My daughter, my mother, my dog, and I walk together along the moss-rich gravel road. My son and his friend trail us, deep in conversation. Suddenly that blood-chilling cry echoes out, a sound every mother knows. A scream of pain tore from the depths. I turn and my son is running towards me at speed. “Mama, Mama I’m hurt! I fell! I tripped! My hand is hurt!” Nels is eight now, but his cries have the same element of rawness I recognize from my first days of knowing him.
I don’t run to him or even move; I wait and collect myself. It never doesn’t hurt, witnessing the pain of one’s child. I wait in this cold sunshine, next to my own mother, and my son runs for me. I hold Nels close when he arrives into my arms. I inspect his hand; it is raw and bruised, and looks as if it has encountered a nasty sharp rock. I brush off his hand carefully, and I tell him that his hand saved his face from being cut. I wipe his tears and kiss him.
Instantly, he has stopped crying. Only a moment before he was wailing aloud. Now he’s thinking about his hand and his scuffed knee and how they protected him. He calms and his hazel eyes are deep in the storm of thought. He is now calm because he ran to me in distress, trusting I would save him, and I saved him.
This sort of thing happens everywhere, everyday, in a myriad of ways, with children and their mothers all over the world. Why do we not acknowledge what a miracle it is, and how deeply we needed, or still need, this mother?
you are so right on. miraculous, and still needed by me. i have been suspecting that this very thing is the reason grief lives so easily inside my breast at the moment. not sure how to proceed exactly, yet, with that knowledge/suspicion, but there it is.
i notice and appreciate your ability to notice and appreciate and relate the seemingly small things that happen in a day. also, i find your explanation that his hand saved his face from getting hurt to be exactly the thing and am glad to have read it, thereby increasing the chances that i may be of similar help when the time comes.
a self-absorbed comment, for my self-absorbed day. it is not always this way, but today it is. so it goes, as mr vonnegut was so fond of writing. i acknowledge and strive for a more complete view with each passing hour.
in other news, that monster foot over there on the right sidebar is fucking great.