‘I shouted his name, but the security was not allowed to do that because it scared the guests’

It’s been eight years now, but just thinking about it makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. Lewis was lost on the beach on Curaçao. He was three years old and it took about forty minutes to find him again.

Your child is your most valuable asset, to what extent you can talk about possessions, but you know what I mean. Your child is your most vulnerable, weakest, most sensitive place. From the moment you have such a little one in your arms, you feel in everything that you will protect him or her with your life. I won’t be playing in front of my own judge anytime soon, but whoever touches my children has a problem. I think many parents recognize that feeling, you just don’t have to think about something happening to them.

I followed with horror the news about Gino, the boy who went to play football and never came back. It broke my mother’s heart. Just like children who went with ex-partners and stayed away forever, whether they were kidnapped abroad or killed. A child should just be able to play outside and in fact a child should always be safe with mother or father. That it isn’t makes me sad. Why are there people who want to harm an innocent child?

My panic lasted forty minutes at the time and I can still recall the feeling. The impotence and the fear, the hard pounding of my heart. I honestly don’t want to know what parents go through of kids who never come back.

We were on Lions Dive in Curacao. A familiar place to us, we used to come there regularly. It was my birthday and we celebrated with our family on the beach that afternoon. I remember exactly how it went. I was breastfeeding Miles and Lewis was behind me playing in the sand, my ex getting a drink or something. Lewis followed him, but circled the bar on the other side. When my ex came back and didn’t have Lewis with him, I wasn’t in all the states right away. I therefore think that the panic about such a disappearing process of a child proceeds in phases. At first I thought Lewis would show up again, that was the first minute. After that I – with Miles on my arm – just walked around that bar. Ex walked the other way, but Lewis was already gone.

Anyone who knows Lions Dive knows that there is a part of the beach where you can swim, but on the left is a harbor with boats, it is immediately deep there.

What’s he wearing?

My ex was part of the voluntary rescue brigade at sea, and when we couldn’t find Lewis anymore, he immediately went to that harbor to check whether Lewis had not ended up between the boats. Even then I wasn’t worried, I just expected to see his face among the beachgoers any moment and it wasn’t that busy. When I didn’t find him on the beach, I suspected that my ex would have found him on the other side. The child had to be somewhere. But every time we ran into each other in the middle without Lewis. About ten minutes had passed by then.

The panic started when other people started helping us. Other beachgoers, the people from the bar and even the security were called.

“What’s he wearing?” they all asked me. A yellow shirt with a pizza on it. Was a lot to say, but he was probably the only one with a shirt like that. That was an advantage.

It felt very surreal to see and hear everyone searching for my child. It was like a bad movie and it didn’t really sink in. The fact that my ex stayed close to that harbor – with his knowledge of drowning survival – made me uneasy. It wouldn’t be… In the meantime I kept walking around with Miles on my arm, searching everything. The pools, the hotel lobby, the beach, along the surf, people searching the water with snorkels, we searched everywhere. Then we were about twenty-five minutes away. It’s only twenty-five minutes, but in such a situation every minute feels like an hour.

After half an hour I noticed that I couldn’t really control myself anymore. I shouted his name, but the security was not allowed to do that because it scared the guests. At that moment I could punch him in the face, what did those guys care about me? I wanted my child back, alive and well. The scenarios that go through your head at such a moment are all very sinister in nature, I can tell you. A three-year-old child, already lost half an hour on the beach… The sweat of fear was on my back.

It took forty minutes, but it seemed like years before I walked next to a security man who received a message on his walkie-talkie. There was a lad watching the buses in front of the hotel. A yellow shirt with a pizza on it. Holy fuck, Lewis with his bloody annoying bus phase… I could have come up with that myself.

Anyway, there he came, with the man from security who had found him. Dozens of people breathed a sigh of relief (some of them even applauded) when we were reunited. There was nothing wrong with him. He had wanted to go on the bus, he told me. I could already imagine how he had boarded the bus with the tourists and ended up at Hato Airport on his own. I just hadn’t had an attack of insanity yet.

All’s well that ends well. Lewis sat down at another table because he was angry because he wasn’t allowed to take the bus and I had aged ten years on my birthday.

It was forty anxious minutes, but I got my child back unharmed and safe. I don’t want to think that things would have turned out differently and I am convinced that I have become sharper. I still find it – even though they are now eight and almost eleven – a little bit exciting to let them go outside, while in principle that makes no sense and you have to dare to let go of your children. When they cycle to my parents or sisters, I always text whether they have arrived and we make clear agreements about where they are going to play. I give my children the freedom to play outside and I think that’s important. All the greater is my sympathy for the parents who also let their child go with all good intentions…

She is a counselor in secondary special education, an author at De Fontein publishers, mother of two boys aged ten and eight, recently divorced and expecting a daughter with her new boyfriend. So nothing boring about it. That is why we would like to introduce you to our new columnist: Ellen Rink.