
Broken seashells
There Must Be Broken Shells – Not everything is perfect Seashells come in a wide range of shapes and sizes. High and low tides each bring their selections. As a child, I didn’t see the value in the broken shells. However, I did collect them, after all, treasure was treasure! I remember bringing those broken pieces to my mother with the joy and excitement that only a child has. I’d give her my treasures, sand and all. The careful transference from my small hands to her large hands, not wanting to lose a single gift from the sea. I’d give her my treasures, and she would carefully pick out the broken pieces and cast them aside. “Those are broken,” she would say, handing me back only the whole ones. Perhaps I was broken too. Was she going to cast me aside as well? Eventually, I stopped sharing my treasures with her. As I grew, my collection of seashells contained more broken pieces, for I, too, was broken. That childhood experience with the broken seashells and my mother’s dismissal now echoed with a painful resonance. The feeling of being deemed imperfect and unworthy of being kept resurfaced with sharp clarity in the months following his departure. I remember writing in my journal, a raw admission of my deepest fear: “. . . and now, I’ve never been more broken.” Had he, too, finally seen only the fractured parts of me and decided, like my mother, to cast me aside? Or perhaps he was finally realizing his fractured parts and was running away to work on smoothing out his own edges? In the face of that vulnerability, I began to carry a fractured piece of shell with me. It became a tangible truth, a quiet rebellion against the idea of perfect worth – a reminder that some are whole, some are broken, but ALL possess an inherent beauty and value, a truth so clearly seen through a child’s eyes. I may have some fractured parts, but I AM still worthy, exactly as I am. And the answer from the seventh wave – “Walk forward without hesitation into this new life presented to you. For you are free to be you, and you are free to be me, the sea.”