Plato and the Broken Arm

(Now with extra added guilt. I've come back a couple of times during nap time to revise this post and keep finding new ways to kick myself.)

Sometimes in life our ideas of ourselves run smack into the wall of how we actually react when faced with problems and decisions.

Basically-- and I don't think I'm alone in this-- there lives inside my head a sort of Platonic ideal of Cary Milkweed, who has met with ease and grace every challenge set before her. I read the story of the Good Samaritan and imagine what my cloak would have looked like as I helped the stranger all others passed by; I watch cupcake-making videos on Youtube and see myself cranking out tiny spun-sugar replicas of the Great Barrier Reef for Eva's birthday; I observe Kate Middleton at an Olympic volleyball game and I'm certain that my nose, when I'm Duchess of Cambridge, will never be that shiny in public.


Pip pip cheerio. You are never allowed to sweat.

So you see there's a great deal of judgement and downright insanity in this parallel fantasy life I lead. Though sometimes I manage to pass over the boxed mix to do my own baking, in reality the hard things never go as I imagine they will.

Yesterday Silas broke his arm on the playground. It all happened like this: While I had my back turned for a split second to retrieve nutritious, organic snacks, Silas (no doubt imitating Tarzan--our bedtime reading of late concerns that portion of the Burroughs oeuvre, which we reverse translate from Korean) swung out on a vine and was hit by a passing condor, which knocked him twelve feet from the sky and onto a picnic table. Naturally he landed upright and unharmed, but some other savage child, seething with jealousy, pushed him to his doom and a complete fracture of the left side radius and ulna.


Mere seconds before the fated collision.

What actually happened: He was sitting two feet in front of me on a bench drinking water. While chatting with my friends, I watched him start to slide off the bench and noted a four-inch gap between his sandals and the ground. I decided he would make it, kept talking, and he pitched forward onto his arm. Also, he had just been eating cheesy crackers and drinking from a water bottle that may have been sitting in the diaper bag for two or three days.

At this point the narrative splits again, and I swiftly recognize the problem, gather his concerned and instantly available sister into one arm and heft him in the other, and drive rapidly to the closest doctor's office while reciting the bones of the arm out loud, but in soothing ancient Tibetan. Upon arrival, I produce both hand sanitizer and quesadillas from the recesses of the diaper bag, pass them out to all the hungry children, and convince the startled secretary to let me pinch some morphine which I administer to my son intravenously. We are rapidly seen and treated and return home to a serene bedtime routine.

What actually happenes: Hearing Silas cry and watching his face turn a strange shade of gray, I begin to turn him around and around in my arms, examining body parts until his left arm floats into view and triggers something in my reptile brain. I shriek "IT'S NOT RIGHT! IT'S NOT RIGHT! HIS ARM'S NOT RIGHT!" over and over while the other mothers try to get me to stop hopping up and down so they can have a look. My nurse friend checks him out and observes the same limpness and weird curve above his wrist that I can see, and I begin babbling "WHERE'S MY PHONE? WHERE'S MY PHONE?" while I pack the diaper bag and completely forget about my daughter, who's physically carried over to me by another mom. I shake and move like I'm in quicksand. Snacks are shoved in my bag and another mom slowly repeats the directions to the Ortho Urgent Care over and over until I can say them back. I buckle the kids in and drive way too fast and, once confronted with paperwork, have it returned to me three times by the secretary for things I forgot to fill out. Silas starts to moan and my blood runs cold, but it's difficult to comfort him because Eva is upset that I won't put him down to play Mr. Potato Head. I snap at her fiendishly and she dissolves into tears, and so on, etc, ad infinitum.

In the end, he received excellent care and slept the entire night with little discomfort and is even now pushing trucks one-handed in the other room, but the way here from there? It didn't go the way I might have imagined it would. One thing that stands out is that I didn't pray at all-- there was never one single second when I asked God for help or comfort or guidance. That may be how it goes when you're in the soup-- you're just thinking about the temperature of the broth and not The Hands That Made It. Still, for all the piety I'm trying to engender in myself, Jesus never even crossed my mind. What does that say about me?

Rationally, I know it's one of the side benefits of being a child of God that he's with me even when I'm not with him. The whole time I was sweating and shaking and making a complete ass of myself trying to leave the playground without further hurting my son I was surrounded by God's love and protection. I know it even if I didn't feel it, because I think that's just the way it is. God never neglects to show up. I neglected to involve him in the whole thing, though. Guilt.

Really the whole experience was just crunked-up nonsense projected on a cave wall, and I'll probably never stop reliving how it should have gone down. I know I can't stop thinking that it wouldn't have killed me to just take two steps forward and help him down off the bench. Why didn't I just take his hand? I followed him all around for an hour as he trailed after the big kids and climbed on equipment made for children three times his size, so when he sat down on a bench to eat some crackers I let my guard down. I put him on the periphery and put a conversation about timeshares or whatever it was we were discussing in the fore, and he broke his arm in two places. Guilt, guilt, GUILT.

Seriously.

I bet this shit would never happen to Kate Middleton.