Let Monday Come

The first thing you need to know is that she's fine. Truly. Me, not so much.

I was carrying Josephine up the stairs this evening and my slipper caught. I pitched forward and she pitched right out of my arms and landed face first on the hardwood step in front of me. When her scream--which really sounded more like alarm than pain--alerted Paul, who was just steps away in the bathroom giving Rudy his bath, he came running out to find me rushing past him into her room to get a look at her. He asked me what happened, and I said, "I dropped her! I dropped her!" Of course he wanted specifics immediately and all I could do was telegraph my account between sobs. He told me later, after we had all calmed down a bit, that he thought at first that I meant I had dropped her all the way down the stairs. A parent's mind goes to the worst case scenario. I can certainly attest to this.

No, not that far--only a six inch drop from my arms to the step--but far enough to make that horrendous sound and to send my mind careening into guilt and regret and what-ifs. Far enough to fill me with real terror. I dropped my baby. Just writing those words makes me sick all over again.

But she really is fine. No bruising, no cuts or abrasions. She cried for a little while and then calmed. I was even able to coax some giggles out of her! By the time I put her down for the night it was like nothing had happened. But I am still shaking. It has been a hard weekend anyway. She is going through another cry-all-day patch, obviously in pain, unhappy, and we are waiting for her medicine and my new diet to take effect. I had already been feeling like a terrible mother. A mother is supposed to be able to comfort her child.

And then this, like punctuation at the end of a grim sentence. As I put her brother to bed a little later on, I held my hand over his chest while we sang train songs. I could feel the bones of his torso, and feel the thrum of his pulse, his little boy heat. All body. And what normally seems so incredibly solid to me felt thin and wispy and breakable. The reality, of course, is that he is solid, and he is breakable. This, we are finding, is one of the potentially paralyzing truths of parenthood, and one that we have to acknowledge, stare down and then push aside on our way out of the house every morning. We don't get a choice in the matter.

I suppose if there is anything light in all of this, it's that it continues a tradition of sorts. My grandmother, the Josephine for whom our daughter is named, dropped me down a flight of stairs when I was a baby. My Gram has told me that story over and over again, and it's not the narrative details--it was winter; I was bundled up in the carriage; they were stone steps; she only stepped away for a moment to get the mail--that I hung on, but the fact that she was so terrified (because she loved me so much) and that I was unharmed. Maybe it's one more example of my somewhat dark sense of humor, but I always loved to hear that story and imagine my infant self bouncing resiliently down those cold stone steps, landing without a scratch, perhaps even sleeping through the whole thing!

That's what I want for my kids--resilience.

What I want for myself is to never, ever hurt one of them again.

And yes, I know that is asking a lot.