READING 13 ︎︎︎ Yael van der Wouden, The Safekeep

Vertigo

I was walking Hattie this morning when it struck—that sudden, seizing thought: Where are my children? A second earlier, I had known. The boys are out with the nanny. Evie is with the N--lys. Everyone is safe. Everyone is well. But my body didn’t believe it. My chest dropped like I’d stepped off something. It was the feeling of falling out of bed. A kind of vertigo.

It passes quickly, usually. My mind recalibrates. But for a moment, the floor disappears. The knowing that my children are not here becomes a fear that they are nowhere. It’s not rational. It’s momentary. Bodily. 

And I think of my mother-in-law, who has Alzheimer’s. One of her constant refrains—so easy to interpret as nagging or confusion—is the question: Where is so-and-so? Where is this person? Where are my sons? It used to irritate me. Let it go, I’d think. Assume they’re safe.

But now I wonder if it’s the same vertigo—experienced again and again. The same fearful loss of the map. She knows who they are. That’s not what’s gone. What’s gone is the thread that once held people in place. She’s lost track of where they’ve gone, when they left, whether they were ever here. Did they step into the next room, or are they in another city? Are they gone for a minute, or for good? She reaches for their location and finds nothing. A compass spun too fast, pointing in every direction at once.

It makes a sort of poetic sense that motherhood would leave its imprint so deeply that even as memory fades, the instinct to check remains. Maybe it’s not just confusion. Maybe it’s love trying to orient itself. Maybe what feels like obsession is actually a kind of falling prayer.

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