oh this is hard

And again, with feeling: the ER

I guess I still have some smugness that needs to be beat out of me. For all of that talk about cavalierly choosing to accept risk, not an hour after I wrote that blog post, Whit went to the ER in an ambulance.

Grace and I had picked out two tiny chocolate Easter eggs at Bread & Circus this morning. The eggs were wrapped in foil and in a basket right by the checkout. I assumed they were solid chocolate. There was no ingredient information or label. After giving them the eggs after lunch today, I skipped off to the gym.

I was there only 30 minutes. Walking out I checked my phone and saw texts from Anastasia: gone to the ER. Whit is having nut reaction. I drove as fast as I could (why are there so many sloooowwww drivers on the streets? i made zero friends with my horn today) and walked in about 5 minutes after they had arrived. Whit was quiet, clearly scared, and hoarse. He barely spoke. I handled insurance paperwork and watched him with concern. It became clear that he was actually getting worse. Anastasia explained that she had done the epi pen at home but that he had moved – he had a huge gash on his leg and probably not enough epinephrine in his system.

After about 30 minutes of watching a rash spread across his face and chest and listening to his increasing wheezing, a team of doctors and nurses descended. This happened fast. They asked me to hold his face while other adults held him down, administered another epipen, four different kinds of oral medications, put a nebulizer mask on his face, covered him with little sticky heart monitors, and inserted an IV. My poor boy. He visibly cowered in fear when he saw the epipen coming and then, after it was done, with tears streaming down his face, choked out:

“Please, only one epipen? Please?”

I was crying, struck by both his pain and his manners.

I was too busy holding him down and cupping his tear-wet cheeks to take pictures when he was really hooked up to everything. It was scary. His eyes were wild above the nebulizer mask, looking for me, full of questions and fear.

Epinephrine is some amazing stuff. Shortly, his rash started to clear and his breathing began to calm a bit. Matt took Grace home, and Anastasia and I settled in for what we had been told would be a lengthy waiting period. The IV dripped silently into him, and he kept having to pee in a bottle as it dripped out of him. I told Anastasia about how stupid and guilty I felt for having given him a chocolate without knowing precisely what was in it. I was so angry at myself for that – and also for not being there when this happened. As she and I talked, Whit was lying on the bed in between us, staring at the ceiling, almost falling asleep. Suddenly he spoke:

“Mummy, it’s okay.”

“Oh, but Whit, I am so sorry – I was so stupid and I feel so terrible for doing this to you. It was such a mistake. I am sorry.” I cried back to him.

“No, Mummy, it’s okay. It was an ackident.”

I started bawling then. I hadn’t realized he was even listening, but not only had he heard me, but he wanted to make me feel better. It was a humbling moment: when your four year old is parenting you, it’s time to grow up.

I could tell he didn’t feel great still because he was so docile. He just sat, listened, watched, eyes occasionally fluttering shut. After a while Anastasia went home and I sat next to him, rubbing his white back, feeling the regular bumps of his spine, looking at the little jutting shoulder bones that I always think of as his wings. Oh, my baby boy. My fragile, fragile boy.

When they finally took off all of the monitors and removed the IV, I picked Whit up in my arms and almost twirled him around, so grateful was I to be able to do so. It was so nice to have the wires gone. Again with the manners: I said,

“Whit, please say thank you to Jane for taking such good care of you” (Jane the nurse who had wielded several big needles and scary smoke-emitting masks)

“Jane, thank you for taking such good care of me,” he said without hesitation. Jane gave me a huge grin and told him he was a great pediatric patient.

“What’s a ped-atkrick patient?” he asked.

“Pediatric means child. Which word do you like better?” Jane asked him.

“Oh, ped-akrick.” he smiled.

I stayed home tonight from C’s birthday celebration to check on him every 30 minutes, and to assuage Grace who has already come out of her room crying once that she is having nightmares about what happened today. She was genuinely afraid of what happened. Anastasia told me that within 3 minutes of her calling 911 there were nine male EMTs in our living room. When I got home there was a towel striped with blood thrown in one corner and Whit’s jeans cast across the couch. I shudder to think about what Grace saw.

I guess this was a gentle reminder from the universe that the risk really is real, really is close, and that it doesn’t behoove me to be so careless about it.

Message heard.

Fragile


I love Lisa Belkin’s Motherlode column yesterday. Love it. I had tears running down my face at work reading it. It touched many soft spots for me, including my deep awareness of the fragility of it all, my inability to really enjoy life in the moment, and the way that parenting humbles you, making you aware of how smug you were to assume you could control most things about these little people.

If I were to write my list today, I think the three sections would mirror the list of soft spots again. There is something so simultaneously fragile and sturdy about these little children’s bodies. When I was pregnant with Grace, I remember vividly thinking: ok, just have to get to 12 weeks without miscarrying … then, please God let me have an ok AFP result … then, let there be 10 fingers and 10 toes at the ultrasound … then the delivery … then you realize, like a lightning bolt: It never ends, this risk.

At any moment Grace and Whit could meet with danger, either through an accident or through development of illness. When thinking about this post last night, I thought initially: I have chosen not to live in fear of these risks. And then I thought about it, mentally hitting the delete key until the sentence was struck out. I don’t know that for me it’s a choice; it feels more like instinct, something gleaned by osmosis from my own confident, comfortable, capable mother. Thank you, Mum.

In a weird confluence of thoughts about risk, the Natasha Richardson story yesterday really got to me, activating that same sense of: Wow, there is danger everywhere, and yet we cannot really anticipate or prepare for it. How devastating that story is to me, for some reason – the difficulty of reconciling a small tumble on a bunny slope, from which she walked away, with the news that she is likely brain dead … how does that happen?

There is nothing I can say on the topic of how fast it goes that is more succinct and perfect than that old adage about parenting: The days are long but the years are short.

And then. Oh, how children cause the mighty and smug to fall! I remember being incredibly proud of myself when Grace, at her three-year old checkup, told Dr. Rick that broccoli was her favorite food (totally unprompted by me, who actually loathes broccoli). My good sleeper, my good eater, my generally sunny and cooperative child. Sure, she had terrible colic and screamed for the first three months of her life. But I barely remember those months and as I’ve averred before, it may well have been me who had the colic.

And then Whit. I think every parent has a particular dimension on which this come-to-Jesus occurs. For me, it is food. The child eats only hamburger, chicken (in nugget form), and noodles. He won’t even eat such childhood staples as applesauce and raisins. No. I hide a pea under a forkful of chicken nugget and he chews, thinks, and then reaches into his mouth to extract the pea. The child’s sense of taste is like a pregnant lady’s sense of smell.

Anyway, the point is: we think we know it all, and then we learn we know nothing. I am fairly sure I know less about this whole journey than I did 6.5 years ago – I know I am certain of much less. You accumulate stories and shed stereotypes. You accept exceptions and nuances and drop assumptions. This is growth, people, isn’t it? Doesn’t this sound like – shocker! – maturity? Adulthood? Wow. Who knew.

So Much Advice

What a huge industry parenting books are. I confess I’ve been largely disenchanted with the genre. I totally rejected all the how-to-make-your-baby sleep books: my God! 7:10, open curtains in baby’s room, 7:15, nurse, 7:30, sterilize pumping equipment, 7:35 diaper change, 7:40 pump, 7:50 put child on floor for tummy time, 8:15 start naptime music, close curtains, 8:25 time for nap … jesus. Non merci. I preferred something along the lines of: wake when the baby wakes up, nurse, hang out for a while, maybe walk to Starbucks for venti latte, do email while nursing, make grilled cheese for older child while nursing, insert wine IV at 5pm and keep right on nursing, etc. And for the nighttime sleep? I confess the Ferber in-and-out every 20 minutes method just seemed to make things worse for everyone. I preferred my pediatrician’s advice: at 7pm, bedtime. Tuck in. Close door. Open door at 7am. Good morning! Easier for my pea brain to understand, and apparently also for those of my children.

And now I find myself trying to read the next iteration of parenting books. The ones that want to coach you into a better parent. Playful Parenting was a recent gift, and yes, I think I could use a lot more playful in my parenting … but, disappointingly, the playfulness ends with the title. The book is dull and boring and … well, after 20 pages, I think I kind of get it! Am I being stupid? Does there really exist 200 pages of insight on playful parenting? Perhaps it is over my head. Raising Cain has been in my stack forever. That one I swear I’ll get to. And maybe for Title IX reasons I ought to also read Reviving Ophelia (though I have a few years until I need that one, I think). And I have heard great things about The Price of Privilege and So Sexy So Soon, both of whose central topics (the potentially corrosive impact of wealth and the terrifyingly early encroach of sexuality onto my six year old) I care about a lot. So maybe I’ll give those a whirl. But somehow all of the instructional parenting books I’ve read so far seem redundant, repetitive, and not a little holier-than-thou. Maybe I’m defensive about my own subpar parenting and not open to input, who knows.

Which brings me to the three books about parenting that I absolutely, passionately adore. They are The Blue Jay’s Dance by Louise Erdrich, Operating Instructions by Annie Lamott, and Waiting for Birdy by Catherine Newman. What these books have in common, in my opinion, is that they are not out to offer advice. They are really not about parenting, actually, but about life broadly defined. Each woman describes her experience in exquisite detail, telling stories both hilarious and tear-jerking. None of the three writers subscribe to the Deification of Motherhood school, which I deeply dislike, so that’s a plus. They are by turns dispassionate and deeply committed, funny and wise, unsentimental and tender. These are motherhood books I can embrace, and I think that’s because they are really about personhood, about the experience of living as an adult in this world.

Waiting for Birdy’s subtitle captures it best of all: “…frantic tedium, neurotic angst, and [the] wild magic.” Doesn’t motherhood – and, really, life itself – contain each of those three in every hour? If you haven’t read all three, I can’t recommend them highly enough.

Cracks inside

Look at how grown up she is.
Parenting is both an endless allelujia (credit to Newman and Hank for my favorite Christmas card message ever, ever, ever) and an endless goodbye. Every single day I wrestle with my fears about the passage of time, my anxieties about failing to make the most of this one life I have.
Grace informed me tonight that there are only 10 more days of Beginners. Somehow this just causes cracks inside, brings tears to my eyes. There is something about Beginners: my first child in her first year of “real school.” We are beginning. We are almost at the end of being beginners. This brings to mind, naturally, that marvelously bittersweet and neatly poetic quote by Churchill:

This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end.
But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.