I am sitting in a spacious room at the Halekulani Hotel on Waikiki Beach, looking out at the ocean. A pigeon--or is it a dove?-- prances on the balcony, looking for crumbs from the room service breakfast of warm popovers and poha berry jam. Instrumental island music is playing on the stereo, foreground to the background of waves and children’s shouts from the beach eight stories below. An antherium in shades of green sits on the desk, alongside a dove-grey folio which holds the hotel stationary, embossed with its trademark orchid, on which I write these words. I am reveling not only in the view, but also in an uncharacteristic feeling of happiness, of joie de vivre.
This is the trip I used to fantasize taking with my mother, back when I was still courting her, still hoping to win the approval and affection of the woman who gave me life, but could not give me love. I imagined that I would invite her to fly to Hawaii and stay at this luxuriously beautiful hotel, where we would sit on the veranda, telling funny stories, drinking pina coladas and watching the sun set. But it was always just a fantasy. For however much the child in me wished to give my mother such a vacation, the adult me knew that if I had offered it to her, she would have found a way to back out at the last minute, to reject me once again.
The white rooms and the green lawn below, shaded by palm trees and adorned with deck chairs, resembles the park-like sanitoriums found in European movies, where the heroine goes to heal from the shock of a near-fatal accident or the loss of a loved one. As I sit here, soaking up the beauty of ocean and sky, I wonder whether three nights will be enough.
I am here alone over the summer solstice to celebrate getting my master’s degree while simultaneously doing a year of intensive therapy to come to terms with my childhood abuse. I have come to this island, ruled by the fire goddess, Pele, as part of my effort to re-parent myself, to learn to be my own good mother, to see myself as beautiful, to treat myself as the precious child I once was.
I ask myself what I would have offered my mother if she were here, and then give that to myself without guilt. An early morning walk on the beach. An afternoon shopping for the perfect pair of bronze, bejeweled flip-flops. A hair treatment of warm coconut oil scented with mangoes A slice of macademia nut pie before dinner.
In the process of meeting my own desires, I am also reconnecting with my body, experiencing pleasure through senses dulled by pain and feeling my own abuse. I walk along the beach, holding the hand of the little girl who is my inner child. I slide through the shallow pool, then lay on the lounge chair and let the sun dry me. Wearing the slinky black dress with ruched sides that I bought for my birthday, I take myself out to dinner at the hotel’s French restaurant, La Mer, where I dine on chilled lobster salad and organic vegetables. While savoring the dessert of five tiny scoops of sorbet arranged like dabs of paint on a cookie shaped like a palette, I watch the hula dancer’s graceful hands and hips moving to the rhythm of the slack-key guitar and ukulele and sway in my seat. And at night, even as I toss and turn with the unfamiliar found of crashing surf, I rest in the softness of the sheets against my skin.
As I revel in the beauty of this place, as I take in the sensual pleasures of that surround me, I feel I have finally come home, to this body, to her beauty, to an uncharacteristic sense joie de vivre, the joy of being alive. The joy of not only surviving but of thriving.
