Trusting the Gut

Last weekend found us in the burning Okanagan camping with a group of my husband’s oldest and dearest friends—a whole crew of great people with awesome kids. We camped at what was basically an RV and tent parking lot next to a nice beach on Shushwap Lake.

Saturday was a perfect summer day with the sun blazing and a lake cool enough to not even notice. Our whole crew set up in front of the roped off kids area and spent the afternoon alternately baking and cooling. I was feeling nice and dirty and a little brain dead from two nights of travelling-with-a-baby sleep.

At some point in the afternoon, a woman from our group (who I just met for the first time this weekend) came down to our beach spot laughing about how her partner had sent her 3 urgent messages saying a storm was coming our way. “Hail and wind, he says. ‘Don’t set up your tent. You’re on evacuation alert.’” She laughed, and we all looked up at the cloudless blue sky and felt the soft summer breeze.

“It’s sure hard to believe that.” Someone said (maybe even me?)

“Yeah, it will probably pass us by.”

An hour went by and we forgot about her words. I was sitting under an umbrella with the Boodge and a friend who had a young baby, longing to lie out on a towel and soak up some sun, so I asked Sean to be on the Boodge for a while. Moments later our brother-in-law pulled up on his motorboat…he was taking kids out tubing and had come in to change loads. Sean decided to hop on with the Boodge—we had brought is lifejacket just in case he got an opportunity to go on a boat ride.

Immediately, I felt a little mommy-worry. “Should I come, I wonder?” But Sean said, “No, I think you should relax like you wanted, we’ll be fine.” We had been planning to take him in a boat anyway, and I knew Sean would keep him safe. I lay back down on my towel and watched the Boodge's little orange-hatted head bob away in his dad’s arms. Uneasiness hadn’t left me, but I talked myself out of it.

At that moment, the woman mentioned the storm warning again. Someone went to make sure the boat knew about it. I had forgotten about this, and my unease escalated. A physical sense of trepidation came into me, strong enough to make me recognize it as important. Should I go stop them from getting on the boat? Go get on myself, so I could be there to protect the Boodge? I stopped myself, not wanting to appear like the overprotective mother, the wife who doesn’t trust that her husband can take care of the baby. Relax, relax. But my body was telling me differently.

I watched the boat pull out into the water, throw out the tube, and a kid and then an adult bounce in for a ride. A friend’s daughter came up fresh off the last boatload, soaked and dishevelled and out of her mind with excitement “We went tubing! It was so AWESOME!” I looked back at the lake and realized I had lost sight of the boat. Nothing I could do now but lay back and wait.

A few minutes later, in an instant the wind picked up. Dark clouds came over the mountains on the other side of the lake. People jumped quickly to their feet. ”That storm is coming, we have to pack up.”

Even as our friend said it, air mattresses and umbrellas were picking up and blowing away. “Get the children out of the water,” someone yelled. Sand was blowing hard, like little pinpricks on my legs and arms. My baby was in the water. Where is that boat? Whitecaps were forming on the lake where there had been ripples moments ago. I looked up and down the beach where boats were docking and unloading and I didn’t see the Boodge’s little yellow lifejacket, his orange hat. Panic was taking me over, I felt frozen in one spot looking up and down the beach to spot their boat.

It feels terrible to be powerlessness to do anything to help when what is most precious is in danger. But it was worse because as I stood there I realized I could have prevented him being out there if I had just listened to my intuition, my knowledge, my body giving me warning. If I had not worried about how I may appear. If anything happened to him now, how could I live with the knowledge that I didn’t get him off that boat when I could have?

Gavin de Becker, in “The Gift of Fear”, writes about how often we discount our instincts, talking ourselves out of what our gut knows and putting ourselves in peril. Malcolm Gladwell also explains in "Blink" how our brain assesses all the information available unconsciously and tells us what to do in an instant. Still, we question ourselves. We humans are so blessed and cursed with higher thinking that we discount our animal part that tells us how to protect ourselves and those we love.

Mothers are gifted with amazing instincts. I think every mother I know has a story in which her body told her to check on her child just at a moment when they were in grave danger. And we all marvel that our children are surviving toddlerhood with all its close calls, but I think it is because of our animal instincts that they do. We act unconsciously, grabbing baby before he falls down the step, opening a door in time to see a toddler climbing to an open window, checking on the kids only to find them mixing up a concoction of Drano and shampoo to drink on a dare. It's our gut that moves us, if we can get out of the way and listen to it.

I am not blind to the irony that last week I was writing about how important it was to me to teach the Boodge to honour and trust his instincts. The Boodge and his dad came in on the boat, safe and sound, and I have never been happier to see them. The situation, luckily, was a powerful lesson learned with no loss. Now I have to ask myself, what about the Mama-instincts that were given to me when he was born? How can I make sure I trust them next time?