I'm sitting here next to my littlest man who is sound asleep, listening to him breathe in and out steadily. Today in a freak accident he managed to get clocked on the head very hard by a sizable tree branch (more like a small stump) that his older brother had for some reason placed at the top of the gate that leads into our back yard. Apparently the little guy went to push the gate open, the stump-like branch fell on his head, and I was alerted to the problem by a storm of tears and a rather large bump.
In my heart I am sure that my younger son is going to be okay and even if I simply use logic without intuition I can see that his pupils are not dilated inappropriately, he has not been vomiting or nauseated and he has not complained of any headaches. That said, he did tell me before going to sleep tonight that he felt dizzy as though the ceiling were spinning in circles... so I'm definitely keeping a close eye on him.
This is the hardest part of being a parent; the complete and utter helplessness I feel to protect my children from all possible danger and to mend or heal them when they are ill or broken. I would do anything it took to keep my babies safe al day long but the reality is, even when I turn my back for mere seconds things can and do happen.
Loving this particular child has been a contant lesson in learning how to let go. I vividly remember being 19 weeks pregnant with him when my blood pressure spiked intensely and my doctor began to talk with me about possible pre-eclampsia and bed rest. I wept for about two days, praying and trying to talk with the little soul still gently taking root in my body. I knew he was not yet big enough to survive outside of the womb, and I wasn't sure what could actually be done to keep him growing healthily if my body was rebelling its biological role.
Then one sunny afternoon I lay down on the red brick patio in our (then) back yard near our orange tree and I looked up at the bright blue sky radiating through its branches... noticing each individual orange silhouetted by the Sun. Some were new-ish and green, others were ripe and plump, a few were beginning to rot on their vines and several had fallen to the ground below and were beginning to slowly dessicate. I meditated on those oranges and I realized that all of them were, in their own ways, perfect. It wasn't up to me to judge their merit based upon whether they'd ripened on cue. My job was to appreciate their unique beauty and love them for what they were.
Those thoughts helped me to calm down significantly. I realized that I couldn't value my unborn son's life based on how long it lasted... but needed rather to trust deeply in whatever divine force had brought him to me, believing that however things transpired from there, everything was happening as it should. My son was a unique, lovable soul and I needed to appreciate what he had already brought me - rather than wringing my hands over everything I had no control over.
Our little bean must have had some deeper purpose beyond gestation because everything seemed to calm down after that. The high blood pressure resolved after I stopped work a few months early and rested all of the time. He was born two weeks early as a large and healthy baby in what later proved to be my easiest and smoothest delivery.
Still, from the get-go he has been a child prone to accident and illness. He suffered terribly from colic for the first several months of his life, writhing in agony and screaming his little lungs out night after night. He has been on many different courses of antibiotics in his short life for a variety of infections. His thumb was very nearly sliced off while I was in the hospital giving birth to his little sister... that took a cast and several stitches to remedy. He has suffered from food allergies and tummy troubles, countless ear infections and several rashes. He has always been a tiny, elf-like little guy and at one time we were told that he was in the 7th percentile for height for children his age... meaning that 93% of children his age were bigger than he.
This is the child that suffers from nightmares and fear of the dark; he is prone to projectile vomiting and "owies". He has visited the ER and the doctor's office more than my other two children combined. I can't count the number of times I have stopped next to his open door at night just to listen to make sure that he is still breathing. Tonight has been one of those nights - just listening to make sure that he's still with us.
Having children is such a strange thing. For years I imagined how great it would be to finally have a family of my own: I thought about all of the books I would read to my children, the travels and adventures we would share, the sweet things I could do for them and the love I could lavish upon them. Not once in all of that time did I seriously contemplate the fact that my children might get sick, that bad things could happen to them in a split second, that I could ever lose them.
Now my babies are here and since the weight of responsibility first settled upon my shoulders I haven't been able to get away from the uncomfortable realization that my husband and I are the main things standing between our children and potential disaster. "It's all up to us!" I realized on the day they first discharged us home from the hospital with our real live baby, and I haven't really slept with both eyes closed since that night.
Still, a life lived in fear is no life at all. I don't know what destiny has planned for my three little imps but I *do* know that it would be a genuine tragedy for me to overprotect my children and deny them the chance to experience real life with all of its exciting discoveries, wonders and heartbreaks. Falling off your bike while learning to ride is surely preferable to sitting alone in the house watching other children cruise down the street because your parents are too scared to let you try.
When I was in elementary school I had a friend whose parents were so concerned about losing her to a car accident, she was not allowed to drive in any vehicle but their own... or to spend the night away from home. She missed out on field trips, birthday parties, slumber parties and other fun opportunities ~ anything her folks weren't able to drive to or participate in.
Worse, she suffered the embarrassment of having to tell her friends and teachers over and over throughout the years that she would not be able to do x-y-z with them because of her family's rules. Her parents tried to make up for this by giving her every toy and luxury, attempting to make their own home a mecca of fun that no child would wish to leave.
I haven't seen this same friend in twenty years but when last I knew her in high school, she was rebelling hard core from her parents and acting out in an extreme way. My mother ran into her mother at the grocery store recently and was saddened to learn that her parents no longer have any contact with her at all. "She has become a terrible human being," her mother confided sadly. "She has stolen from us, lied to us, and generally made awful decisions for so long that we had to let her go."
I cannot imagine a worse irony. In holding on too tight to their adored child, they managed to set themselves up for a lifetime in which she survived her youth physically unscathed but emerged from childhood emotionally scarred to the point where she could no longer maintain a healthy or even dysfunctional relationship with her family of origin.
I myself had a very overprotective dad (although not to that extreme degree) and I am trying hard not to fall into the genetic or memory-based trap of becoming just like him. At some point as a parent you just have to take a deep breath and accept that your children have their own life paths to follow... and that your job is to nurture and guide them without stifling their sense of adventure. There is no point in second guessing every choice. "If only I hadn't let him play in the yard yesterday... he might never have gotten hit by that branch!" That kind of logic just doesn't work at all.
All this to say that even though my son got hit in the head today by a heavy piece of wood AND got his first bloody bike scrape, he'll be out there in the back yard playing hard again tomorrow with my blessing. And a helmet :-)
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