I wish no mother feels this feeling x
My son started drowning while surfing on our family holiday in Newquay. There was nothing I was able to do. I felt completely helpless as wave after wave pushed him under, while the cord from his surfboard became tangled around his feet. He was nineteen. An hour earlier, he’d been standing on my towel eating a sausage roll, dropping crumbs everywhere and telling me to stop fussing about sun cream. The people who brought him back to the beach gave us our son back. I’ll never have enough words for what they did. But there’s someone else from that afternoon I need to tell you about. A young paramedic who sat opposite me in the ambulance. She asked me a few questions about him, and somewhere in my answers, she noticed something about me. She didn’t make a fuss. She waited until he was in hospital, until my husband was beside his bed and until I was in a position to hear what she wanted to ask. Then she asked whether I had time for a cup of tea. I nearly said no. I didn’t see what else there was to discuss, and I didn’t want to leave my boy. I’m glad she asked again. We’d booked a week in Cornwall. Nothing extravagant. A rented place outside Newquay, enough bedrooms to stop the children arguing, and a kitchen where the four of us were able to sit round the table together. Our daughter, Lucy, was twenty-three. Our son, Ben, was nineteen. Getting both of them on the same holiday had taken more organisation than booking the holiday itself. Ben had spent the week before we left studying swell reports. He’d slide his phone across the table and point at numbers as though I was expected to understand what any of them meant. By the time we reached Cornwall, he’d already decided which morning we were going to the beach. “You do your shopping on Tuesday,” he told Lucy. “Monday’s the day.” We woke to blue skies. It was already warm enough to have breakfast with the back door open. My husband, Paul, packed the car while I gathered the towels and Ben stood in the kitchen ea
