The Best Balm (even works on yet more stitches)

The anxiety began, I’m pretty sure, a couple of Fridays ago, the day I took Lily to the doctor to check on the brand spanking new set of stitches put into her forehead by the lovely resident in the emergency room.

The doctor was a nice man, we had a nice chat, and he declared Lily good to go after a friendly five-minute examination.  We bade farewell with the lack of emotion you would expect from a professional exchange that is likely never to be repeated.

Two and a half hours later, I got the text from Mike telling me he was visiting the same doctor getting stitches for Jake.

Now, there is only so much you can ask of a mother.

I was calm and in control when Jake got his first set of stitches a little over a year ago.

I was calm and in control when Lily got her stitches a week and a half ago.

But two sets of stitches in one week, not to mention a second set on the beautiful face of my little boy who is not yet four years old — this was simply too much to bear.

I hunkered down for a moment behind the steering wheel of my car in my sweaty yoga clothes, my phone still clutched in my hand, and I cried.  An hour and a half of astanga yoga, it turns out, is powerless against the spectre of two scars searing the creamy white skin of my child’s face.

Understanding somewhere in my animal brain that I practice yoga precisely to help me deal with difficult situations, I called Mike.  He didn’t pick up.  I screeched or sobbed or semi-coherently spewed something into the phone and just managed not to throw it out the window.

Then, shocked and adrift, I drove aimlessly.  I started toward home, but a surge of hormones rebelled at the idea of letting my perfectly loving and capable husband take care of Jake in this moment of need.  I would NOT be denied the opportunity to sit in small, sterile examining room wearing mismatched yoga clothes and a grubby head band while someone sewed up my boy’s chin!

By the time I got to the doctor’s office, Mike had texted me about the big “No Cell Phones” sign that was preventing his law-abiding self from calling his hysterical wife back and had further informed me that, as it turns out, no stitches were needed.  Just a good glob of adhesive.

Amazing how much assistance you get when you walk into a doctor’s office and inform them that your three-and-a-half-year-old son and his bloody chin lies somewhere within.  I arrived in the examining room just ahead of the doctor and his adhesive.

“Good to see you again,” we smiled at each other, the danger over.

“Do you have any more kids to bring me?” he asked as we said goodbye, this time, I believe the odds would have it, for the last time.

The odds being what they are, the whole stitches and almost-stitches thing is not, as this long story might have led you to believe, the source of my anxiety.

What started to feed my anxiety was the fact that we arrived home just an hour ahead of our weekend guests — a father and five-year-old son we love so much that sleep was an unwelcome distraction for the two-and-a-half days they were with us.

Which wouldn’t be such a big deal, except that a few hours after they left we attended a four-year-old’s birthday party.  Which shouldn’t have meant anything other than that Jake would sleep very well that night except that I still had a work project to finish after we arrived home at eight o’clock.  Which I could have managed handily and with little anxiety except that we were leaving to visit Mike’s mother in St. Louis at noon the next day and I had not yet begun packing.

Things, of course, have a way of happening when you are a parent, even when being a parent seems to get in the way of being a parent.  Bags must be packed.  Supplies must be laid in for nine hours in the car and a night in a hotel with a pool.  Delinquent phone calls must be made to friends in St. Louis with whom I intended to take full advantage of my mother-in-law’s babysitting skills.

The trip was lovely, truly it was.  But anyone who has traveled with small children will tell you that it involves — as the above list suggests — an inescapable degree of stress.

There’s the stress of trying to coax the three-and-a-half-year-old to watch his Backyardigans DVD’s in the car because his seventeen-month-old sister vastly prefers them to Toy Story.  And the stress of explaining ad infinitum the less than easily grasped concept that people are trying to sleep on the other side of those hotel walls and, further, that they are unlikely to care or sympathize that Lily is taking your Bubbe.

Even at Grandma’s, there’s the stress of being the heavy who will not allow the kids to drink yet more juice after their tea party with Grandma has ended.  The  stress of abandoning your kids over and over that you forgot about when you made all those plans to see friends without them.  The disrupted schedules and lax eating supervision and ill advised trips to restaurants.

This is what I believe we call a “family vacation.”

But, really, the anxiety didn’t fully manifest until we were back home on Monday.  Maybe it’s that I didn’t have time to unpack the second we got here.  (We nesters just hate an unpacked suitcase.)  Or the feeling that I had to complete a work project way ahead of deadline to pay for the decadent anniversary dinner Mike and I enjoyed in St. Louis.

Whatever it was, once Lily woke me up Monday night, she was the only one who made it back to sleep.

You know the feeling.  You lie back down in the bed you were loathe to abandon a few short minutes before.  Your mind starts spinning, like a computer whose power button has been hit hours before any work is to be done.  The once cool sheets become hot and annoying.  The pillow molds itself into uncomfortable, hard knots under your cheek.  And.  You. Can’t. Sleep.

I toughed it out for probably an hour and a half before the panic attack started creeping up my spine.

Four o’clock in the morning is not, I probably need not point out, the optimal time for a panic attack.  There is relatively little to be done at that hour to alleviate the utterly overwhelmed feeling that overtakes you.  A racing heart is unlikely to advance you any more toward sleep.  And sunrise, with its proffered excuse for getting up and cleaning out the closets, is still over an hour away.

And then, into the jittery silence, came the shuffle of feet, the welcome thump of my half-asleep boy dragging himself into our room.

Normally, Mike grabs him and goes back to bed with him, leaving me to the delicious sensation of spreading my legs diagonally across our king mattress.  This time, however, I took preemptive action.

“I’ll take him.  I’m awake anyhow,” I said, my voice a tad too excited at the prospect.

And so my Jake curled up in bed with me and I curled up around him.  His fine hair rubbed softly against my neck where his head fit.  His still slightly chubby hand grasped mine, squeezing gently every few minutes.  My heart pressed against his heart.

The anxiety poured out of me, like grass seed sliding through a seeder.  I felt drowsy.  I felt saved.  And I fell asleep.

Sometimes the most important reminders come only after a whole lot of turmoil.  There are few things I hate worse than a panic attack.  But there are few feelings better that I can imagine from a whole life of experiences than holding Jake that night.

It reminded me that sometimes healing comes from other people, not just from within.  That the energy of the Universe is in others and is often most easily experienced from their love and kindness.

That Jake is my own child, of course, intensified the experience.  That he is so much like I was at that age deepens it even more.  But there are so many people who heal us, and not just lovers and friends and family.  Strangers can too, with a well placed moment of assistance or a word of kindness.

No that the best stories aren’t the ones that end with a cuddle.