I think Jake tells it best:
“Mommy yelled, ‘LILY!’ and she fell off the porch and all the blood came out of her head.”
It was one of those rare moments of parenting that are as exciting and dramatic as in the movies — I’m put in mind of the scene in Kramer vs. Kramer when Justin Henry falls off the jungle gym and Dustin Hoffman runs five or six miles through the streets of Manhattan with a moaning boy bleeding all over his shirt until he makes it to the ER, thus unequivocally proving that he is a good father and deserves custody of his kid. This image of good parenting sticks in my mind perhaps because I watched Kramer vs. Kramer an obsessive number of times when I was thirteen — having developed an inexplicable and not a little bit embarrassing crush on Dustin Hoffman that lingers to this day — not because it is a particularly apt indication of how I make my parenting choices.
Still, I’m not sure how it reflects on me that my equivalent to running through the streets of Manhattan consisted of sitting on the edge of the tub with a dirty beach towel wrapped around my girl yelling at Mike to call our friend who is a pediatrician in the certainty that he keeps sutures, a needle, and a sterile operating theater at home.
In retrospect, I find it odd that I was rendered so helpless by the mere sight of my sixteen-month-old daughter backing off the porch in front of me, a big grin on her face even as I screamed her name so loudly that neighbors came out of their houses to see what was happening. Or maybe it was the blood gushing out of the cut on her forehead in the copious amount head wounds are promised to produce.
Mostly, I think that if you are the one with a bleeding, screaming child in your arms and you know that someone else can take care of the details like getting some sterile gauze for the cut and pointing out that our pediatrician friend is unlikely to be able to operate at his house and driving to the ER even as you badger him from the back seat to call every doctor we know, then you let the other person do all the practical things you would be forced to do if you didn’t have the option of shirking this duty and being hysterical.
To be honest, I wasn’t all that hysterical. I would even go so far as to suggest that I was rather calm once we arrived at the ER.
I calmly told person after person that we wanted a plastic surgeon to do the stitching, no offense to the physician’s assistant originally designated to do the honors. I was equally calm but firm with the resident who came to do the stitches but, in her own timid way, insisted that we sedate our baby. Instead of fighting with her, I merely listed the cornucopia of food my daughter had ingested too recently to allow for general sedation, with an emphasis on the dairy items and a little tweak to the time line to make it seem certain that a few blueberries remained in her stomach. And I know I was a sea of calm as I watched them swaddle Lily, lay on the gurney with her on top of me, and murmured, “It’s okay, Mommy’s right here,” while she cried and the surgeon stitched. Because that’s what mothers do.
In fact, when we were waiting for the surgeon and Mike turned to me like the good husband he is and said reassuringly, “It’s not your fault,” it took me a moment to fathom why he’d think I would blame myself.
Sure, I knew just how dangerous it was for Lily to wander out onto the cement outcropping of our porch, especially holding a hula hoop roughly one-and-a-half times her height. True, I didn’t insist that she move into less dangerous territory. But somehow that didn’t feel like an indictment of my entire three-and-a-half years as a mother.
Maybe, I’m beginning to suspect, I was in shock myself. What else would explain my decision that not only did Jake deserve to meet his friends to play outside at eight that evening — seeing as he had patiently spent three hours in the ER with us — but that Lily would enjoy the outing as well? That I did not run out to fill the prescription for antibiotics and buy the milk that we lacked before cuddling up with her for a quiet night inside? Only as we both fell asleep at 9:30 did it occur to me that I was not acting much like a mother whose baby girl had just been treated to six stitches in the emergency room.
It didn’t all catch up to me until Monday, when I ran the gauntlet of concerned parents and grandparents during preschool drop off asking about the big bandaid on Lily’s face.
This, I think, is when I finally realized the whole experience should have been a lot more harrowing than it was. At that point, exhaustion set in and I started to think a whole lot more clearly about my behavior, before, during, and after the creation of my matched set of children with the scars above their left eyes.
Honestly, I do think I was on that parent autopilot all weekend, the one where you act like everything is fine because someone has to. You notice little things — like how Mike has moved the planters to foil any plans Lily might concoct to return to the scene of the crime or how many ways Lily can bump her head in a day that you are now maybe just a little bit more careful about. But you soldier on, putting aside your own fear and anxiety so your daughter – not to mention the son who witnessed the whole thing and may well one day carry this as his earliest memory — can get past hers.
But more than that, the lack of guilt I feel, the ability to shrug and smile when people tell me how awful it must have been and to suggest that having already been through stitches once prepared me, might, just maybe, suggest that yoga has taught me a lesson or two about parenting.
Or, if not yoga, then my kids.
What I recall most about seeing it all happening was an utterly focused ability to be in the moment, to do what really needed doing without the distractions of all the ideas and anxiety my mind could have thrown at me. I knew I had to scoop my daughter from the ground where she lay screaming and I had to hold her. As for all the other things that needed doing, a quick, “Mike! Lily needs stitches!” was a remarkably concise summary of the events to that point and an authoritative delegation to him of everything that needed doing that did not involve holding the baby.
Panicking, crying, fainting — none of it would have changed the fact that my daughter was bleeding all over her blue tie-dyed dress. More to the point, blaming myself would not for one second have allowed me to take back that moment of watching my daughter back off the porch with an impish grin on her face.
We can’t change the past. All we can do is deal with the repercussions in the present moment. And being distracted by wishing for things we can’t do merely keeps us from being our best with what we can — and must.
The truth of the matter is that kids get hurt. Even bubble babies — the ones whose parents do things like build a railing along the porch and, oh, put up a gate at the top of the stairs (still haven’t gotten around to that one) and locks on the toilet seats (ditto).
I’m not saying I don’t try to keep my kids safe — at least we have outlet covers and sun block and shoes that don’t make them trip on the sidewalk. I’m just suggesting that I have a pretty healthy sense that there’s only so much you can do.
The ways in which I keep my kids safe tend toward the long term — organic foods and benzonphenone-free sublock and lead-free toys. Which says more about me than about anything else. We all protect our kids from the things that scare us the most.
The point is, we choose what we can do and then, too often, we berate ourselves for not doing more. It’s a black hole of parenting, this feeling that there is always something crucial we’re not doing, whether it’s signing up for Kindermusic or fixing a hot breakfast every morning or, yes, building a rail on the front porch.
The real lesson comes in recognizing our limits — the same way we learn to recognize our bodily limits in a yoga class. Doesn’t matter how much you beat yourself up; if your toes are out of reach, they’re out of reach. The same principle applies with our kids or, really, just about any other area in which we convince ourselves that we fall short.
If my children are going to cut their heads open — whether from a tumble off the front porch or from being on the wrong end of a bucket apparently swung with great force by a two-year-old friend — then this is part of their active, living, imperfect lives. And part of mine as well.
Some Balance Poses in Honor of Lily’s Fall
Vrksasana (tree pose) — for those who prefer their challenges gentle.
Ardha Baddha Padmottanasana (standing half-bound lotus) — if you’re ready to really let go and fall.
Adho Mukha Vrksasana (hand stand) — go for it!