Emergency Response

I always find it entertaining and a bit tragic when people say they think having a baby will save their relationship. It is the quickest way to a break up, in my humble and cynical opinion.

Nothing makes a person more certifiably insane than becoming a parent. You start doing shit you vowed never to do. You are cooing and giggling and clapping like a moron at the DMV. In line at the grocery store. Waiting for a pap smear. And you almost always have a baby with you when you’re doing it! Thanks to modern technology, you are photographing first boogers, first smiling sleeps and first poops and of course,  sharing all of it. You want the world to witness your obsessive parenting ways.

However there is no stress like that of a sick/injured/hurting child. Nothing. I can only speak from here on out as a mom. A mom who doesn’t have a fully intact maternal gene. My domestic tendencies never fully integrated. What did fully load is my mama bear DNA strand. That sucker is lodged, reinforced, and armored. BRING IT!!!

From the time my cubs were meatloaves in diapers I have always responded usually with calm first. Their wild chaotic baby screams short circuit my brain into calm. I don’t know why, I am still cold sweating under my stained and unlaundered clothes, but my brain insists on my own calm and breathing until the initial frantic screeching is done.

Logically nothing can be figured out while the flailing and eye-rolling hysteria is in full swing, so the calmer I am, the quicker the humanoid calms down. My husband, on the other hand, has always had the opposite reaction. To him, the sooner he finds out the reason, the quicker he can fix it. And you better f-ing tell him immediately or the insistence just grows and grows. He’s a fixer. I’m a wait and see-er. Sometimes this works well, but only after twelve years of wedded bliss, two marriage counselors and two children later – not in that order, obvi.

As our kids have gotten older, the emergencies have slowed down. Most of the heightened panic is over a stolen toy or remote control. This past weekend, however, we had a crash course in emergency response.

I was downstairs, and my husband was up. Both the kids were upstairs together getting ready to go swim at the Y. Suddenly there is a bone-chilling scream from my daughters innards that threatens to shatter all the glass in all the land. At first I thought, “Spider in her room .. ?” and the scream just continued. At this point I ran up the stairs and met with my husband between both kids who are staring at each other and screaming into each others’ faces. My daughter is cradling her hand, and my son has saucer-eyes and is beginning to panic.

My son has sensory issues and sudden loud noises are a trigger. This most definitely qualified. At this point my husband just wanted them separated so we could figure out what happened. I took the girl, he took the boy. I just hugged and shooshed my girl until she could breath again. Bit by bit we pieced together the scene.

They had raced into his room together, but my son was trying to kick his cootie-ridden sister out of his bedroom. She refused to go, so he started pushing. She wanted to leave on her own, so she grabbed onto the doorway, as a 7 year old does when she is trying to be an independent woman. My 11 year old was not having this crap, so he thought she was out and slammed the door to reinforce his discontent. Unfortunately my daughter’s hand was still gripping the door way. SLAM. SCREAM. Hysteria.

My son was horrified at what he had done. My daughter was obviously in pain and it was just a cacophony of sound. Once ice packs and kisses and deep breaths were had, the kids reunited to “I love you and i’m SO sorry!”s. My son even let his sister hug and kiss him. He returned the hugs without any threats.

He was to stay in his room home with Gramma while we took sis to the Urgent Care. Long story short, she has a hairline fracture in the tip of her pinky.

Parenting is not for the fainthearted. You need balls, heart, and ears of steel to get through a lot of it. This little saga has definitely made me feel like I have earned another stripe.