen many photos and videos of him in the company of sharks, holding their fins and tails and stroking their noses with a natural tranquility.

Though I am curious about sharks and have my diving certification, we don’t exactly share this affinity. When I swam in an estuary, he warned me of the potential of cruising bull sharks. He also told me the story of a septugenarian avid sea swimmer, who was eaten by a white shark one morning in Sunny Cove, just a stone’s throw from Kalk Bay. She swam the length of the cove in the early hours of the morning for over 15 years. Locals told us that, despite shark warnings, she waded in for her usual swim. A neighbor said he saw the attack take place, and it took less than 30 seconds. The shark was reported to be nearly 20 feet long. The woman’s remains were never recovered.

There are, of course, the horrifying images that populate’s one’s mind; the flailing limbs, the reddening of the sea. But equally, there was something moving and satisfying about the story. Tragic, yes. Unwise, perhaps. But she entered the ocean to swim without fear. As a swimmer, I know the feeling of oneness with the water, the freedom and peace that come with swimming. She died in the manner that she lived, consumed by that which she loved.

At the time of our trip to South Africa, I was pregnant, and feeling uncharacteristically cautious and protective of my body and the child that grew within it. The story about the fated swimmer nearly prevented me from getting into the sea, but the draw of the water was too strong. I tried not to imagine that first tooth going into my belly, but I did, daydreaming about how I would fight back, so that even if I lost my life or my limbs, the baby could be preserved. In my most melodramatic imagining, I would swim to shore after the attack, near death, and the doctors would keep me alive in a medically induced coma until the baby could be born via caesarian. In the movie version, Andrew would bring our child back to the cove where it took place and hold her hand as the sun went down.

Macabre navel-gazing aside, there is something so basic, so primitive about having a child and the way it shifts the evolution of your thinking brain, from selfishness to protectiveness. The squeak of a window opening, or the cry of a cat sparks my adrenaline, for their similarity to the sounds of my baby. We are both risk-takers - Andrew’s not just a diver but a motorcyclist and a paraglider– and the idea of parenthood clipping our proverbial wings bothers me. While part of me grasps to the idea of being unchanged, and free in the world, Skye’s existence changes how I live, forever. Parents have always said this, but I only now understand it.

It feels a bit late in life for us to shift how we are, become more cautious, parent-like people. We laugh that our whole family has big birthdays this year: 50 for Andrew, 40 for me, and  Skye’s first birthday. Our awareness of how much time we have already spent, makes us all the more aware of what we have left, while Skye’s life is laid out ahead with the myriad possibilities that narrow with age.

I find myself a bit jealous of the oldest vertebrate living on earth: a 400 year old Greenland shark. Greenland sharks reach sexual maturity at 150 years, which seems like enough time to climb all the mountains, dance at all the parties, ride all the rollercoasters and kiss all the boys. But perhaps, in the human world, having a baby in middle age is the equivalent of that. You can never climb all the mountains. You can never dive with all the sharks.

“Why are you researching Greenland sharks?” Andrew asks in the dark.

“This blog… I know it is about babies and sharks and consumption, but it’s a mess. I feel like I haven’t been able to write since Skye was born,” I say from my side of the bed.

“Yeah…” he says. “Greenland sharks look a lot like seven gills –they’re kind of bulky and rounded like submarines, and cruise around in the bottom of the ocean. They’re nearly blind.”

“Have you ever dived with them?”

“No, they live at like 2,000 metres.”

We stop talking because there is a cry through the baby monitor. When Skye cries, we are both quiet, and listening becomes something that feels akin to reading, but like reading braille; feeling our way through her sounds, learning what is urgent and what isn’t, what yelps are in her dreamstate, versus when she cries in a way that means it’s time to throw on a robe and pad down the stairs.

I’ve since learned that Greenland sharks can live up to 2200 metres deep, a bit over 7,000 feet. Which is deeper by a thousand feet than Denali, the tallest mountain in America. Researchers used carbon dating on the oldest Greenland shark’s eyes to determine her age, which approximated her birth in the early 17th century. She had her children in the mid to late 1800s, around the time of the Civil War. I wonder if 1983, the year of my birth, will seem like the time of the Civil War when Skye is my age.

Andrew, at ten years my senior, is also rattled a bit like this, but handles it well and with an undiluted sense of humor and zest for adventure. To celebrate his 50th year, he will fly to Norway to live on a ship in a remote, ice-scattered fjord for a week, diving every day and night with orcas, the true apex predators of the ocean. When we were in South Africa, we met a shark researcher visiting from Germany who was concerned about orcas off SA attacking and eating white sharks, leading to a decline in the population and potentially throwing the entire marine ecosystem out of balance. Just before our trip, a video surfaced of pods of orcas preying on white sharks, which a South African shark biologist called “one of the most beautiful pieces of natural history ever filmed.”  I could see the Norway expedition taking shape in Andrew’s eyes even then.

To me, it was sad. Just as watching white sharks kill a seal is sad (though Andrew tells me seals are not as cute up close, and can be quite vicious). It also gave me a chill to think: Andrew is going diving with animals that literally eat great white sharks for breakfast.

People keep asking me how I feel about Andrew’s birthday diving trip: if I am scared, if I don’t want him to do it. It would never occur to me to ask him not to go, though I know there is a serious risk. The idea of asking the person you love most to stop doing the thing they love most out of fear seems wrongheaded to me.

“What is the point of this blog?” I will ask Andrew at the dinner table in my mind, and he will reply that he doesn’t know, that it’s up to me to decide the point of my writing, that he’s sure I’ll figure it out, and maybe we should watch Jawstonight.

And I will agree and then think of the strangeness of watching Quint being chewed by the big fish, singing “Spanish Ladies,” while my baby is suckling at my breast. This essay was supposed to be about babies, and their consumptive nature, and how I am getting older, and it scares me that Skye is drinking my youth, and how we are all connected by eating and drinking and birth and death. How do we love without consumption? Can we be reduced to the drive to procreate and survive? Are we all sharks just with smaller teeth?

“This essay isn’t about babies; it’s about sharks,” Andrew might say.

Maybe it is about sharks. Maybe it is about babies.

When I was pregnant the first time, I called the little one “baby shark,” and we tracked his progress on an app, as he grew from the size of a pinhead to a blueberry. When I swam in the ocean, I thought of baby shark swimming inside me; when I ate, I thought of my food nourishing him. Now, there is a small blue stone in the shape of a heart that I keep in a wooden box that symbolizes baby shark, and the loss of him. He left my body in a rush of blood in the bathroom in my grandmother’s house in Key West. It was gory. An exit befitting a baby shark. 

But now we have baby Skye, whose name and presence brings to mind all things celestial rather than nautical. She was born looking heavenward – the French-speaking doctor said in English: “She was born looking at the sky.” And she fills the shark-shaped hole in my heart.

Andrew isn’t the only one with a big birthday this year. I began to think about what might be a fitting adventure for my 40th, and my thoughts drew me to the city of my youth: New York. A friend and I chatted about how much fun it would be to walk the streets of our old neighborhoods, eat in restaurants and shop in stores whose windows we only pressed our faces against as 20-somethings. An escape and a homecoming: a celebration that with middle age has also come maturity and means. I like to think that in the nesting doll of myself, I am young and free, inside the parent part of me. I am “Sarah” before I am “Mom;” I can explore and risk and dare in the way I did in youth, just as Andrew can swim with killer whales and be a doting father. We are untethered by our new titles; parenthood only layers on richness.

For the New York trip, my friend suggested the 4th of July weekend, which I thought would be perfect, but in the same instant, my mind filled with dark possibilities:

A shooter at a parade; a terrorist attack; a subway bomb; fireworks and screams.

And then I thought of Skye’s perfect little face. “Maybe the weekend after.”