Thirty Years Ago I Watched My Friend’s Father Drown. I Think About It Every Time My Children Go Near Water.

How can I let my kids enjoy the waterpark, pool or beach, when just a few seconds of fun floods my brain with PTSD?

Image courtesy Motherwell

An eerie hush falls over our section of the humid, indoor water park. A mother to my right mouths, “Someone’s drowning.”

The lifeguard drags the young girl in a neon orange two-piece to the concrete shore, and I scan the sidelines for her parents. But there is no one to claim her, and she disappears behind a water slide, her bony shoulders still rising and falling as she struggles to catch her breath.

“Why were you screaming in my ear, Mommy?” I’d been holding my five-year-old too tightly since he’d first dipped his toe into the kiddie pool, which was hours before we saw the young girl rescued. Both my children hate being around me and water — I’m the overly cautious parent whose grip leaves marks and whose urgent, borderline hysteria ruins all the fun.

I touch my neck with a shaky hand. My throat aches. I had screamed, unable to contain my terror and my knowledge: it only takes eleven seconds to drown. It could happen right here, under the fake jungle scenery, next to the over-priced ice cream parlor, with dozens of parents an arm’s length away.

“I’m sorry I yelled in your ear, Honey.” He rolls his eyes and asks if we can ride the lazy river again. I take a deep breath and check the life jacket I make him wear, and remind myself it’s 2016.

In 1987, twenty four years before my first child was born, my best friend’s family invited me to vacation with them in Hawaii. It was the summer before high school started; we had a pocket of days in the lush beauty of Hawaii where we could be young girls marveling at the black-sand beaches, snapping pictures of waterfalls on the drive to a volcano, and donning leis as we poked at poi during a luau.

On our fourth day there, we all rented boogie boards to play in the surf of a beach nestled under a lookout point at the end of a highway. We didn’t see the “No Trespassing” sign. We thought that having the beach to ourselves was a serendipitous stroke of luck. We didn’t know that we would need a lifeguard. We never would have believed that anything dangerous or life-threatening would befall us under that perfect blue bowl of sky.