Sunday night, after being tucked into bed, my eight-year-old son came running out into the living room, crying because he felt sick to his stomach. No fever; he was vague, contradictory on his symptoms -- they seemed to change every few minutes, apparently trying to find which were the right answers that might make me as distressed about this as he was. We are fortunate in that he is healthy and rarely ill, so as a result, he reacts with fear and dread all out of proportion to the actual possible ailment.
I calmed him down, gave him a child's antacid, and a few minutes later, held him as he threw up into a towel. He felt better. Apparently it was something he ate. (Likely culprit, a Kid Cuisine frozen dinner that, unlike wine, did not age well.)
Last night, more drama. Once again, after being tucked in, he came out running and crying again, this time with blood on his hand.
This time, his nose was bleeding. A child who is crying in fear while bleeding from the nose tends to spray blood much like one of those fast, spurting sprinklers spray water. Fun, eh?
Again, I calmed him down, got the bleeding stopped, and he returned to bed, a little apprehensive about some distant thunder. But he fell back to sleep, and the loud cracks of a thunderstorm missed our neighborhood. He doesn't cry very often (really he doesn't), but he is still young enough to be scared of thunder or panicky at the sight of his own blood.
He is still young enough to come running to his mom for help and comfort. He is still physically small enough for me to hold, awkwardly, on my lap sometimes, small enough to cuddle close to me. I know he won't always need me this much -- less every year, in fact, and that's as it should be.
Now, what I have to say is not special or unusual. I'm no hero. I have no special knowledge. And I should know better than to wade into this topic on DKos. But, never one to ignore the latest trends, here's my pretentious I AM diary. Because I am a mother.
Now, I've always been somewhat of a sentimental sap, I guess. But something happened after I had my son, under less than Hallmark circumstances. Shawn was born two months premature, and remained in the hospital until he was four months old. Under financial pressures and with a less-than-sympathetic boss, I had to go back to my job a week after he came home from the hospital, with monitors and oxygen tanks, and my husband had to quit his part-time job to take care of him.
You could say it was the stress, or post-partum depression, and I wouldn't disagree, but after Shawn was born, the world became paper-thin and fragile to me. A beer commercial could make me cry. A greeting card, a photo in a magazine, a tv news report -- all these things could set me off. Yeah, I know: Hormones. Yet suddenly life became rarefied, frail, so vulnerable. My husband and I felt simultaneously glowing with blessings, and stricken with fears and expectations we hardly thought we could fulfill. A newspaper story about a sick baby, a hurt child, a lost puppy even, seemed just too cruel to contemplate. Even the so-called happy stories seemed poignant and precarious.
Little by little, daily life stumbled and stammered into new routines, and that raw feeling I had of anxiety and imminent disaster thinned out, passed by. My son is healthy. Quirky, challenging sometimes, but gradually our confidence and comfort level as parents grew.
You know, people always say parenthood "changes everything," but you notice they don't always say whether those changes are for the good or bad. (Aside from being tired all the time, I would say good. Or maybe that's just middle age.)
But once you taste that sense of being open, gaping, exposed to the dangers of the world, it never quite goes away completely. Oh, sure, most times, you can blast high school songs on iTunes, or get lost in Project Runway or a into a pirate movie with Johnny Depp. We're ridiculously lucky in this country, so sheltered that escapism, indulgence and denial are our three squares. But sooner or later, if you're awake at all, you're going to "go there." A cable news video, a newpaper photo, a painful anecdote makes you remember. The imagination cranks into service. "What if?" you ask. (Often wide awake in the middle of the night, staring at ceiling.)
It's not really about Lebanon or Israel. I felt this way during the bombing of Afghanistan and Iraq. I imagined what it might feel like to hold my son, tighter and tighter against me, while bombs go off around us, like dangerous thunder, shaking the earth, shattering glass. I think about how scared my boy would be, and how I couldn't let him know how scared I was. It's what I see in news photos of mothers with eyes weary and slightly glazed, as they hold their terrified children, trying to be brave but terrified themselves.
I wonder what it would be to crouch in an Israeli bomb shelter, watching tv reports of bombing above us. I think about mothers without power or clean water in Gaza. I imagine fleeing a war zone over bridges out, roads clogged with others trying to escape, and bombs falling among us. It's not always about war. Sometimes I think about those images from Katrina, or the tsunami parents, searching for missing children, walking through bodies laid out for identification and dreading what they might find,
I think about mothers in Darfur, weighing whether to risk rape to get water at the well, or to risk a son getting murdered or kidnapped on the way.
I think about those teachers who held little children in that Russian school, wired for bombs by Chechnyan terrorists. How would I calm a child who is hungry and thirsty, afraid to move, who has to soil his clothes because no one is allowed to go to the bathroom? I wonder how suffocating my grip would become, squeezing my son against me, trying to calm him, knowing we probably wouldn't get out of there alive.
After 9/11, I read about the father who put his child on a plane for a National Geographic field trip and said goodbye. That plane crashed into the Pentagon. I think about the children on those all those planes, wondering if anyone held them and tried to calm their fears in the last frantic moments.
Images of harm to myself or my husband don't carry the same sharpness, the same sick feeling in my gut and in my heart. I know, instinctively, what it would be like to put my body in between my child and any harm, any hurt, any terror.
And, I wonder what it would be like to see my son go off to fight a war, a war like Bush's wars, or any war, knowing he could return scarred, broken, or not at all. A grown son, you can't tackle and hold back, or place your body in between him and his "mission." You'd just have to let him go....
By now you must think I am a raging nervous wreck. I'm not (at least not today). But what I feel can't be that uncommon. I know others feel this way. You don't have to be a parent. I know many people who aren't parents with sensibilities like this, deep in their bones. I also realize that some parents may not feel these things so viscerally. (If more did, would we have so many chickenhawks in Washington?)
What I have to say is not special, it's not that rare, and it doesn't make me an expert on anything except, well, love. And loss. And all that makes life precious.
I wish, god how I wish we could build a world where war was obscene, and simply unthinkable. All I know is what I feel, and what I am.
I am a mother.