If a Tsunami Comes, I Know Which Child I Would Save

Now the truth of the matter—and one has no eye for that in times of great peril, and only by a great effort even in times when danger is threatening—is that in reality the burrow does provide a considerable degree of security, but by no means enough, for is one ever free from anxieties inside it? -Franz Kafka, “The Burrow” Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir

There is no news in fear

but in the end it’s fear

that drowns you.

-Anne Sexton, “Imitations of Drowning”

At a small party two summers ago, I found myself sharing a deeply personal story to a group of near strangers. Someone mentioned Kathryn Schulz’s New Yorker article about the killer earthquake and tsunami slated to destroy the West Coast, and I relayed how, after the piece came out eight years earlier, I’d been terrified of spending the night in a tsunami inundation zone, but rather than let Schulz’s article dissuade me from attending a wedding to which I’d RSVPed (because surely that would have been crazy), instead, I studied evacuation routes and potential wave size. I examined maps showing the time it took for the ocean to retract, rise, and come to shore. Then I chose which of my two children I would pick up and carry in the minutes before the tsunami made landfall and which child I would abandon.

“I decided to leave the baby,” I said to a circle of startled faces. I forced a laugh. “She was only four months old, so it’s not like she’d even know what was happening.” 

In the tidal waters of Washington and Oregon are rooted ghost forests; near-spectral remains of an ancient coastline that dissolved when a 9.0 earthquake hit the area over three-hundred years ago. At high tide, you might not see the stumps, but then the moon’s weight tugs the water back, and there they are, rising out of the muck. 

When I disclosed my decision to leave the baby, I was only sharing an edge of the story, as if we were all in a boat just inches above a waterlogged forest, and I was pointing out the glint of the sun on the waves. Distraction only works internally for so long though, and while the others might have been focused on the sparkling sunlight, my mind had already wandered to what lay below the dappled surface, to the person I’d been when I swam those waters and how the decision to abandon my child was the thing that finally set me free. 

A few weeks after the party, I came across a posthumously published Kafka story about a paranoid rodent who obsessively digs and maintains his underground burrow against bloodthirsty intruders. The story, clocking in at thirty pages, is perseverating and claustrophobic, even for Kafka. As the burrow grows from a few simple tunnels into a complicated labyrinth, the animal is unwilling to stop working to make himself safer—his nightmare of attack alternately comforting and harmful. 

Only in the face of actual catastrophe, when safety is no longer possible, can anxiety finally be sated.

Most scholars think the story is unfinished because it ends in the middle of a sentence and because when the rodent hears what he eventually believes are the unmistakable sounds of a predator digging nearby, it doesn’t run for safety or attempt to mount an attack. Instead, it sits still, eats a snack, and daydreams about possible outcomes. In effect, it opts to do nothing but wait and see. To me, the ending feels complete. Anxiety exists as the hungry precursor to possible disaster, feeding on details and portents, always seeking to remind us of the unattainable nature of safety. Only in the face of actual catastrophe, when safety is no longer possible, can anxiety finally be sated.

I grew up on an island between Seattle and Tacoma where I played at a park built over silos that once contained nuclear-tipped missiles aimed at the Soviet Union. Much like Kafka’s rodent, I spent my youth in a state of constant mental preparedness. In the early 90s, I assumed the strike would come from Russia, but the nations I feared shifted with the news cycle, and my worries, similarly, evolved. Night after night I’d lie in bed, reading with a flashlight under the covers, wondering if the attack had begun and the very air I was breathing had already started to poison me. 

After 9/11—during which time I lived in a dorm four blocks from the World Trade Center—the country was briefly terrorized by envelopes of anthrax sent through the mail. Between the recent attacks and the anthrax, I felt vindicated. It’s like when a hypochondriac gets a cancer diagnosis or Kafka’s burrowing rodent finally hears the enemy lurking just underfoot—see, I knew I wasn’t making a big deal out of nothing. Confident my childhood nightmares were coming true, I carefully followed news of the anthrax poisonings, while selfishly hoping I’d receive the toxin next. “I just want to get it over with,” I told my roommates, “Before there’s a critical mass and they run out of drugs to treat it.” There I was, almost two decades before the advent of COVID-19, and already I was worried about the scarcity of proper medical resources. Needless to say, I never did receive an envelope containing anthrax, George Bush Jr. started another war, and I grew up. 

Ten years later, I was both a newlywed and an expectant mother. My husband and I had moved to a satellite city of Seoul near his father and extended family, where we’d both found jobs teaching in the public school system. Towards the end of my duties and seven-months pregnant, an air-raid siren went off followed by a crackly news report over the intercom. I didn’t know enough Korean to understand what was happening, but behind the announcer’s voice, I heard the distinct hum of low-flying planes. My students leapt under their desks, and I followed suit. Kim Jong-Il, had died the previous winter, and now it appeared his son was finally following through with the threats that issued reliably from the North.

As I hunched around my pregnant belly, I wondered if my husband was under his desk too, across the river in the little school where he taught. Maybe this is how we would die, the two of us and our unborn child—scant nobodies amongst the loss of millions. That was when I noticed my students were laughing and talking, pushing each other. One by one, they came out from under their desks even though the panicked announcement was still blaring.

“What’s happening?” I called.

The girl closest to me answered. “They do this every year.”

“This is a drill?”

She nodded. “Just practice.”

I’d read that some mothers who don’t feel an immediate connection take it to be a personal failing.

The baby was born in the middle of August via an emergency C-section while I was unconscious. When I woke up, I knew immediately I was not a natural mother—the kind who, upon holding her child for the first time, understands she’s never known true love before that moment. I’d read that some mothers who don’t feel an immediate connection take it to be a personal failing, that amidst the haze and exhaustion, the distance can become unbearable.  So I tried not to panic, and when I gazed upon my infant daughter, I focused on letting the newness of her be enough. I certainly wished her no ill will, but I was desperately counting on her good traits to emerge and eventually harden my watery love into something more significant. 

When she was four weeks old, we left Korea and moved to a tiny apartment in Seattle. I took seriously my role as expert Pacific Northwesterner, introducing my Brooklyn-raised husband to the normalcy of non-stop drizzle, the infamously cold reception newcomers often receive (coyly called the “Seattle Freeze”), and earthquake preparedness. 

“The ground is shaking!” I’d yell, and if he didn’t move, I’d yell it again, watching as it clicked, and he dramatically lunged under the dining table. My husband believed we were playing a game—albeit a strange one, not unlike foreplay. The drills reminded him that life wasn’t to be taken for granted, that we were in possession of living bodies, and so he always emerged from between the table legs grinning, showing pleasure at the mere fact of taking breath.

 Returning to the Pacific Northwest had caused earthquakes to metastasize in my mind from casual concern to ever-present threat. It didn’t help that my personal sphere had recently expanded to include two new people whose very presence eroded my ability to assume security. When it was just me, death seemed frightening but perhaps not the worst outcome as long as it was swift, but here was my hapless Brooklynite husband, my soft-skulled infant stranger—two beings for whom I was now responsible. That they might suffer because of my negligence to sufficiently prepare ate at me.

My preparation was similarly ever-present. Unemployed and depressed, I researched what to put into an earthquake kit, spent hours scrolling through message boards before selecting the most shelf-stable granola bars, the best first-aid supplies, one of those straws that turns contaminated water potable. Our kit quickly grew from a backpack to a backpack plus a large duffle bag. It contained everything I thought we might need. Diapers and flip flops, vitamins for the days of sodden and malnourished wasting, a kitchen knife too dull to properly cut tomatoes but which could certainly be used to stab an assailant when society fell and we were forced to travel, filthy and broken along the horrific new coastline in search of resources. 

Six months after we moved back to the U.S., my husband lost his job. We struggled with Medicaid, with parenting, with insufficient sleep, and through it all, the rain kept falling. Soon, it felt like moving to Seattle had been a colossal mistake; we were foolish to have tried to put down roots in this muddy and unstable ground. Perhaps we should go back to Korea where we might live under the unlikely threat of a North Korean attack, but at least we’d be gainfully employed. But we were too poor to move again, and besides, we’d been homesick for the U.S. when we were away. No—we would stay the course in Seattle, stick it out for another year, then plan our escape.

But before twelve months were out, I got a day job, and my husband got a night job. He enrolled in graduate school. There were sunny days. Our baby’s skull plates fused, and she learned to walk. I began to know her—to love her in earnest and without question. Eventually, we moved out of our tiny apartment and into a magnificent turn-of-the-century building on Capitol Hill. The tides, I thought, were turning.

Despite being a one-bedroom, our new apartment was palatial. It had gorgeously high ceilings and crown molding, and it was only two blocks from the school where I now taught. Best of all, it was significantly cheaper than every other rental on the market. But there were downsides: our daughter had to sleep in a walk-in closet, the windows were so thin it was impossible to stay warm enough in the winter or cool enough in the summer, and every so often, pieces of brick and marble façade came loose and fell to the sidewalk below. It goes without saying that the building had never been retrofitted for earthquakes, something Seattle had been pushing more urgently in recent years. 

It didn’t help that the school I worked at took earthquakes very seriously. Every year, they committed to a lengthy simulation during which students had to shelter in place while roving faculty pretended to shut off the gas supply and pry open elevator doors. I was assigned to Search and Rescue and was outfitted with a backpack that contained a walkie-talkie, duct tape, a crowbar, and a body bag. My task was to check every classroom, closet, and stairwell, then radio back to Incident Command if I discovered a child tagged with an index card detailing injuries. In those moments, it was all too easy to imagine my own child in their place, to see her lying prone on the floor, not marked by an index card but by an actual injury, a crushed leg or splintered jawbone. 

I started running drills with my toddler, showing her how to climb beneath her bed and close her eyes tight.

At home, I started running drills with my toddler, showing her how to climb beneath her bed and close her eyes tight. I asked my husband to anchor our heavy furniture to the walls. I checked and rechecked our emergency kit, discarding expired food and adding a tent and sleeping bags, sharpening the knife. Every night, I ran through what might happen the moment the earthquake hit. In the worst-case scenario, we’d be alive but trapped within earshot of each other. I imagined hearing my daughter’s cries but being unable to rescue her, imagined hours stretching to days, her cries growing weaker until I knew she was dead. In one scenario—the only one that gave me hope—my daughter would survive , but I’d be trapped beneath debris from the upper floors and unable to move. Nevertheless, following the sound of my voice, my nimble girl would crawl to me through tunnels in our newly pancaked apartment, and I’d sustain her, feeding her with my own blood. She could suckle this way, her little vampire mouth taking what it needed until I could give no more. Then, when I was dead, she’d be strong enough to leave me, escaping alive into the ruined dawn. 

I’m not being hyperbolic, not exaggerating my worries for comedic effect or shock value. These are things I actively considered, night after night after night. Many new parents are frightened by the sheer depths of their own protective instinct when they discover they have flash-fantasies of their children’s gory deaths. It’s why we move so quickly as we pull our children from sources of open flame, muscley-looking dogs, busy streets. But somewhere in my brain, this instinct got stuck and widened like the banks of an unruly river. Running through dire earthquake scenarios created a kind of spirograph in my grey matter; the darkest lines were the most well-travelled, etched in deep enough to form grooved paths I tumbled into so often I hardly realized when I was inside them again. 

Two years later our building was still standing, I learned I was pregnant again, and we enrolled our daughter in preschool. In addition to the rolls of paper towels, printer cartridges, and Expo markers we had to buy for communal classroom use, we were also instructed to prepare a personal earthquake kit for our daughter. Inside needed to be several days-worth of non-perishable food, water, a small toy to keep her distracted, and a note from us. The note, we were told, should be reassuring. I concocted a hundred different horrifying scenarios all entailing my daughter, huddled and bloody, gleaning what solace she could from my words as the city crumbled and life as she knew it was over.

I put in a little joke. I implored our daughter to be kind to those around her who might be afraid or maybe hurt. I ended by flat-out lying that her father and I were safe. If there was ever an earthquake significant enough for her to open my note, I knew my husband and I would be—if not dead—then horribly maimed. I knew this because my daughter’s school was a fifteen-minute walk from both our apartment and my job. If one of us couldn’t reach her after an earthquake, it was because we never would. 

Shortly after I dropped her off at preschool for the first time, our OBGYN called to tell me my recent scans indicated I had a condition in which the placenta grows over the mouth of the cervix instead of at the top of the uterus. I was told to come in for an emergency appointment as soon as possible.

“As your baby gets bigger,” the doctor told me a day later, “There’s a risk the placenta will tear without warning.”

“What happens then?” 

“You’ll hemorrhage at an unbelievably fast rate.”

“How fast are we talking?” 

“You could bleed out in five minutes. That almost never happens, but it’s likely the baby will need to be delivered early to avoid rupturing your placenta.”

“How early?”

“If you make it past thirty weeks, we’ll plan for a delivery a couple of weeks before your due date.”

“And if my placenta rips before that? How many weeks is considered viable for a fetus?” What I was really asking was the limitation of my maternal authority—how old the fetus could be before I lost the ability to advocate that she not be resuscitated.

“At twenty-five weeks, it’s our policy to do everything in our power to save the baby.”

My loss of control was complete—there was nothing I could do to keep the baby safe or to let her go if she came dangerously early. I did not manage myself well. I screamed at my husband, blamed him for how sad I felt, and every night, he seemed to stay at work longer and longer. I yelled at our daughter. Inside my uterus, a new child was growing, and the temporary organ I’d created to sustain her threatened to kill us both. Now it was all I could do to think of earthquakes, to attempt to latch onto the old familiar fear as the new one threatened to drown me. I was the rodent in the burrow, but instead of fortifying my walls and digging new escape routes, I was lost, tunneling in concentric circles downward. 

One Saturday, when my husband was working a double to try to earn a little money before the baby came, it was just me and my daughter alone in our huge apartment. I’d been trying to keep her busy with coloring books while I attempted to take a nap, but she’d grown bored.

“Mama,” she said, “let’s do an earthquake drill.” 

I wanted to explain that no amount of planning could save her from the ways I’d already harmed her.

I couldn’t bear to look at her in that moment—to see all my anxieties scratched into her like a network of scars. I wanted to explain that no amount of planning could save her from the ways I’d already harmed her, but what I said was, “OK.”  Then, I stood in the doorway of the walk-in closet and halfheartedly called out, “Earthquake,” watching as my clever child hid under her bed and shielded her eyes from flying glass. 

“You come under here too, Mama,” she said, but I shook my head. 

“I’ll be alright,” I lied. 

I stopped reading and instead binged old TV shows at night while my daughter slept. The days came and went, and my placenta got its act together. It climbed the side of my uterus like a lazy slug until, just a few weeks before my due date, I was officially in the clear. The baby was born in April. She was perfect and strong. She napped well and ate ferociously, but her entrance into our family marked a powerful desire for my own exit from it.

Given my family history and the general state of my mental health, I’d known I was at high risk for postpartum depression again, but the insidious nature of how it manifested this time was crushing. I became the infatuated mother I’d never been, but only for this second child—my love, it seemed, had just enough room for one, and it was precisely my intense and obliviating connection to the new baby that drove me to the precipice. 

Betrayed by my mind and body, my intuition told me it was my younger daughter who’d always been there, that the older was an unwanted interloper—a person I had to squint at to even recognize. I was devastated, left sobbing in the bathroom, questioning the last three and a half years of motherhood, questioning my own humanity. I didn’t even know this baby yet, and already she’d eclipsed everything else in my world. Still, my love for her was the most unshakeable thing in my life, and so I clung to it despite the destruction it wrought.

During my maternity leave, cobbled together from FMLA and unused sick days, I cried and watched TV and didn’t sleep. My fears about hemorrhaging and a baby damaged by early eviction from my womb were entirely replaced by the belief that I’d made a horrible mistake; women like me were never supposed to become parents. My guilt drove an overwhelming desire to leave and never return. Better the children grow up away from my malignant presence than with such a mother. My husband pushed me to go to therapy, but I was unable to begin the legwork. Instead, I spent hours on the Internet reading posts by people who were traumatized when their mothers abandoned them, and just as many about people who wished their mothers had done the right thing and left. 

There’s a lesser-known Hans Christian Andersen tale called, “Story of a Mother” about a woman who tries to rescue her son after Death has stolen him and planted him in a garden. By the time she reaches the boy, she’s sung herself hoarse, pricked her chest with thorns, given away both her eyes, and agreed to have her hair shorn, but before she can take her child, Death stops her. He returns her eyes then shows her two visions in a well. In one, an anonymous boy is cherished and joyful, his life a good one. In the other, he lives a miserable existence full of poverty and distress. Death tells the mother she can choose to take her son home, but she must first understand that his fate will be one of the two she has seen. Unable to risk the chance that her beloved son might lead a sorrowful life, she begs Death to ignore her earlier demands, asking him instead to take the boy onward. 

In those early days after my baby was born, it seemed my children would be doomed to live out the fates in Death’s well. If I stayed, my younger daughter would be happy, showered with love and affection while her sister withered, lonely in a corner. If I left, both girls might be damaged, but I felt certain the older one would still bear the brunt of it—she would be, after all, the one who could remember life before her mother had turned strange and run away. She might blame herself, or she might blame her sister for being born in the first place. If I could take out my own eyes and crawl into Death’s garden to spare my children, I would, but I was caught in a trap of my own making. 

I worked against every fiber of my being not to preference the baby. I let her cry while I attended to the needs of my preschooler first. I bought a face-paint kit and transformed my older daughter into a tiger, a dragon, a field of flowers. At night, though, when she was finally asleep, I looked upon her with shame. My efforts had been too paltry—thin and easy to see through. Surely she knew, deep down, that I was an imposter.

I was deep in the middle of figuring out how to house a preschooler and a newborn baby inside an Airstream.

Trying to take my mind off my inexcusable failings, I threw myself into planning for a wedding we were to attend in a couple of months. It was going to be held in a kitschy trailer park half a mile from the ocean, where all the guests were expected to spend the night in a cluster of vintage travel trailers. It would’ve been a charming idea if I didn’t feel like I was disintegrating as a person. As it was, I was deep in the middle of figuring out how to house a preschooler and a newborn baby inside an Airstream, where to purchase wedding outfits for our family of four, making sure I had enough diapers and absorbent breast pads to last through what was bound to be an exhausting weekend. 

Help came in the form of friends who owned a beach cabin just a few blocks from the venue and only yards from the Pacific. They offered to let us stay with them, and they also volunteered to watch the baby, freeing myself, my husband, and our older daughter to enjoy the evening’s festivities. It felt like a godsend—there we’d be, away from our regular routines, celebrating our friends, and best of all, we’d be a family of three again. The bride and groom had asked my daughter to walk their mothers down the aisle, and I leaned into the honor, using the impending occasion to reinforce how special and loved she was, telling her how wonderful it would be to see her in the ceremony. Soon, I’d built a great deal of fragile optimism around the event, hoping it would allow me to recognize my daughter for the first time in months.

A couple of weeks before the wedding, my world was forever altered when I found Kathryn Schulz’s article “The Really Big One” in The New Yorker. Schulz’s writing was detailed and terrifying, and reading it was like welcoming a chaotic old friend back into your life—the kind whose existence puts into perspective how insignificant your own failures are. 

The shaking from the Cascadia quake will set off landslides throughout the region—up to thirty thousand of them in Seattle alone, the city’s emergency-management office estimates. It will also induce a process called liquefaction, whereby seemingly solid ground starts behaving like a liquid, to the detriment of anything on top of it. Fifteen per cent of Seattle is built on liquefiable land, including seventeen day-care centers and the homes of some thirty-four thousand five hundred people. 

Schulz didn’t just poke into my existing fears, she knifed right through them and kept going, much of her article focusing on a twin horror: the cataclysmic tsunami that would sweep over the region once the shaking subsided. The waves, Schulz explains, would be the real killers, and depending on the depth of the earthquake, they’d wipe all the low-lying coastal towns off the map, the damage remaking the entire landscape between the Pacific Ocean and the Cascade Mountain Range. 

After reading, a great quiet settled over me as though I were already immersed in the ocean, as though my only options were to keep holding my breath or to open my mouth and let the water come rushing in. Everything I’d been numbed to over the past year when I fought a losing battle against my own mind split open into technicolor. 

It wasn’t as if my concerns about my ability to parent completely disappeared in the face of this new and seemingly unquenchable fear—the process of coming back to myself would take years—but at the time, it was a massive reprieve. Suddenly, I could see there were bigger things to worry about than my own parenting—things that would destroy life as we knew it. And best of all, these things weren’t just in my head. Here were experts openly panicking, telling me I wasn’t ready for what was coming, and there I was, swallowing every single word. 

I’d been two weeks late in discovering Schulz’s article, but in those two weeks, enough frightened readers had written to The New Yorker that Schulz also penned a follow-up piece with practical advice. I read the two articles within minutes of each other. In the second, Schulz writes:

If you are an out-of-towner planning to spend the night in the tsunami zone: don’t. Of the almost thirteen thousand people expected to die in the Cascadia event, one thousand will perish in the earthquake. The others will be killed by the tsunami—and they amount to nearly one in five people who are in the zone when the water arrives.

In preparation for the wedding, I found and examined FEMA maps and evacuation routes. The experts Schulz interviewed believed we’d have roughly fifteen minutes to escape, so I calculated how long it would take every citizen in the area plus another thousand or so vacationers to drive those routes should roads still be viable in the panicked moments post-earthquake as the waves built. Then, I calculated how quickly we could run to higher ground when the roads inevitably became clogged. 

Both my husband and I are reformed smokers. Neither of us played sports with any success or regularity in our youth or since then, so our ability to literally run for our lives was iffy. And this wasn’t even counting the children. Still, our kids were small; their weight wouldn’t be an imposition in our adrenalin-fueled dash to higher ground, would it? That’s when I remembered that the baby wouldn’t be with us for most of the night. In the event of a tsunami, it would take us precious minutes to reach her, minutes we wouldn’t have if we had any hope of saving either girl.

My baby had magically transformed from a force capable of consuming me, and back into a human baby.

The decision to leave her behind arrived with absolute clarity, no hand-wringing or second thoughts. It was as easy as giving away my eyes to secure a meeting with Death. In the split second it took to think about it, my baby had magically transformed from a force capable of consuming me, and back into a human baby. My older daughter, meanwhile, reverted to a person I’d known for years, a person I’d once held and marveled over, someone whose personality was curious and gentle and stubborn, and there was not a single particle of me that would ever consider leaving her if there was the possibility, no matter how slim, that I could still save her. My husband could come with us if he wanted, but I was going to pick up my older daughter and run. The choice was no choice at all. The baby, I’d leave to the sea. 

When he got home, I made my husband read the articles. I showed him the maps and the escape routes. He did not act like I’d lost my mind; he just met me where I was, perhaps realizing I was returning to myself after a long absence. He agreed to the plan, promised to stick with me so the two of us could pass our older daughter back and forth when we got tired. I’ve since asked him if he was only trying to ease my fears, but he always says he wasn’t, telling me, “It just made the most sense at the time.” 

The following weekend, we packed up the kids and drove to the wedding, passing signs denoting evacuation routes I’d already committed to memory. The night of the ceremony, we left our baby with our friends, and walked, as a family of three, onward. My husband and I watched our daughter escort the soon-to-be mothers-in-law down the aisle. We watched the kiss and took part in the dancing, and through it all, the ground did not open to swallow us whole. The ocean did not wash away the land and all of us who happened to be upon it, and I did not have to find out if, in that horrible moment between life and death, I really would’ve gone through with the plan, though I believe I would have. The worst had already happened: I’d lost my first daughter, not to an earthquake but within myself. Deciding to forfeit her sister was a price I was willing to pay. If I were Kafka’s rodent, I would’ve had two daughters. One, I’d have taken in my mouth and carried away, the other, I’d have left in her earthen bed, slumbering and unaware, a small sacrifice. 

In her first article, Schulz uses a metaphor of two hands—one edging under the other—to illustrate how the big one will come in the form of a massive release of mounting tectonic pressure. She says that when the obstruction preventing one plate from moving under another finally breaks,

…The northwest edge of the continent, from California to Canada and the continental shelf to the Cascades, will drop by as much as six feet and rebound thirty to a hundred feet to the west—losing, within minutes, all the elevation and compression it has gained over centuries.

The path through motherhood, for me, has been something like this. I have not slipped into the role easily, and sometimes, I still get stuck, causing tremors as I try to keep moving forward. I’ve gotten used to these disruptions, though, and I’m better able to warn my family. Take cover, I might instruct, I’m not stable—the ground beneath me is shaking. 

My children spent a combined eight years in school before we moved away from Seattle to settle in Ann Arbor. That’s eight different emergency-kit notes they never had to open. When the kits came home every June, we created a holiday to mark the occasion. My older daughter called it “Nocturnal Night,” and in addition to playing boardgames and watching movies and staying up as late as they wanted, Nocturnal Night was also when the kids were allowed to consume their shelf-stable emergency snacks—a binge of squeeze pouches and protein bars and dried fruit. Before the festivities began, though, before I washed lunch boxes and shook sand from tiny backpacks, I always retrieved the notes I’d written—one to each girl. These we would not feast upon. These I cast, unopened, into the recycling bin. The act of reading them, just like the act of writing them, felt like bad luck. 

I like to think I’ve grown since the day I read Schulz’s article. I like to think I’ve overcome a lot of what made me fallible as a person and especially as a mother, but I feel I owe my children one last emergency-kit note, not in the event of a killer earthquake but in the event they should ever read this essay.

Girls,

I hope I will have loved you hard enough for this essay to be irrelevant in the way you look back on your childhoods and our time together, and still, I won’t lie and say I regret the choice I believed I was prepared to make, monstrous as it was. Up until that point, I’d been swimming in murky waters, scraping against barnacled stumps, my eyes burning from the brine—and I’m grateful that when I finally surfaced, there was something I could grab onto. If I’d never read that article, I likely would’ve abandoned you to your fates long before now, causing seismic waves of another kind because I would have believed I was the thing that would ultimately destroy you. 

If I thought it would do any good, I’d make you promise never to spend the night in a tsunami inundation zone again, especially not along the Cascadia Fault Line, but your lives are your own, and my hang-ups don’t have to become yours. And if either of you ever decides to get married or host some silly girls’ weekend in a travel trailer at the edge of the Pacific, I’ll swallow my fear to be there by your side if you’ll still have me. And if, in that distant future, we should ever find ourselves in the exact situation I feared when you were young, and the ocean pulls back leaving a stretch of uncovered shoreline and the deadly waves rise before us, I promise I’ll grab your hands tightly in my own, and in that moment, the three of us can decide whether to run or whether to face the wave together.

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