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I crossed my legs and sat up straighter, shifting Seb to the front of my ankles so he could continue his conversation. “How old is she?” I asked, nodding at Sienna.
“Fifteen months.” Sienna’s mum dropped to her knees with a tired sigh. “And yours?”
Maybe I should have corrected her and said Seb wasn’t really mine, but it would have made the conversation awkward.
“A little more than six months.”
“And he’s on finger foods already?”
“Uh…” Uncertainty made my heart skip. She made it sound like I’d done something wrong. Had I misunderstood the information in the books? No, I was sure I had it right, and I’d made Will read about it, too, so we could agree on ways to expand Seb’s diet. There was no reason to doubt myself about this.
Before I could answer, Seb swiped another floret from the container and brandished it at Sienna.
“Seb.” I removed it from his grasp. “Stop trying to feed her.”
The woman laughed. “It’s okay. If your son can get my daughter to eat something green, I’ll pay you to visit us every night at dinnertime.”
I smiled politely, distracted by the way my heart pattered at this stranger assuming I was Seb’s mother.
“So, whereabouts are you guys from? I know it’s not Valentine Bay. This town’s not small enough to hide a kid this cute.”
The woman accepted my compliment with a smile. “We’re just passing through on our way to Sydney.”
“Ah.” I nodded. “Well, welcome.”
“Thanks.” She smiled at Seb, who was accepting Sienna’s face-pats with equanimity. “He’s a cool kid.”
I smiled and dropped a kiss on his head. “He is.”
“Well, I’m sure you’ve heard it all before, but if you can get through the first six months, you can get through anything. I don’t know about you, but those were the toughest for me.”
Unexpectedly, the image of Heather walking down Will’s hallway flashed through my head, and I experienced a pulse of sympathy for what she might have gone through raising Seb on her own for the last half a year. I hadn’t spared much thought for the woman who abandoned this sweet little boy, and the few I did hadn’t been too kind, but something about the way Sienna’s mother tried to connect with me over our shared challenges had me revisiting my judgement. It was followed by a stab of guilt that I was lying by omission about raising Seb myself.
“I, uh—”
“Sienna!”
The woman tugged the little girl away from Seb, who was now cluelessly wearing a broccoli floret hat. I laughed as I pulled the vegetables from his curls, and a surge of love bubbled up in me. Seb was just so darn perfect that how and why he came into our lives didn’t matter much to me. I wouldn’t have changed anything about the way things had turned out.
Sienna was apparently tired of her game, and she stormed out from under the shade of the umbrella. The woman jumped to her feet.
“It was nice talking to you,” she said as she walked away. “Have a great day!”
“You, too!” I called as she followed her determined little girl down the beach.
I scooped the broken bits of broccoli into the little box, put it out of Seb’s reach, and offered him a sippy cup of water instead.He grinned and swung the cup at me before depositing it in the sand.
“Did you hear that, little man?” I asked. “That lady thought I was your mama. What do you think about that, huh?”
Seb babbled and waved his arms, which I took to mean he didn’t think it was a terrible idea.
And neither did I.
I looked out over the water to where the boys were not surfing but sitting out on their boards and shooting the breeze. Will happened to be facing the shore at the same time, and he waved his arm over his head to say hello. I waved back with a weird kind of pressure building in the part of my chest that had been so open and clear a few minutes ago. And if I couldn’t articulate to myself what that meant, I was a hack who shouldn’t be on the yoga mat.
The kind of peace I experienced that morning only came with alignment. It was the result of knowing I was in the right place at the right time—that I’d found something that fit. That I belonged. I rubbed my sternum and breathed into the discomfort.
All the years I’d spent looking for myself in my practice, and I’d found her while sitting on the beach with a baby in my lap and the man I loved smiling at me from the ocean.
