Rivers, Spiders, Snakes and Toys

Toys R Us is going out of business and I’m feeling somewhat ambiguous about it.

Shane asked if we could go check out the sales. He is fifteen, but being the good nerd like his parents, he still enjoys collecting WWE Wrestling action figures and Funko Pops. If you don’t know what that is, here’s an example:

Toys R Us happens to sell all of these types of things so I think he was hoping to get a deep discount for the chore money burning a hole in his pocket.

I like shopping, but mainly online. Some moms are soccer moms. Some moms are Susie Homemaker moms. Some moms are hard-driven career moms.

I’m an Amazon Prime mom.

Like I’m pretty sure if I were in a Kevin Costner western, that would be my name. “Priming With Amazon”.

Perhaps you’ve met my mother, “Debits With QVC”?

In any case, toddlers don’t enjoy Amazon (or QVC for that matter). That’s how I became the “Target, Toys R Us and sometimes Walmart Mom”. I could always take Shane there and there would be hours of entertainment. It became a tradition for me to take him on a shopping spree the day after Christmas or the day after his birthday to spend his gift money.

I guess these are the memories he has that have caused him to comment more than once how sad he is that Toys R Us is closing.

As we went to check out the sale the other day, we had this conversation:

Shane: I’m going to miss coming here. We’ve been coming here since I was really little.

Me: Yes we have. Did you know I was eight years old the first time I ever went to a Toys R Us?

Shane: Really? You didn’t go when you were little?

Me: No. We didn’t have Toys R Us in El Paso until I was probably eleven or twelve. The first one I ever saw and went into was in San Antonio. We were visiting and my Mom took us.

Shane: What did you buy?

Me: Anything we wanted. My Mom didn’t say no to anything. Board games. Barbie clothes. Pretend makeup and jewelry. My brother got a whole bunch of model cars. She let us have anything we wanted.

Shane: That’s so cool!

I should probably point out that it was my eight year old self telling that story to Shane. It WAS cool, to an eight year old.

My forty-six-year-old self didn’t tell him the real reason Mom was so generous in spending copious amounts of money she probably charged on a card and that my Dad would not be happy about having to pay off later.

In the summer of 1980, my Mom and brother and I took my grandparents to a family reunion for my grandmother’s side of the family. Dad stayed behind, though I don’t remember exactly why.

The reunion itself was at my great-aunt Lou’s house. That was my grandmother’s younger sister (my grandmother was the oldest of 8 children). Aunt Lou lived on a farm in the Hill Country just outside of San Antonio.

My memories of that part of the trip were good ones. My brother and I slept on camping cots on either side of the guest bed my Mom slept in. They had a pool table and when the men were not busy drinking beer and shooting pool, we would sneak in and try to play like we knew what we were doing. When I got tired of being around my brother and being around other people, I would go lay down on my cot in the guest room and read my copy of “Little House On The Prairie” that Mom bought me for the trip.

That trip was the first time I ever saw anyone shoot a rattlesnake. One of the dogs would start barking at something in the yard and Aunt Lou would go out with her shot gun. After a gunshot, Uncle Dave would go out and pick up what was left of the snake.

We left the farm to go stay with my great-aunt, Glynn, in Bandera, which is a small town about fifty miles northwest of San Antonio. When we drove up to the house, the roof looked like it was moving.

“Those are Daddy-Long-Legs”, my mother told us.

Spiders. Thousands and thousands of spiders crawling all over the roof of my Great Aunt’s little white stone house. So many of them, that it looked like the roof was moving.

Luckily, we were staying at Mom’s cousin’s house in town, but my brother was so traumatized by the spiders that he had nightmares for the rest of the trip.

One of our reasons for going to Bandera was to float on the Medina River.

Mom’s cousin’s wife, Connie, had been talking up this river float for days. Our other cousins from El Paso had gone the summer before and had a great time so we kids were excited. My mom, not so much. She wasn’t a good swimmer and had always been afraid of water, but everyone kept telling her the river was pretty gentle and not very deep in most places, so she agreed to go.

My brother and I had both taken swimming lessons two summers before and had turned into real water babies. But a river isn’t a swimming pool, and Mom made it clear to us that if anything should happen and we fell off our inner tubes, we should not try to swim against the current. We should swim with the current and try to get over to the bank as quickly as we could and wait for an adult to come get us.

I remember stepping out into the water and being surprised at how powerful ankle-deep water can be. I remember Connie and my brother went ahead of us, then I went, and my Mom went last. What Connie had failed to tell us was that it had been raining there for a month. Heavy rains. The river had swelled up higher than usual and it was running very swiftly.

As I sat down in my tube and the current started carrying me, it felt more like rapids than a lazy river. I also became aware that the water was a lot deeper than where we had stepped in. I could no longer see the bottom. The speed of the current made me nervous.

I don’t know how long we floated before I became aware that something had happened to Mom and she was off her tube and in the water. I could hear her yelling at Connie, “Get my kids out of the water!” I had never heard terror in her voice like that before, and never heard it again after.

Just as she was yelling at Connie to get us out of the water, my tube hit something. Connie would tell us later it was probably a submerged log. The next thing I knew, I was thrown in the water and everything seemed to happen in slow motion. It was murky and dark and cold and even though I was completely under water, my feet were not touching bottom. 

Instinct took over and I got my head back above the water but not before I swallowed and choked on some of the nastiness. I could now feel the full power of the current and it was carrying me away from where I had last seen my Mom.

Up ahead Connie had made her way to the bank and had her arm out, yelling at me to come to her. I let the current carry me to her and I remember grabbing her hand and then clinging to her, terrified. She hoisted me onto the bank and I pulled myself up while she went to help my Mom.

I would learn later that Mom’s tube had hit something in the water as well, and caused her to fall out. Not being a good swimmer, she knew her only chance was to hang onto her tube so she managed to wrap one arm through it and around it and held her hand with the other one, sort of as one would put someone in a headlock. She would tell me years later that she heard my tube explode and it actually flew up in the air a little, and the last thing she saw before her own head went under was my little body go under the water.

I didn’t tell Shane that that’s why we drove into San Antonio the next day and went straight to Toys R Us. I allowed my eight year old self to tell him that anything we picked up off the shelf, Mom would say, “Do you want that?” and if we said yes, she threw it in the cart. I allowed my eight year old self to tell him that I had never seen a cart so full of toys and games and that we couldn’t wait to get home and show Dad everything Mom bought us.

And as my eight year old self told him this “fun” story, my forty-six year old self remembered pulling into the driveway at home. I remembered that as soon as my Dad appeared from the garage door, Mom burst into tears, and he just stood out there and hugged her while she sobbed, until she had gathered herself enough to come into the house.

My eight year old self can remember how scary it was to feel like, for a moment, I was drowning. But my forty-six year old self cannot even fathom the terror of watching your child go under water and not seeing her come back up.

I didn’t tell Shane that the summer in the river is the reason his Memaw took him to swimming lessons every summer for four years from the time he was two. She didn’t want him to be afraid of the water and she knew that being a good swimmer is what saved my life that day.

I didn’t tell him that the river is the reason I still feel very at home in a pool, but open bodies of water terrify me. I didn’t tell him that’s why when we go to the lake back home, I only let THD take me a little way out on the jet ski and then we have to turn around and go back to shore, because my anxiety goes through the roof.

I’m sure someday he’ll read this blog and read this story, and then he’ll know why my feelings about Toys R Us are so ambiguous. But for now, my eight year old self just wants him to remember it as the place where we had mommy and son time.