Last night, Nancy's three kids came over to watch Pinocchio with my girls. I popped popcorn and passed out organic lollipops and they had a wonderful time. Nancy and I quartered ourselves in the warm kitchen. The scents of simmering apples and Thai chicken lingered in the air. We sipped vanilla lattes while she stitched up napkins, I put away applesauce and folded laundry.
Pinocchio finally ended and Elspeth, hopped up on cane sugar, hopped straight into the sharp edge of my flip top desk, which I had just popped down to write Nancy a check for the squash she brought me from Farmer's Market. Elspeth bounced off the desk into a heap on the floor and after a second began wailing.
Well, let me tell you: I am a no-worry, hands-off kind of parent, and a good thing, too, because Elspeth is a Class A bruiser. I can't count the times she has bashed into things, and she survives all the hair-raising encounters, including the time she fell down my parent's stairwell with an open pair of adult scissors in hand. But last night, Elspeth's crash worried me, because of the sharpness of the desk edge and the fact that I believed it had poked the soft part of her temple by her eye. She evidenced no dizziness or disorientation and I told myself, after she fell soundly and quickly to sleep, and after I read Dr. Sears online, that I probably had nothing to worry over.
But the stillness of the house entered my own chest, and I was a bit afraid. Every parent knows this echoing sort of stillness inside, when you are suddenly and unexpectedly worried over a child. When Merry was born, anxieties were new and constant enough, but with Elspeth I have barely pursued the tense, holding-my-breath and "listening-for-breathing" periods at night.
I believe my own fatigue and Martin's absence (berating his rhyming poetry students) contributed to my anxiety. A startling sense of all that normally seems permanent, to be taken for granted, assumed, suddenly was shaken by a simple but rough bump on the head. My sense of calm, of dailiness, felt shaken.
But of course there was nothing to worry over. After checking on the girls, I fell into a deep sleep and this morning Elspeth was cheerful and engaged in just as much mischief as ever, tipping over vases and what-not. If anything, small encounters with worry--small, and hopefully not unreasonable or wallowing--do make me treasure my children all the more. My Nana was a terrible worrier and her shadow often lingers in my mind as a warning NOT to worry, to trust, to relax and let go. But how hard is that? For every day there is a letting go, a release of what I sense I must hold onto more tightly every minute. But the grasping and the squeezing is a mistake, and makes me smaller inside. I hope for safety and a simple life full of beauty and goodness, but whatever comes to me is a gift, and whatever is taken from me was not mine to begin with.
But when the house is empty and my child has been hurt, this wisdom becomes hard to find through clouds of fear. Peace to you, my child, peace that your mother often struggles to receive. Can parents give gifts they often need most themselves? I do hope so; otherwise, I will have very little to give my girls.
