My Oceans: Essays of Water, Whales, and Women by Christina Rivera

 
My Oceans: Essays of Water, Whales, and Women
By Christina Rivera
Curbstone Books | 2025 | 272 pages
 

For years, Christina Rivera journaled and wrote in pieces, interrupted between words by the demands of womanhood and motherhood, resulting in a “non-linear gathering of things once scattered.” The fragmented form of her debut book of essays, My Oceans: Essays of Water, Whales, and Women, reflects life’s unpredictability, braiding personal narrative and researched storytelling that parallels human and oceanic fragility. In the author’s note that precedes the opening essay, Rivera writes, “I… wrote this book in pieces because it was through my fragmentation that the distinctions between Earth’s oceans and my own receded. The shape, the movement, of these essays was always waves.”

The ocean isn’t so much the theme of this book as its essence. Water propels Rivera, a practiced diver and environmental writer whose proximity and frequent interaction with “the blue womb” increases her sensitivity to its changes. Rivera’s award-winning essay “The Seventeenth Day” is a stunning example of the author’s attunement to an interconnected world. Braiding together two narratives, Rivera reflects on her mysterious health crisis and the story of Tahlequah, an Orca mother who pushed her decomposing dead baby through the Salish Sea for 17 days. After numerous tests, Rivera learns her body is full of heavy metals and industrial toxins and realizes she unknowingly passed on these toxins to her children through her breastmilk. In a grieving orca mother, Rivera sees kinship, not only in grief and environmental susceptibility, but also within their shared experiences swimming through some of the same waters.

Rivera writes, “I am not interpreting Tahlequah’s behavior through my limited experience of being human. I am tugging on the DNA strings that bind us but more than that, I’m recognizing the limits of my experience of being human…. This connection to Tahlequah—it makes me feel like a tumbled grain of sand on a planet four and a half billion years old.”

As Rivera’s words and reflections ebb and swell like waves, her worldview expands. The singular claim of my oceans morphs from essay to essay into our oceans as the author delves into deeper, farther-reaching subjects like sexual assault, religion, American politics, and climate change. Her accounts of womanhood reach every account of womanhood within the broad scope of mothering and being mothered. Recounting her daughter’s birth beneath a blood moon, she thinks back on the pregnant leatherback turtle who has “for over 150 million years, trusted her nest to an earth womb,” arriving at a modern age where a not-too-distant extinction looms. In the leatherback turtle, she sees a companion in aching, birthing, and bearing another body within a threatening climate. Parental responsibility awakens Rivera to her similarities with other ocean mothers and the natural urge of all species to shelter, nurture, and protect.

In her essay “Two Breaths,” Rivera writes of swaying with the sea fans during a night dive to witness the congregating manta rays. But 30 feet beneath “the roof of the ocean,” after dozens of night dives as a certified divemaster, she panics. She writes, “Looking at the top of the water, I understand it is my distance from my children that makes my eyes wide enough to speak to the quiet language of panic.” The duality of feeling most “at home in the underwater world” contrasts with the heaviness of responsibility and risk. Rivera writes, “From the ocean floor, looking up, I feel this pressure. And I am not the only warm-blooded mammal in the ocean tonight with this anxiety.”

I found Rivera through her essay “Empty the Tanks,” adapted and published on The Cut in December 2024 before the release of My Oceans. As a writer, I was drawn to her ability to weave together two seemingly disconnected stories to arrive at a cohesive sense of “aboutness.” In this essay, Rivera parallels the abuse and containment of an orca named Corky and “the onus on men” in sexual assault cases. The warm-blooded Corky knew far more than anxiety. She knew trauma and grief having suffered “137 months of forced and failed pregnancy.” Corky’s rights and women’s rights are intertwined, compounded by male hubris and peripheral silence. Just as Corky’s glass-shattering screams and cries were ignored, so often are women’s. Rivera writes, “Once upon a time, Corky shattered glass. To shatter glass, the vibration must match the resonation of what shatters. What can our shared resonance with Corky’s story tell us about shattering our own cages?”

It was this essay that drew me toward Rivera’s beautifully “fragmented” book, though I am a childless, infertile woman who sometimes struggles to relate to and read books about motherhood. But this is not a book about motherhood—it is a book about the connectedness of all living things, the responsibilities that accompany humanity, the wonders and delights of the natural world, the joy of love, the grief of loss.

It is fitting that in one of her final essays, Rivera enters the water with a “pod” of other women. Written as a “how-to” for shedding human bashfulness and joining our waterlogged forbears, Rivera reflects on the collective fortitude of women. She writes, “This is why we migrate and collect. For the shared wet skin of confessions that strip us to likeness. For a place where women’s bodies, in a seamless nuzzle, can say what needs to be felt. For the laughter that wakes what sleeps inside. Because there is no laughter like the laughter of a woman shaking off the sleep of laundry and carpools and interrupted dreams. A woman waking from domesticity.”
 

Read “The 17th Day”, winner of the 2023 John Burroughs Nature Essay Award and read “Whatever We Hope Can’t Be Hoarded: A Conversation on Motherhood and Environment” by Jennifer Case, with Martha Park, Emily Raboteau, Christina Rivera, and Elizabeth Rush, both originally published in Terrain.org.