Crawl of Fame

by Julie Moss

  “Okay, Mom.”

  My son had already camped alone in an Italian forest at age six, run his first triathlon at eleven, traveled to more than twenty countries, earned his Junior Lifeguard stripes, and become an all-league cross-country and water polo performer. He was also an excellent surfer. If we had a family business besides triathlon, it was surfing. He understood the thrills and safety factors, and knew how to assess his surroundings. I wasn’t throwing a non-swimmer into the deep end.

  We arrived a few minutes later. Quite a few onlookers stood on the cliffs, pulled together by the same coastal alerts I’d heard: the tsunami that crossed the Pacific following the March 2011 earthquake that leveled Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant with a forty-eight-foot wave was about to hit Santa Cruz. A few surfers watched with Mats, hoping the tsunami would amount to more than the gutless one- to two-foot ripples dissolving on the rocks below.

  After surveying the situation, Mats grabbed his board and looked at me excitedly. Some parents might think (and did think) I was sending him into harm’s way, but Mats viewed it differently. “When I talk about this, I can kind of imagine someone thinking, ‘How did your mom not get a call from social services?’” Mats recalled with a hearty chuckle. “Well, it was my decision to paddle out, so . . .

  “When I first heard a tsunami was coming, I thought, ‘It’s barely going to be noticeable.’ We’d had tsunamis, but they were like a foot. Still, I was super excited: ‘Cool, I’m going to paddle out and surf a tsunami. Wild . . . not something people do every day.’

  “When Mom and I arrived, the tide was normal, coming up on the cliffs. I talked to a couple people, and then walked down the cliff. When I got to the shoreline, it’s like, hello! The tide was receding as fast I could walk on the rocks . . . a hundred feet out . . . two hundred feet . . . The rocks never show unless it’s a super low tide, and no one had seen the rocks this exposed.

  “There was a little surf, but nothing really. Then a set of three waves came through with about ten-foot faces. I missed the first one, caught the second one, rode it for awhile, kicked out . . . and then the same wave completely filled in the exposed rock reef and crashed against the cliffs. I decided it was time to go in, so I paddled over to the three other guys and told them I was done. We’re all smiling at each other: how cool—we just surfed the tsunami!

  “There are two channels at Pleasure Point where you can safely paddle in and out when the surf is big. They turned into raging rivers. Then these incredible longshore rip currents started running up the coast. We tried to paddle against them, but it was hopeless. I turned to the other guys and said, ‘We’re just going to have to ride this one out.’ We got pushed a half mile down the coast. Then it switched, and we got pushed right back. It was a trip. Totally bizarre.

  “I got to school late, and told my friends, ‘Yeah, I just rode the tsunami!’

  “‘You’re full of shit,’ someone said.

  “When they saw me smiling and heard me talk about it all day, they knew otherwise.”

  Well, my friends reacted differently.

  “When Julie told me about it on the phone, I said to her, ‘What the hell are you doing? You can’t let him out in the water during a tsunami! Are you trying to be the cool mom?’” Lisette recalled. “But she knew her kid and how capable he was. She’d never urge him to go out there if he didn’t have very strong surfing and swimming skills. It seems irresponsible, but when you hear him describe his experience, it’s clear he had full awareness and control. In hindsight, would it have been any more irresponsible if he’d paddled out during a monster swell? When you have kids who surf, they’re in the water, that’s part of the deal.

  “On the flip side, one time I was visiting when our boys were about nine. There was really big surf in Oceanside. Mats was in this rebellious headspace of, ‘Well, if you don’t want me to do it, or it seems dangerous, then I want to do it.’ He was in the water bodysurfing, caught in a rip, and Julie was a wreck. She was running up and down the beach. She was really scared, and was ready to go out and get him.”

  It was Mats’s final decision, though my role could be construed as a Bad Mom moment. Mats loved it! Were I seventeen years old that day, I would’ve paddled out. You know how powerful you feel inside after an experience like that? Too many people don’t allow themselves the opportunity to try something outrageous. Hey, here’s a tsunami. Go feel it.

  Later, we drove over the narrow Santa Cruz Harbor bridge en route to school. A huge crowd lined the harbor; what was going on? We then saw the no-nonsense business end of the tsunami. The same five-foot surge that sent Mats and his surf buddies a half mile down the coast ripped through the harbor, destroying or sinking thirty boats and decimating a dock. Further north, in Mendocino and Humboldt counties, six people were swept out to sea, never to be seen again.

  Meanwhile, my son grinned without stopping. The smile reappears every time he’s asked about that day. Why not? Like my Kona moment, it’s something incredibly unique, and unlikely to be repeated.

  Meanwhile, I struggled to figure out my next steps. The subject of Mats’s spiritual development through Dance of the Deer further polarized Mark and me. I tried to balance the nontraditional emphasis on traveling for retreats and missing school with more traditional options. I wanted Mats to carry forth with fullest authenticity, independence, and confidence in his choices and decisions, but also to be a fully functioning member of society.

  Between co-parenting, shuttling Mats, and fielding heartbreaking questions—as in, how and why did the storybook marriage of two Ironman stars fall apart?—I contended with complications that drained me of energy and resources. Mark had to deal with these same complications, but he unilaterally chose this path to Santa Cruz that impacted both of us. He had the opportunity to make a conscious decision. I had no choice in the matter.

  I knew I should buck up and move on, but I was trapped in a downward spiral. I couldn’t convey to friends what I was feeling, because I struggled to make sense of it myself. I tried to slow things down while all my moorings and foundations were breaking loose or disappearing—Mark, my mom, my life. Where was my inner Wonder Woman now? I felt like a tsunami had submerged Julie-town and left it in shambles. Divorces have that impact.

  After experiencing its painful effects firsthand, I will never view divorce as a positive, transformative experience. Nor will I view it as “the best thing to do for the kids.” It’s just too fucking hard, especially for kids. But life must go on, and at some point it’s critical to stop letting divorce define us. My challenge felt like a never-ending headwind on a twenty-mile hill climb. I struggled with how to emerge. How would I take the reins of my life back and stand on my own?

  I looked to my side. There was Mats. I felt alone in partnership, but he was right there. Already, he was my constant reinforcing rock. That would never change.

  Mats started displaying bravado, awareness of his surroundings, and an active, incisive brain early on. He was a worthy mesh of Mark’s structured, one-step-at-a-time approach and my more spontaneous “go for it” attitude. If Mark was a straight line, I was a zig-zag. Mats embodied both of us.

  When Mats was about four, he climbed up a tree. Mark was worried he could fall and get hurt. I thought about that possibility too. But I also thought, how amazing that he feels confident enough to be up there. “Mats, if you got yourself up there, you have to be responsible for getting yourself back down. Can you get back down safely?” I yelled.

  “Yes.”

  “Show Mommy how you can take a couple steps down.”

  “Okay.” He shimmied partway down the tree.

  “So now, you’re responsible for keeping yourself safe in the tree.”

  “Okay, Mommy.”

  I celebrated these moments. When Mats was six, he added another: his all-night vision quest in the Italian Alps during a Dance of the Deer retreat. Can you imagine being six and alone in the woods? I can’t. Mark felt fully confident. I was like, Isn�
�t sitting next to a fire enough? He kept an eye on Mats, who embarked with his little backpack and sleeping bag, minus food or water, and made his little camp. “That little camping trip shaped my connection to nature. I feel at home in the mountains, in the woods,” he says now.

  When Mats applied for college at University of California-Santa Cruz, he revisited the vision quest in his college entrance essay. I’m guessing the UC system doesn’t get many admission essays about vision quests taken at age six; I would have loved being there when they reviewed it! He wrote about watching the ants crawl, the clouds scud across the sky, and not leaving his circle until sunrise the next day. He also wrote how it helped define him. As a parent, you never know what lesson, guidance, or conversation ultimately sticks with your kid, because they’re not going to tell you while they’re growing up. After he wrote this, I felt good all over again about his upbringing, and the fact his father and I got his upbringing right.

  “When I wrote about it, it did bring the experience into a different light. I thought, ‘Maybe this is something worth talking about. This is something that was a special opportunity, a unique thing to do.’ It didn’t seem like a big deal when I actually did it. I looked back at my upbringing, and concluded, ‘Yes, this has shaped me.’”

  We did raise Mats in an unorthodox manner. “I had a different upbringing than my peers,” Mats said. “The places I got to see, my parents . . . I think it’s led me to see things on their own merit that might seem unorthodox to some, or out of their belief systems. Including nontraditional careers. I grew up around professional athletes, going to all these different events . . . so some of these extreme feats, or whatever, don’t seem so strange. Like if someone calls and wants to do a fifty-mile hike, it’s like, ‘Okay, let’s do it.’ Nothing strange about it.

  “My upbringing has given me a wide scope of what is possible. I traveled a lot and really appreciate the travel, especially with my dad at all the Dance of the Deer stuff when I was a kid. It’s only when you grow up that you realize, ‘that wasn’t so normal.’ I got to see a lot of different places in the world, places of great natural beauty, so I developed a strong love and appreciation for nature.”

  The long periods away from school needed to change as Mats grew older. He needed a more structured and socially interactive high school routine, not the in-school-today, in-Europe-tomorrow rhythm of his elementary and middle school years.

  “I think a lot of times growing up, I felt isolated from my peers. I never had a super strong group of friends,” Mats recalled. “I had friends, of course, but never felt I had that same bond as other kids do. There’d be weekends in high school where I didn’t have anything else to do, so I’d drive down to Big Sur and go camping by myself. Instead of going to a party on Saturday night, I’d go hiking, or drive up the coast to go surfing. It felt worthwhile, something I could do that fed me, that felt normal to me. I found a lot of comfort in that.

  “I was a solitary kid, and part of that was growing up as the only child of two parents who had big names, traveled a lot, and created their own places in life with their two feet and their minds. I spent a lot of time entertaining myself. That plays into a sport like Ironman, which is a very solitary endeavor. You spend a lot of time in your own head during racing and training. I think sometimes, triathletes are the most self-centered people on the planet, out of necessity, right? All the solitary training is appealing to me, takes me to a place where I feel comfortable.”

  About the time Mats graduated from sixth grade, he ran his first triathlon. “I thought that was pretty impressive, watching little Mats do a triathlon,” Scott Tinley said. ST rode his mountain bike next to Mats during the run, a kind gesture from an old friend. Mats also showed the family penchant for running up front . . . but, like his mom in 1982, he got nipped at the finish line. “It’s not the performance of our kids that matters as much as they know that sport is a kind of thread that stitches our collective families together,” ST, now an exercise science professor at San Diego State University, said afterward. “They understand this. Any success as a parent or a teacher that I’ve had far eclipses anything that I ever did in sport. I think Julie would agree for herself as well; she and Mark did a great job with Mats. And I don’t say this lightly.”

  I continued to make sure Mark remained central in Mats’s life, even if it meant staying in Santa Cruz in the home we’d bought and I remodeled after the divorce. “I really appreciate that time we spent together, especially now looking back on it,” Mats said. “Whether you’re super excited about what you’re doing or not, just the fact you have this time to spend with your dad is special.

  “With Dad, I was a student at Dance of the Deer for years. For me, the biggest thing was learning to quiet the mind, always try to operate with a settled mind, finding peace in every situation, and drawing on the natural world for spiritual and mental strength and renewal.”

  How can I not beam when my son says things like that?

  Meantime, I did something for myself. I joined Marshall at Source Seminars in Idyllwild, in the San Jacinto Mountains about two hours from Cardiff. Among other things, Marshall had become happier and more centered since going to Source after I suggested he enter a ten-day intensive at the Yoga Room in Encinitas to help his training for the Rock ’n’ Roll Marathon in San Diego. He was also trying to lose weight and stop drinking (which he did for good in 2010).

  Among other things, Source reconnected me with meditation, which I’d tried in college. This time, meditation became a central spiritual practice. It also helped me undo some of the trauma and insecure feelings of my childhood.

  Marshall carries a vivid memory of our time at Source. “I’d just finished my second ten-day yoga seminar at the Yoga Room in September 2002. I was seriously thinking about becoming a yoga instructor, and then my mom died. I talked to the instructor, Michelle. She told me about an inspirational, life-changing weeklong program in Idyllwild.

  “When I got there, the leaders of Source, Dennis and Kanta, were a sight to behold. Dennis looked like Gandalf, with the hair and goatee, and Kanta had just done one of her annual ‘cut my hair as short as I can’ haircuts. Okay. But the energy was awesome. I thought, ‘Well, this might be a way to get past my crap and start my life again.’

  “After twenty minutes on a Monday afternoon, I’m crying like a four-year-old. This stuff keeps coming out, dealing with childhood trauma. The one event that emerged was that one day, while my folks were embroiled in their ugly divorce, I came home from school and went to make a snack. There was no bread, no peanut butter, maybe a few canned goods in the cupboard. But in my mind, the fridge was empty; nothing that a kid would eat. My mom came home, upset about something, and I asked, ‘Hey Mom, there’s no food. Can we go to the store?’

  “She lost it: ‘Don’t you get it? Your father is leaving us, we’re poor, we have no money.’ I really feel like at that moment, at nine years old, that’s when my life as I knew it had fallen apart.

  “That’s the constructed story of my childhood I had to get rid of. Source Seminars helped me shed the preconceived notions of who I was. The childhood crap is just a story, a well-crafted script we create in our minds to adapt to life. I also realized for myself that the real truth was to be found with that first kernel of real meditation, and while you might be this small, you’re also as big as the universe.

  “Julie noticed something different after I started going to Source. She went up for the first time in the summer of 2003. By December 2004, we were going for Level 3 training together. I’d already staffed the seminar a couple times, and really became involved with what they were doing. Over the course of the next several years, I traveled with them extensively. Julie and I went to India; and I went to Israel, Bulgaria, Ireland, also Self-Realization Fellowship–inspired meditation pilgrimages.

  “Julie realized that her marriage was done. She received the same initial benefits I did—let go of crap stories of her childhood, stories we thought our parent
s told us—whether they did or not. Source has a way of pulling those threads apart to reveal who we are. She went back to Santa Cruz with this knowledge and inspiration under her belt.”

  The contractor remodeling my house, Tom Eagleton, ended up becoming a Source graduate and traveling to India as well. He and I formed a wonderful friendship, often taking our sons, Mats and Willie, on ski trips. All these years later, Mats is working construction for Tom—the job subsidizing his current triathlon dreams.

  I loved Source, how it enabled me to make sense of my childhood, then get rid of parts of that story that weren’t really true and no longer served me. I understood my mother’s life better, what she went through to try to raise us alone. I kept going, and joined Marshall as a staff member—really purposeful work.

  “One thing about Julie: When she puts her mind to something, she becomes phenomenal at it,” Marshall said. “Julie turned out to be the greatest senior staff member Dennis and Kanta ever had. I heard it directly from Kanta: ‘Marshall, you’re second only to her.’ She’s the greatest because she knows how to read people and get them exactly what they want. The Moss siblings were the wunderkinder up there. And we liked it because we could get out of ourselves. Julie didn’t have to be a mom or a divorced woman up there; I didn’t have to be a drinker up there.”

  In 2008, when Mats reached high school age, we decided he would attend public school. Along with that, your free-spirited, adventurous, send-your-kid-into-a-tsunami-and-up-a-tree narrator of this story became a sign of the times: a helicopter parent.

  I had trouble with the “helicopter parent” then, and I do now, after seeing how far some have gone in their oversight of their nearly adult children, and their willingness to step on any toes to fulfill the vision they see for their kid(s). In 1990, child development researchers Foster Cline and Jim Fay coined the term to refer to a parent who hovers over a child in a way that runs counter to the social responsibility of raising that child to independence. Hmmm . . . hard to imagine myself going there, but I did.