You’ve been on this for months now. Shipwrecks. You have a pinterest page filled with them, and we’ve checked out every book in the library. We’ve watched documentaries, we’ve gone to visit the shipwreck pulled out of Matagorda Bay at the State History Museum. In the morning, you wake up asking questions about shipwrecks. “Mama, what kinds of things cause a ship to wreck?” “Mama, could a ship tip over and not sink?” So many questions, all day, every day.
For your fifth birthday, we had a shipwreck party, with a pirate ship piñata and 
a (sinking) Titanic cake. You said it was the best birthday party ever. I found it morbid, but I got you some titanic books (one a coloring book), and now we read them every night before bed. I’ve started to have bad dreams about it. Dreams where I’m surrounded by people who are frozen; ice-cold statues with dead, frost-covered eyes.
Emotionally, it’s beginning to be more than I can take. Each night reliving how the ship Californian was only 10 miles away, and could have saved all of the passengers, but their radio was turned off. Seeing the drawing of the one lifeboat tipped over, and the people scrambling to stay on top of it and not fall in, and next to it that one of the people who weren’t fortunate enough to make it into the lifeboats jumping into the icy water. You made me draw that at dinner the other night. “Mama, draw the people jumping.” It caused my heart to sink. I can’t, I wanted to say, but I did it anyway. And thought too much about it.
Part of it is how relevant it seems. The EPA going away, and our healthcare, the refugee crisis, the crazy hot weather. Telling the tale of the Titanic over and over is just rubbing it all in for me, making visible this kind of haze of disaster that floats above and around everything. Lately it feels like we are all shifting our feet on that upturned lifeboat in a tricky and surreal slow-motion dance. One night I want to get in bed with you and pull on the covers, read the story again and find that the Californian did come, and that everyone is safe. Please let us all just be safe.
Little Bug 