Day Break

5:00am, 29 August 2012
Broadcove Beach Campground, Cape Breton, NS

We had arrived the night before, at dusk, in the onset of pouring rain, to select our campsite and set up our tents. During the night, I could hear the sound of retching, but it sounded like it was coming from the campsite beside us. I figured if it was one of my kids, they'd let me know.

I underestimated the independence and fortitude of my 10yr old.

At 3am, I awoke and, thinking it chilly, left our tent to make sure the older kids were warm enough in theirs, only to find she'd been the person throwing up for hours. I settled her back in with an extra blanket, told her to come let us know if she needed us, and returned to my tent to lie awake for the rest of the night, worried and wondering if she'd need me.

10 years is a funny age. She's no longer a child, wanting to be cuddled and held, but she's not yet a teenager demanding complete independence of me. She needs me and she doesn't need me, and her desire to stay close wars with her desire to go the other direction on a daily basis. Tall and strong and so very bright, I can still see the uncertainty in her eyes as she pushes childhood behind her. She is stubbornly self-sufficient and wonderfully adaptable.

By 5am, she had given up on sleep and was sitting at the picnic table, wrapped in a blanket. Everyone else was sound asleep -- only the sick kid and the worried mom awake under the brightening sky.

I got dressed and crawled out of the tent.

"Would you like to watch the sun rise over the Atlantic with me?"

Day Break at Broadcove Beach Campground

We walked hand-in-hand down to the bench at the top of the cliff: just me, my eldest child, and our blanket. Echoing the many times I've comforted her and held her close over the years, she crawled onto my lap and I wrapped us in the blanket. We talked about so much, but mostly about how finite is our experience of various things in our lifetime.

Broadcove Beach Campground, Cape Breton Highlands National Park, NS

As a parent to three now, this comes home to me frequently. "Is this the last time this baby will ever nurse?" "Is this the last time this boy will crawl into my bed to cuddle?" "Is this the last time she'll hold my hand on the walk to school?" We try to catalogue these moments as parents, but they're much less tangible than the "firsts". There's no spot in a baby book for "the last time she kissed me goodbye in the schoolyard."

The two of us talked about how many times we might watch fireworks in our lives, or travel in a plane, or eat a coconut. The possibility to do these things is always there, but how often do we actually do them in one lifetime? The idea of infinite opportunity conflicting with finite experience grabbed her imagination. As an exercise in making lemonade out of an otherwise miserable experience, watching the day break over the water was a success.

Morning Has Broken!

The only thought in my mind, however, was this was the one and only time in my entire life that I will ever watch the sun rise over the Atlantic Ocean with my eldest daughter at 10 years old -- a child teetering on the cusp of being grown up.

We sat there for about half an hour in the early morning quiet, watching the horizon lighten, then pink, and then break over the ocean like the yolk of an egg. It was glorious. It was magical. It was heartbreaking.