In the photo, my mom is holding Kate and me as young girls on a beach. We are both small pink barnacles clinging to her hips as an anchor in the wind, Kate peering at the camera, while my face is nestled into my mom's neck. The beach is all tangles of seaweed and silvery strand grass blowing sideways. An overturned yellow dinghy lies behind us. The sky is no color, a smear of cold nothingness.

I've revisited this picture a thousand times over the years. Of all the photos I've squirreled away from my parents' haphazard collection of memories, this one resonates with me most. Something about my mom's face makes my heart ache— her squinted eyes, her relaxed closed-lip smile, the effortlessness with which she holds us both. She feels like motherhood, embodied. In truth, I feel a longing to crawl back into her arms in the same way and allow myself a moment of respite from the elements, a moment to feel so safe and sure of my place in the world.

One evening, at the suggestion of one of my guides, I sit on my bed and do nothing. I don't meditate; I don't do breathwork; I don't listen to relaxing music, I don't read or journal or journey or intentionally radiate lovingkindness; I just sit and allow myself to exist without my usual urgency or insistence upon productivity. My eye catches this photo where it is taped on one of our drawers and in that stillness, I immediately begin to cry. At this point in my healing journey, it feels clear to me that tears don't have to "mean" anything; oftentimes it's just stored up emotion and stress leaving my body. I am grateful to have this photo to tether me; we stay in contact for nearly 30 minutes and at the end of my time of nothing, I peel the photo from its place and flip to the back where in my dad's handwriting it says:

Chatham

8/19/86

I recognize the date as my parents' 19th wedding anniversary. My mom was 39, just as I am now. Outside of this I know nothing; I have so many questions about this trip, about the people they were, the person I was, how this moment in time filters into each of our personal kaleidoscopes of becoming, how this latent memory was part of the vein of my own evolution into present-day Beth.

These questions fuel the idea for the gift I give my dad for his birthday, just a few days later, which is actually a thinly veiled gift for myself. I offer that twice a month we'll sit down to look at a family photo together; he will tell me whatever comes up for him in viewing it and I will take some time to commit my rendition of those stories into something written. It is the gift of storytelling, togetherness, transcription, sharing memories.

We decide to have our first meeting at Handlebar on his birthday— an extension of his usual 3 pm visit for a cup of coffee, ever a man of routine. As we stand in line, he pulls out a leather planner the size of a billfold that is embossed in gold with the words "Boston Diary 1986." He used the planners as journals to collect little tidbits of what his days then held and has kept it pristine almost 38 years later. As I flip through it, the baristas shout birthday tidings to him over the counter; they clap for him, they cheer. Part of his routine, his essence, is also being deeply lovable. His two dollar bills, his consistency, his generosity and thoughtfulness, his quiet kindness are all part of his charm.

After a birthday latte splurge, I learn the trip to Chatham was inspired by a visit to East Weymouth Savings Bank, in which my dad had invested. For a lifetime I'd known my dad manages investments daily, but not until last year did I know those investments were exclusively in small banks. Knowing him this doesn't surprise me, but somehow I still missed this explicit fact.

This kernel of knowing emerged over one of our dinner conversations that happened while I lived with my parents for a year and a half after separating from Nic. When the girls were with me, dinner conversations orbited around the girls themselves almost exclusively, but in their absence, my parents would become somewhat of a mental reel of memories. First dates. Old apartments. Family trips. High school teachers. Dinner with friends. They each had pieces of this tape of their mostly shared history they were splicing together with words— a ricochet of remembering, a tumble of recollection, each of them feeding off of each other's prompts.

I remember few of the details of the stories themselves, but so much of the energy of watching my parents recall the life they've lived together. I could feel them disappear together to past moments, reliving them in real time. I could feel the joy and innocence and sheer pain of their evolution together. The loss. The triumph. They became a symphony, their parts so deeply intertwined to make something whole and beautiful. Somehow inside of all that was a love of investing in small banks that I hadn't yet heard until I was 39.

Of course we took a family vacation to chase a small bank.

When we arrived, apparently one of our bags was missing at the airport, our room wasn't ready, the machine to make room keys was down, the front desk man apparently asked my mother to keep a 2 and 4 year old quiet after we'd been traveling all day and were denied access to our room, and then later when we were finally nestled in our room, the fire alarm went off. My mother will proudly add to this story that she refused to leave the building at this point; it had been enough chaos and we'd burn down with the building if we needed to.

As a mother myself, I fully understand.

Other high points of the trip committed to transcription were apparently many trips to the Stop N Shop, during one of which, I peed on the floor. Eating haddock every night; ("your mom was in heaven"). Ice cream at Emack and Bolios. Me creating chaos in the children's room at the Mother Church in Boston. Also, clearly, beaches, wind, overturned dinghies. It is a swirl, little bits of history. I can feel the spaces gaping between them, all the moments unseen, even the spaces where my mom's voice should be chiming in to complete things, how quiet and somehow incomplete my dad seems in her absence.

The question I then ask is, why Cape Cod? What felt so special about this place that he went home and named an entire room after the place? My real question, the one I ask myself and others constantly, is, is it your place? Is it the place your body, heart, and mind feel most connected, most alive, most seen? Is it a home you didn't know you were missing? Does that place exist for all of us? Are we constantly fumbling our way back to someone unidentified place that brings us back to life?

Is that where you belong?

Without really waiting for an answer, I offer that Big Sur feels like that to me. Dad laughs in agreement, says maybe Big Sur feels that way to everyone. And then he adds, "You're kind of like Big Sur— majestic...gloriously beautiful, but also don't go around the corner thinking it's going to still be there. At any moment, there could be a landslide."

I pause to write the exact words down. I pause because I've been seen. I pause because so much of our tumult as humans is in the spaces we feel not allowed to be our most authentic selves, and here, in two effortless sentences, my father has shown he knows me, me exactly.

My whole life I've been at war with that person. I've tried to be something tepid, balanced, neutral; I just wanted to feel like I belong. I've tried to be a little less turbulent and consuming than the person I appear to be now, but in truth I am exactly what my dad described— my surface has the potential to crumble at any moment and yet I am anchored by the ancient roots of an entire forest of trees. I am both rugged stability and turbulence, not one or the other.

In my question about spaces, I realize what I'm wondering is what the process of becoming your truest self feels like for each person. Do they experience it in physical spaces, on trips, in jobs or relationships or children? Do they one day stand at the edge of a dreary beach clutching their babies to their hips, so sure of their own place in the world despite the wind beating against them? Do they close their mouth and smile calmly knowing that one day they'll radiate this energy forward into the universe into a single photo their daughter will herself witness while falling apart as a means of just beginning to collect herself again? Do they one day realize they are Big Sur, embodied, when their dad so aptly relates its essence to their own?

I come again to the image of my mom on the beach. I, too, am a mother of two young girls. I, too, am on the cusp of turning 40. For a moment, I feel connected to everything— to her, to that time we shared together, to my childhood self, to myself as a mother, to my dad who has cradled us and the memories of all these experiences for a lifetime, to the wind that whips at our legs, to all that crumbles, to all that stays standing. It is all part of this unfolding, this becoming human.

Wherever you go, you belong. I can see it in my comfort in the crook of my mother's neck. I can feel it in my dad's words about me as a reflection of Big Sur. I stand in it now as a mother myself, having become someone else’s anchor against the elements.

After staring at this photo for two weeks straight, I tape it back to my drawer where this all began. The bedroom I now share with my girls fills with the warmth of my mom’s calm smile. I step outside into the afternoon sun where, as if from a dream, the wind picks up just for a moment as if to say, You belong here. You belong.