Goal for this summer’s beach trip: Don’t lose a kid.

If we achieve this goal, then we’ll have made progress over last year. No joke.

Patricia is a wanderer. While everyone is paired off by age – the big girls only five days apart, the boys only 3.5 weeks apart, and the little girls six months apart – the developmental gap between the younger two is striking at times. At the beach, Jocelyn and Patience paired off. Robbie and Philip paired off. I sat with Zoe. And Patricia?

Patricia wandered.

Lee was in the ocean with some of the kids, Stephanie was on the shore between him and me, and I was digging with Zoe. All of us were scanning the scene regularly. We counted to six over and over.

One. Two Three. Four. Five. Six.

Again. And again.

Until the stomach-sinking moment when we counted to five.

Patricia – who has no fear in the water but also no ability to swim on her own yet – was gone. I don’t panic usually. I generally contain feelings well. But in those minutes she was gone? I had no box to hold everything I felt.

Helpless, I walked back and forth, scanning the water and then scanning the dunes and then scanning between. I thought about how we’d never be able to adopt Sam, even if the officials in Taiwan reversed their decision in our favor. (We couldn’t in the end, but it wasn’t because we lost Patricia.) I thought about a million things.

I think it was almost 5 minutes before we found her. She had simply wandered down the beach from us and asked stranger adults to build a sandcastle with her. And? They almost immediately began looking for her parents. But. They didn’t expect a little black girl with twists in her hair to be with parents with look like us.

Lee saw three beach patrol vehicles converge in one spot and ran to them, hoping for a lost child and not a body. Meanwhile, I was looking the other direction when – at that same moment – a woman said, “Are you looking for a little girl?” I was white, yes, but she saw the panic of a mom with a missing child and allowed that maybe the black preschooler was with me. I allowed myself to cry finally when she pointed me toward where she’d been found. Safely.

We’ve lost a child once before, but it was a less dangerous setting. (Jocelyn. Hill Ridge Farms. She was in the bounce house without permission, and the farm had excellent lost child lockdown policies.) Words don’t exist to express the emotions in those moments.  

My kid is lost. I’m physically fine. But I don’t know if I’ll ever be fine again in any definition of the word if I have to live without my child.

My friend Lisa’s son Eli didn’t go missing, but he’s gone nonetheless. It’s been almost a year. I’ve never been both so proud of and so broken for a friend as I have been in walking alongside her through this grief. My children might have been lost for a time, but they’re still here. Eli, meanwhile, never got to turn 5.

If Eli were still alive, I know Lisa would be less concerned about Pinterest-level parenting and more occupied with being present in each moment with her fierce boy. As I think toward this summer’s beach week, I’m trying to hold the same mentality. (I’m also keeping in mind a little boy who survived a gorilla encounter and another who didn’t survive an alligator one.)

My bar is low: 1. Enjoy our time together. 2. Don’t lose anyone.

And I think those are all the expectations we really need.