My Son Described His "Other Mother" From "Before"

My son was three, chatty, sweet, and completely normal in every way except for the things he sometimes said with total calm about a life none of us had given him.

It started with small comments. He would say, "when I was big," and describe doing adult things. We thought it was imagination and thought it was cute. Then one afternoon, out of nowhere, over a snack, he told me about his other mother.

He said it plainly, the way he would tell me about a cartoon. He said his other mother had different hair, long and dark, not like mine. He described a different kitchen, yellow, with a window over the sink that looked at a road. He said his other mother used to sing to him in the car. And then, still calm, still eating his crackers, he said that the last time, the car went into the water, and his other mother cried, and then he "came to find you."

I want to be clear that we had never told him anything like this. There was no movie, no book, no relative who had drowned, nothing in his little life that could have assembled these specifics: the yellow kitchen, the dark hair, the singing, the car and the water. He said it once, in full, and then he lost interest and asked for more crackers, and he never brought it up again with anything like the same detail.

He is older now and remembers none of it. I have never known what to do with it. I am not a person who believes easily. But I heard my three-year-old describe drowning with his other mother, in a yellow kitchen he had never seen, and then go back to his snack, and there is a part of me that has never stopped wondering who she was.