Where Mothers Fear to Tread

My son fell off a swingset yesterday. He fell not from the swing itself but from the crossbar that holds the frame together. Factoring in his own height, he fell about five feet and hit his head on the concrete so hard I could hear it. Just thinking about that moment makes my eyes burn.

He had climbed up there while I was on the phone. I was right there, trying to stop him but, ironically, I was afraid that by fighting him, I’d make him fall. So I went around the frame to get behind him as I was positive he would end up falling backwards but before I could put a hand on him, and in the blink of an eye, he fell forward and hit the concrete along the outside of swingset. I will never forget that slow motion fall to the ground and the sound of his head hitting the unyielding cement. I screamed.

I inspected his head for the blood I was certain would be pouring out of it but miraculously, he wasn’t bleeding.

I carried him inside while he cried like I’ve never hear him cry before. It was relentless and mournful. I put ice on his head but by then, I couldn’t remember which side hit the ground. I kept asking him to show me where it hurt but he wouldn’t answer. He just kept asking to lay down and kept blinking his eyes like he couldn’t see.

I was terrified.

As I dialed the pediatrician, I replayed in my mind all the stories I’ve ever heard about people hitting their heads a lot less hard than he did and dying from it. I thought about my friend who hit his head when he jumped from the car we were in together. His brain swelled from the impact and he didn’t make it.

The pediatrician suggested I bring him in immediately rather than go to an emergency room as it would definitely take longer to get even a basic head injury assessment.

I hung up the phone and began to sob uncontrollably. I felt like I had failed my son by not being able to prevent his fall.

And for the first time ever, I considered my childrens’ mortality for more than a half a second.

I’ve read many blogs written by parents who have lost a child and I have cried tears for them as I tried to grasp their pain. But I’ve never, ever allowed myself to imagine the horror of losing a child of my own. Even though the ever present spectre of death has been a part of my life since I was a child, I’ve willfully never let my mind go to that dark place until yesterday.

I cried as I put my son’s shoes on, knowing I shouldn’t do so in front of him, but powerless to stop. He’d said almost nothing since the fall maybe 15 minutes prior and he seemed very out of it but as I cried, he climbed off my lap, gently wrapped my face with his two tiny hands and kissed me. My heart ached.

As we drove to the doctor’s office, I forced myself to not cry, opting instead to make silent bargains with God.

After an extensive examination, his doctor concluded that while there was a very small chance he *might* lose consciousness, it was okay for him to go home as long as we agreed to wake him every three hours to make sure he was not unconscious. If he was or if he started vomiting, we were to go to the ER immediately. She also said it was a miracle his head didn’t split open from the impact of hitting such a hard surface from five feet. My sentiments exactly.

P made it through the night okay but he might be feeling some minor effects from the fall as he’s been very fussy today and a wee bit clumsy, hitting his poor little head again on my desk. Cognitively, he seems okay and I’m guardedly optimistic that he’s going to be wonderfully, perfectly fine in a day or two. I hope.

There is nothing on this earth that will make you appreciate your children more than thinking you might lose them. It’s not that I needed to be reminded to appreciate my son but in the chaos that is our everyday life, it’s easy to forget that my children are really the only things in my life that truly matter to me. I don’t want to lecture or preach but please, look at your kids and take in their essence; their goodness; their ability to love you unconditionally. And then imagine if all of that was gone from your life.

I really believe P is going to be okay and aside from knocking a couple years off my life, I’m fine, too. It was a horrible event that’s now over. The one good thing that came from it is a very pointed reminder to not take life for granted — yours or anybody else’s.

………………..

I wanted to do this in my last post but since it was a Flashback Friday, I opted to wait—

I just wanted to say thank you to all you nice people who sent their well wishes and congrats via email, comments and twitter for my little 15 seconds of fame in the Wall Street Journal. Most of you were not friends, as one might have expected (lamers!), but rather total strangers (and maybe new readers?) who found their way here from the Journal. Your kind and very unexpected words made me feel really good. I realize now it was kind of silly of me to feel so oddly self-conscious about the whole thing because I am good enough, I am smart enough and doggone it, people like me! And If I ever channel Stuart Smalley again, pinky swear that you’ll throw me in front of a bus.

The Ring

I was compelled to dig through my old jewelry the other day after watching gold hit the $1000 mark. I was just curious to see just how much old gold jewelry I actually had — dollar signs dancing in my eyes, no doubt.

A lot of what I unearthed was mine from the days of charmholders that held lightning bolts and floating hearts, of serpentine chains, zodiac pendants and those nameplates that were rather unfortunately resurrected by Carrie Bradshaw.

The rest was my mother’s and grandmother’s jewelry — or rather what was left of it after my sister picked through it all and took the really, really good stuff.

Nonetheless, I don’t have much affection for yellow gold jewelry these days anyway and with very few sentimentally-based exceptions, I’d happily sell all of it for a thousand dollars an ounce.

But I got distracted when I came across my old silver peace sign ring.

Seeing as I was still in utero during the Summer of Love, it obviously came from a far less intense era — the mid to late eighties. And I’m embarrassed to admit it was, by and large, worn because we thought wearing peace signs were cool and nobody else was doing it — which really just meant you couldn’t yet score any peace sign gear at the mall.

In the interest of full-disclosure, I was a clove-smoking, black-wearing, bob-sporting, mall-hating elitist back then. I apologize to to whomever I may have directed any scornful, thou-art-soooo-inferior eyerolling.

Anyway, not ever having bothered to make myself aware of the actual ugliness of war and never having watched one on TV until a few years later with the Gulf War, I was really just a poseur. I mean sure, I didn’t like war. Most reasonable people don’t. But what did I actually know about war and peace or the fight for peace or the lack of peace? Not a damn thing.

As I sat there and fiddled with the tarnished silver ring, I thought about discussions I’d had with my husband half a decade ago, before the impending quagmire known as Iraq, in which I’d argued that war should be a last resort; that every single option should be exhausted before embarking on something that will cause so much misery and suffering.

These days I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about the state of the world — the turmoil, the genocide, the civil wars, man’s inhumanity to man… And I say many silent little prayers to whomever might be listening to please save us from ourselves.

So…I’m wearing the ring again. The difference is this time it actually means something.

So I’ll Never Be a Luddite

Would you think I was a bad parent if I admitted that life without a DVD/VCR player kind of sucks? Yeah, well YOU try to go two months without one and then report back to me. I will graciously accept your apology and let you gush all over me for being so totally right.

Ours now resides in the large dead electronics pile that occupies a sizeable footprint of space just inside our privacy fence and is starting to look like some kind of Unabomber-themed art installation called “Technology Sucks Donkey Butt.” Personally, I’d have named it “Cheap Electronics from China Suck Donkey Butt” but whatever.

So I’m off to begrudgingly buy another one and this time? I’m purchasing one of them there “We Think You Are a Total Sucker and a Dumb One at That” extended warranties that they’re always trying to sell you — and which they totally should when you’re buying the el cheapo grande $69 DVD/VCR player. Not that I would know anything about that. Ahem.

Sometimes They Come Back

The title of this post is actually the name of a Stephen King short story. More specifically, it was from a book of his short stories called “Night Shift” and I read it obsessively; more times than I can count, when I was about ten.

This, however, isn’t about anything scary or macabre.

No, this is just me wondering why people who have wronged me, in terrible ways in some cases, always come back into my life after I’ve totally moved on and forgotten all about them.

When I was 14, a girl who’d been my friend for most of ninth grade did something shitty to me that was apparently so abhorrent that uh… I can’t even remember what it was anymore. I dropped her like a bad habit but lo and behold, a year later she sent me a card and prattled on like we were the dearest of friends. WTF?

When I was 16 a girl that completely screwed me the year before and then moved away wrote me a letter like nothing had ever happened, like we were still friends. She even invited me to come stay at her house in Cocoa Beach. As if.

When I was 18 and in college, another girl who had screwed me over the year before got my phone number from my stepmom (our parents were friends) and just like the others, called me up as if nothing had ever happened and chatted me up for an excruciatingly long time.

A stellar judge of character, wasn’t I?

More recently, however, a girl that I’d been friends with for several years in my late twenties found me through my husband and emailed me full of apologies and chit chat about her life.

She never did anything horrible to me if you don’t count packing up and leaving town without so much as a goodbye. This was someone I had supported endlessly for over four years while she was in an emotionally and psychologically abusive relationship.

I can’t even calculate the number of hours I spent on the phone, listening to her cry, propping her up and helping her plot she and her children’s escape from her very unbalanced asswipe of a baby daddy. She never went through with it and I never got mad or gave up on her like the rest of her friends.

When she moved away, with him, without a word to me, I was truly shocked and maybe a little hurt. My life went on unchanged, though, except that I no longer worried about her or her kids. Five years passed and I’d all but forgotten about her when I received that email in December

She apologized. She acknowledged that I was a good and loyal friend to her; that leaving the way she did was shitty.

And she’s still with him.

She says that life is good but I’m not sure I could ever believe that. He was a royal mindf*cker; completely incapable of accepting any responsibility for his abusive behavior. He actually told her one time, in front of me, that she LIKED being treated badly and that it was her own fault. That she MADE him be that way. I have a hard time imagining someone like that could change.

And frankly? I have no interest in finding out. I have my own life and my own problems.

So I never replied to her email and she recently wrote my husband asking if I’d received said email or not. He says I should reply.

I told him that I don’t feel compelled in the least to do so. I don’t hate her or wish anything bad upon her. I just really don’t care to pursue the matter.

For Two Days I Was a Better Mother and a Better American

You may or may not have noticed that this site was down for almost three days, as were all the other sites hosted on my account like Green Mom Finds and Moms Speak Up. I blame the butthead that had twelve MILLION files (literally) on the server.

At first I was agitated when i couldn’t get to any them. I actually didn’t know what to do with myself at night as I spend a significant amount of time each night tending to all things blog-related, like the fabulous new Green Mom Finds.

But suddenly, I found myself with plenty of time in the evenings. Time to fold laundry; time to pick up the house, time to work on other projects, time to flip through magazines and of course, watch more non-CNN-on-in-the-background-while-I-work-TV. I’m talking trashy reality TV, multiple recorded episodes of Nip/Tuck, random music videos. I even watched something completely vanilla and pedestrian during primetime. Yes, I admit it. I watched the pilot of Lipstick Jungle. And I liked it. My status as a good and obedient couch-indenting, TV-watching American is now official. *preens*

During the day, I was like Supermom! I devoted countless hours to the desires and whims of my children. Trips to procure Valentine’s junk for school, to the duck pond, to the pet store to peer at various rodentia in their aquariums, master-planned playdates lined up, extremely healthy yet tasty snacks made on demand, the reading of an untold number of books…

In short, I played more with my kids, was generally more domestic than is good for me, and I was a far more productive and attentive human being than I’ve been for the past 2.5 years. It’s kind of pathetic. And even more so because I know I could never have done all that in two days if my sites weren’t down. The lure of the computer… she is irresistible, no?

Now who wants to throw me an intervention?