reliving

This was the scariest moment of motherhood for me so far. It took a couple seconds to register, and I think my first words were quiet, slow, and then crescendo-ing towards panic, “Help. Blood. Lots of it, from her mouth, and… her teeth are gone.” I’ve been through a lot in the last couple years. Most of it, not as the primary sufferer, which adds a strange twist to the tragedies I’ve lived through… and I would have to say this is the one that made me wretch, sweat and cry unlike ever before. But as a wife and mother, I have learned how to let someone else have the spotlight in the pain and struggle of life. I watch, I clean up spills and I put the band-aid on it. A couple days after watching my baby, who is too young to enunciate “Mommy, I knocked my teeth out,” we reached the anniversary of another marker that is now etched into my experience forever. Flag Day, three years ago, my husband’s best friend shot his brains out with a brand new antique rifle, in his garage, for his roommate to discover. I remember thinking on that day, three years ago, how could he leave that mess for her to find, and yet he did, and then I found out he whole story and now I know why. In Alan’s case, a young man with debilitating schizophrenia, he was leaving this world with less heartache this way, without watching the disease, unresponsive to the medication he had been taking, eat away at his psyche and leave him incapacitated and unable to understand the delusions he would eventually be living in. Duke then had to live through the accidental  death of his brother, who had been prescribed a dangerous level of a medication that, like with Alan’s, was not able to keep his disease at bay (this time, ADD was the culprit). Duke has been affected by each of these events; they’ve broken him down, and he has had to build up again.  But I have seen these events tear my husband limb from limb, shredded and ragged, and now he has started to put those pieces together again.  As I sat up, that whole night after Jane had drooled buckets of blood in a matter of hours, I had Duke sitting next to me; proof that the shredded and ragged feeling goes away. You can see the patches, the stitches, the repair and the duct tape all holding his wounds together. He wears them on his face, his eyes, his sleeves, his soul. I feared the feeling that I had a torn and jagged piece of flesh in my chest, on fire and burning and bleeding, and with him next to me I had the assurance that the bleeding and burning would smolder and cauterize and heal over. It would of course, be scarred, but everyone has scars.  I will make it, and although the pieces might not go back together exactly, but that doesn’t matter.

On Wednesday, the girls were in the shower. They had fun doing it, and I told them not to jump on the wet tile, thinking I could protect them like that.  So I soaped them and sprayed them clean, and let them play in the body sprays. I blew on the glass, inflating my cheeks, and then Jane fell. I wanted to catch her before she fell, but I couldn’t—she hit faster than I could think to catch her. I was helpless, not a thing I could do. And I was the one in charge, so I started to react. The next hour or so it was me and Duke, calling suggestions back and forth—“should we do this?’ Should we do that?” “What do we do next?” We had run out of good ideas when the dentist called us back—finally. He looked, she screamed. No teeth. He numbed it; he spoke to us, he phoned a friend and they came up with a game plan. The professionals were back in charge, and so I was relieved. The next day when I went back to tell him the results of the x-ray and conversation with the pediatric dentist, he said, “You look better, today, too.” So you could see on my face how poorly I was reacting to the trauma? Uggh, I thought I had done okay.

So seeing how well I had handled this, that which ended up being nothing more than a set of teeth jammed back into the gums (right where they came from), I wondered how I have lived through everything else. Wade, Chip, Alan, surgeries, C-sections and child-rearing. I was stitched almost all the way from my pee-pee from my woowah, to use the pre-school parlance. I carried my whole body weight in pregnancies, and my husband has gained and lost the same. We’ve buried friends, loved ones, bought and built a house, built a family, and grown up. And this gory incident sticks out in my head, probably because of the gore and violence, and the effect that has, but I think also for the metaphorical usage. I can handle blood, body parts, victims, tragedy. I can sit down and relive them, in my head, and on my paper, over and over and over for hours, days, years. Rough nerve endings rubbed and rubbed, but it makes me feel stronger in a sick, sadistic way. Of course, I still feel the ragged edges being rubbed, the same as I did that first night. I know that if I can still hold on to my head, “when all of those about me, are losing theirs, and blaming it on [me]”, then I can live through this pain, the deaths, the lives and the wounds. The pain is still there, but the bleeding has stopped. I still wish I could have Alan, Wade, back; I pray there is a cure for cancer before a doctor ever tells me it is me or the girls or Duke. But I can stand in a house that is burning down around me and by instinct grab what needs to be saved and decide what must be relegated to memory. And that is a powerful instinct.