I don’t know exactly when I stopped writing. I don’t know when what once felt like a refuge began to feel like a cage. What once gave me solace and comfort slowly became painful, a process that would pull out the dark things and force me to relive them or make sense of them. How can you make sense of hundreds of fluorescent orange lifevests washing up on sandy beaches next to tourists sunbathing and children building sandcastles, their skin slick with the oily sheen of sunscreen? Are the tourists aware that the greatest danger here is not just a red hot sunburn? Are they aware that these beaches have been war zones, bodies spilling out onto the sand, kissing the ground, gasping for air? I remember praying that the vests were abandoned by those who had made it safely to land, and that they were not the life vests which had slipped off of desperate bodies frantically waving their arms in choppy waves, crying out for help. 

Until my son was born, there was something that did not allow the dark things to take up space, to move into the light of my mind’s eye, to be examined. After he was born, it was as if I felt everything I had ever seen, felt, or heard, all at once. Everything changed. Now I think of life vests emerging on the coast when I buckle my own child into his. He is excited, and a smile spreads wide across his face at the thought of going on a ride in the sea kayak. My fingers tingle as I try to clip the cumbersome vest to his tiny little body and for a second I think about the other mother, the one who buckled her child into one of the vests I found discarded on the beach all those years ago, small enough to fit a toddler. 

These days I make my morning coffee and pack my son’s lunch. I prepare myself for another day of mental checklists - did we buy blueberries? Did I remember to hang the clothes to dry? Did I schedule his next check-up? What will we have for dinner? I feel guilty that these are the tasks that exhaust me now. I am not sure I was prepared for what this phase of life would feel like - the most profound work I’ve ever done: raising a human - would also feel at times, quite frankly, so mundane. 

Today we are at the beach and I try to ignore the laundry list of tasks waiting for me when we get home. I try to ignore the images of war and migrant pushbacks and detention centers flooding my news feed lately. The world is on fire, and I am here, digging holes in the sand. Holes. I flash back to a funeral I once had to organize for a family whose son had drowned while trying to get from Turkey to Greece. They didn’t have the money to ship the body back home to Afghanistan, and they didn’t know where they would end up. “Anywhere safe” didn’t have any meaning anymore, the worst had already happened. The summer earth was so dry it cracked and crumbled into dust with every jab of the shovel and the Aegean wind whipped it up in swirls into everyone's faces. A tiny hole for a tiny body wrapped in white muslin, a child buried on land it never had the chance to step foot on. The mother wailed and fell to the ground and I, a 25-year-old aidworker at the time, tried to imagine the depth of her loss and simply couldn’t. All I could think about was what a horrible deal it was that this mother had me by her side instead of someone better equipped, the support she deserved. Even if there wasn’t someone else to speak her language, at least we could have found someone who could understand what it felt like to hold within your belly the beating flesh of another heart, a heart you created, someone who knew what it felt like to hear that heartbeat from within. This mother deserved someone who understood the relentless daily care and love that every mother pours into her child from the moment it exits her body. We could have found another mother to stand by her, at least. I didn’t know what to do so I patted her back through the rhythmic wailing, wailing, wailing and thought I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. 

“Mommy?” my son’s little body squirms with excitement. 
“Yes?” I say.
“Why do we wear life vests?”
I pause, “Well, they keep us safe.”
“Keep us safe from what?” He fiddles with his swimsuit drawstring, somewhat distracted.
“They keep us safe if we fall in the water…” I take a moment to think of a way to avoid the word ‘drowning’. “They help us stay afloat until help arrives, so we don’t get too tired swimming.” I scan his face for reactions and playfully sprinkle him with sea water to lighten the weight of the conversation. 
“Yes but you are a good swimmer and you will be able to pull me out,” he continued.
“Yes, that is true, mommy’s always going to do whatever she can to keep us safe, but it’s always good to take precautions.”  

This seems to satisfy him. He does not yet have awareness of my own fallibility, my mortality, my own limitations. I start paddling out deeper and my mind travels to a story a fellow aidworker had told me while we were working on the Greek islands in 2016. At the time refugees were travelling the narrow channel between Turkey and Greece just to be met with bureaucracy, and occasionally hostility, on the other side. She told me of faulty life vests sold to eager mothers taking the journey. The vests were filled with porous material that becomes unfathomably heavy when wet, leaden anchors instead of buoyant flotation devices. Unknowingly, the other mother, the one risking everything to get her children to safety, spent her final savings on vests that would weigh them down rather than keep them afloat. 

My breath catches in my throat at the anguished thought of being deceived into playing a part in your own child’s drowning. At just three my son is still so dependent on me, I am the center of his little world. I think about the energy and effort I expend just to shield him from the slightest discomfort, the lengths I go to to conceal my own anxiety and fears. 

“Mommy look, a fish!” he squeals and points with delight. I force a smile. Did the other mother force a smile while loading up her children in a Europe-bound dinghy under the darkness of night? Perhaps she concocted a story for them, as I do when trying to quell my child’s fears. “Ahh look!” I had told my son as his school bus rounded the corner to pick him up on his first day of school. “It’s Odysseus’ ship coming to take you on a grand adventure!” He had been obsessed with the heroics of Greek mythology at the time. “Whenever you feel overwhelmed you will remember what a courageous adventurer you are, my little Odysseus, and I will be right here waiting when you come home to Ithaka!” He nervously giggled. “Yes,” he whispered, not fully convinced. “I am Odysseus.” I had even felt guilty, yes, for sending him off to school. I knew it was safe and good for him, but still, he seemed so fragile climbing the tall school bus stairs, so vulnerable.

I think about the other mother dressing her children for a journey she does not want to take, realizing that they look to her so fragile, so vulnerable. What did she pack in their backpacks? Did she still have to think of what to make for dinner the night before? Hands running over buckles and straps in the pitch dark, her fingers check and re-check that they are snapped and tightened around bodies still too small to support the weight they must carry. I imagine her heart pounding, her eyes straining through the night to see who is on this perilous journey with them. Chaos breaks as too many people scramble into the boat. “Hurry up, children” she tries to say calmly, but the words spill out of her mouth all at once. Maybe she exchanges glances with another mother, different from her and yet somehow able to speak the same language. “I see you” they say without uttering a word. Maybe these mothers encourage their children to take refuge in their own imaginations by telling the same stories I used to persuade my child to get on the school bus. Maybe they tried to make it a game. 

Once my son and I have paddled back to the beach he plays amongst friends and I succumb to the urge to check the news on my phone. The headlines wash over me. The waves wash over his miniature footprints in the sand.

“Mommy look! A seashell!” He shouts. 
Yet another sunken ship full of souls, off the coast of Chios, ten years after I witnessed the orange life vests bobbing up and down in its crystalline waters. Everything has changed and nothing has changed. I smile back at my son’s joy over the seashell. I call out to him reminding him not to go too deep without his floaties, and a Warsine Shire poem I once heard pulses through my body: “no one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land.”

I want to know the other mother’s name. I want to hear the dreams she has for her children, the dreams she has for herself. I want to know what snacks or extra clothes she packed in their bags. Did she bring their favorite stuffed animal? I want to know the story of her children’s names. I want to know how she deals with bedtime and how she survived the sleepless post-partum months.

I want to know her and I want to know how I am meant to enjoy a day at the beach, my children bathing in the same waters that she feared would swallow hers. I want to sit with the other mother, rest my hand on hers, and remind her she is a good mother. We will watch our kids dig in the sand, resolve their spats and remind them to “play fair” and “be kind”. We will trade recipes and laugh and complain about the endless task of reapplying sunscreen to little sandy, slippery, bodies. During naptime we will dream up a different world, one where we are free to nurture and create and feel and write. As we dream, we will do. This, after all, is not foreign to us. Holding a child’s dreams in one hand, so gently, careful not to crush them, while we hold a hammer in the other, building futures and communities, staving off any threats. In this world all children are precious and sacred. All mothers are brave guardians of the future. In another world there will be no “other” mothers - just mothers with the same dreams.