My motherhood experiences live in that liminal space between the real and the longed-for. The son I lost to adoption but found at 21, when we began to reconnect the bond that was broken. The mother I lost to multiple sclerosis but found in her writings after she died. The sea runs through each of our stories. My mother kept stones from favorite beaches in her pocketbook, long after she could travel to any of them in person. We brought her ashes back to her favorite shoreline in Ireland, where we watched them drift under the waves. My son is a surfer who once said he feels most at home when he’s out in the ocean. The shores he sets out from are the very ones that anchored my brief time as his mother. Water connects me to them both, brings me peace. Especially when it stretches across the horizon, blurring the border between sea and sky, and is all I can see.