The Ocean's Cradle

[Content Warning: Sensitive content, domestic abuse, mental health].

When I wake, my bed seems to be moving, tottering over craggy midnight ocean waves carelessly mimicking the swimming blue that blankets our town like a warm, salty canopy over a baby in its bassinet.

My sister and I are sardined fish in a tin bed, tucked prudently by our mother, who sits at the foot, driving—awake but tired—into a sea with no compass or satnav; she restlessly taps her hands against the wheel.

I look out the window to see street lights, harsh and hazy, zipping past my face like shooting stars, and I make a wish, privately, that this is the last time I wake in the ocean’s cradle.

My sister is still asleep, chin-tilted against the seatbelt and drooling a thin stream of seafoam; young and naïve, she’s afloat in this ocean, lying on a mother whale’s back who sings to her children, century-old ocean lullabies.

The radio sings softly, but it doesn’t hide my mother’s cries; she thinks she has this moment to herself, and though her pleas are silent, I hear them whispering in the wind, indelible like my wish, searching for a buoy to land, for just a moment’s rest.

Between my sister and me are our backpacks, hastily thrown together; mine isn’t fully zipped closed, and my sister’s sparkly, plastic keyring—the one which she threw a tantrum for in the supermarket—glints as it captures every passing star that shoots across the windows.

And in the front pocket of my backpack is my Hello Kitty coin pouch with my pocket money and birthday savings from grandma and grandad; I will offer it to my mother when she stops for gas, and she’ll politely decline, but I’ll still slip it into her purse anyway. And when we inevitably go back, forgetting this blue night in the ocean ever happened, my coin pouch will find its way back into the front of my bag pocket again, ambivalently untouched.

The cradle sways into the gas station, and I squint my eyes as the garish abovehead lights glare down on us, forcing their way in through the canopy; my mother kills the engine.

The car is quiet.

And suddenly, I notice just how small we are in the world. My sister and I have our backpacks, and in the front passenger seat, my mother has just her purse. She stands out by the fuel pump in nothing but her nightie and dressing-gown. She has nothing, and I see how much it matters.

I reach forward and slip my coin pouch into her purse.

Then I decide it’s easier to pretend to be asleep beside my sister when our mother returns.

The radio sings again, whale songs telling stories of sailors, and our cradle begins to rock and float further toward the open sea, where the blue fish in their blue hats and submarines will lead my sister and me to a room with wooden toys, while our mother tells them about the shark that swims in our hallway.

There is a shark in our home who swims laps up and down our hallway, leaving behind a shipwreck of deliberate disarray:

broken bookcases and strewn apart maps and photographs;

cracked clay and scattered seaglass;

my mother’s clothes torn in two;

our grandmother’s pearl earrings buried like treasure in the sandy carpet;

and he comes lurking into my sister’s room and mine when the night turns water into viscid red wine.

My mother, a beating heart before the bleeding mind, bargains with the world to keep us afloat; buoyed in a sea of sharks and swallowing high tide, I give her the satisfaction of a moment of selfishness as she scoffs down an energy bar at the foot of our cradle—there is no thought to save some for my sister and I, and I do not blame her.

We pull into the station, glittered with lit windows and shuffling busy worker fish in blue hats and gold glinted badges, and they come to peer over the bassinet, and my mother lets them take my sister, while she lifts me to her chest with slight struggle.

Again, I am selfish and let her think she needs to carry me, but I just want my mother.

We’re set on a blue leather couch, wrapped in blankets over our Barbie-pink pyjamas, and my sister is half awake now; she squints under the fluorescent station lights, searching past her frazzled blonde bed hair.

She looks ridiculous.

And I hug her, because while I need our mother, she needs me.

We are escorted to a safehouse of limestone and sand, and welcomed back by the long-term residents; the windows are barred, and the front door has two deadlocks on it—I wonder if this is really a sanctum or a prison—we share a common room with other women sitting around and smoking cigarettes, comparing shark tales from their living rooms.

They talk about their own cradles from their childhood, rowing through rocky waves under ocean blue skies; a generation of scars shapes their judgement, but to them, it is just another Thursday.

For breakfast, our mother makes pancakes in the communal kitchen, scavenging what she can from the peeling, weathered cabinets with squeaky hinges; she pours maple syrup—the cheap kind my sister and I love—over a small stack (stack being generous) of pancakes for us to share.

I eat less than I need to feel satisfied, because I know my mother will eat what’s left or nothing at all; my sister doesn’t understand that yet.

May the world be kind, for she is just a child.

Our father, tall, broad and unusually well-groomed, waits out by the car and smiles vehemently with something that looks enough like contrition to lure my mother out to him.

I watch my mother sink into his arms, coerced by the merciless fiend of romance; forgotten is the hand he raised to strike her the night before, forgotten is the ruins of our living room now put back together like a stage set, and forgotten is the turmoil of the upheaval: the sea, the cradle, the blue fish with blue hats, and the two stacked pancakes for three.

I watch my mother fall victim once again, and I check my backpack to find my Hello Kitty coin pouch back in its rightful spot, and know this won’t be the last time my sister and I set sail in the ocean’s cradle.

And I make another wish, privately, just as I see my sister as the little girl she is, that my mother sees that I, too, am just a child.