Time Out

(not just for you, for me too.)

Teaching a child who came on the scene ripping out teeth and chewing off bits of tongue to one - stop doing these things and two - explaining the why of it all, is a task made for giants. Or for the angels. Or the damned. I can’t assign which but I do know this - it remains, entirely, too sacred for a human.

I continue to plead to you, to no one, aloud at any hour, through the seasons and years… How do I teach pain? I’ve stopped the self inflicted torture of trying to uncover answers to why it happened. They dance in a realm not made for me. Grief really has its way with the living.

I am not a logical thinker. My husband and therapist will attest that I feel first and react in step. Kick ball changing through a once breezy life. My lizard brain functions at the highest of levels. Emoting is my finest talent. Regulating falls short, or more like, down a cliff that has no pit.

Like so many women before me, this didn’t register as issue until I became a mother. Because as every child psychologist tells us via books and podcasts and on social media - you have to regulate yourself before you can be of any assistance to that baby on your hip. You’re the calm rock, the port, the lighthouse. You are the anchor. The sun. Gravity itself.

This task, the weight of it, feels impossible. I am slowly being drowned by the inaccessibility. I do not know, cannot access, am very surely not capable of being calm or finding my thinking brain or being grounded when…

Well, have you seen a child try a backflip on a trampoline but at the last minute doesn’t commit and lands impossibly on their head, their neck seemingly gone? My “when” is to picture that, but watch it happen on concrete. And you don’t know the times it will happen or what will trigger it. You just know that it will come, as it always does, swift and violent. Your child’s face stunned every time, even though they did it to themselves, and without the impression of pain, the lesson rendered useless, the action repeatable, a cycle critically unbroken.

I scream and embrace my son every time, often shouting something so upsetting it produce tears from me and in him. A tsunami of emotion, laid at the feet of my four year old. In those seconds where the physical is happening, my mind turns white.

It requires all of my brain to work through these scenarios while they play out in real time - check for blood. Check his eyes. Is this brain damage, is this the one that finally alters my son forever? Is there swelling? If not, does that mean there’s internal bleeding? Watch for drowsiness tonight, and vomiting, which means staring at the monitor, zoomed in to the most pixelated image to check for breathing and a semblance of consciousness until the sun comes up. And even then, am I missing something - I’m not a doctor, what am I missing? The thoughts devour my body until I am only bone and nerves. And then enters anger, rooted in all that is holy from the depths of my constant fear. Is he going to die?

In tow comes the teaching where I explain to him why he cannot jump into the sky and fall directly on his head, or dive off our parked boat onto the concrete, or pull his hangnails off, or land directly on his kneecaps, or slam his head into walls, or do any of the other billion things I never thought of before and in step be calm, the anchor and the refuge while my brain is howling to burn everything in sight to fucking dust. This entire scenario plays out in 15-20 seconds and truly, it makes me feel insane. How can one person think and feel and do so much in the course of fifteen seconds?

The fear triggers the rage and the rage turns into a howling disappointment in myself and the cycle continues in a brutal, unforgiving fashion. After the explaining, apologies, the trying-to-get-it-through-a-four-year-olds-brain-maybe-this-time-will-be-the-final-time-please-but-probably-fucking-not, there is a comedown, thankfully. It’s accessed by magical thinking friends, an understanding partner, and a devoted therapist.

*If you know a parent of a child with a rare disease, medical complexity, cancer, disability, disorder and so forth, I can tell you first hand that the community that rallies around them is the very thing, sometimes the only thing, that saves them. If you doubt your purpose in their life, I beg you to not.

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There is always a home I try to tread back to. My touch-grass-box-breathing-cold-water-to-the-face moment, if you will.

This home is where I can reach my child. Where the simple power in me shows itself as a soft swirl of lemony light. Through the murk, I guide our destined waters. The wonder in all this, of this deep and troubling and magical love for a rare child, is that it’s a privilege. One that was made for the gods, but was somehow, curiously, or perhaps purposely, bestowed to me.