Youngest fell at the pool on Tuesday and scraped her leg in a couple of places. I didn’t see her fall, just heard the sound and looked up to see her splayed on the ground with that familiar shocked/wounded/should-I-cry look on her face. As we went in search of Band-aids, I asked her if she had been running. She hesitated before answering. “I was trying to remember not to run.”
My husband and I have spent a fair amount of time through the years explaining the difference between accidentally and on purpose. Also how you still have to apologize even if it was an accident, and how even after all that, being sorry cannot erase consequences. Sometimes life just hurts. And because of all the random ways we or the people we love can get hurt, we make rules to try to avoid the pain. Rules like, “Don’t run at the pool,” because even though the pool and friends and playing and running are inextricably linked with fun, all the grownups can imagine (or have seen) heads bouncing off concrete and a moment that can’t be un-lived, and we would give almost anything to avoid that scene. Still, when I hear myself telling my kids not to run at the pool, or not to run too fast down that hill because they could lose control and fall, I wonder what I've turned into, because I know that the very best moment is precisely the one right before you lose control and fall—that that is sometimes the whole point of running down the hill.
I haven’t quite put my finger on it, but there is something poetic about the fact that the bowl of watermelon featured in Monday morning’s 10 Bits of Magic came to such a dramatic end Monday afternoon. I have this (apparently bad) habit of thinking that if I can get the door (or drawer, or suitcase zipper) shut on something, that means it fits. And I was able to cram the bowl of watermelon onto the top shelf of the refrigerator and get the door shut with very little trouble, so I didn’t give it another thought. When I opened the door two minutes later to put something else away I was completely surprised that the bowl, released from the pressure put on it by the butter compartment, flew out and shattered on the floor.
I have broken my share of bowls, plates, glasses, baking dishes, pitchers, coffee decanters, and jars since I started pretending to be an adult. I’m almost used to the mess, but getting hurt isn’t usually part of the equation. This time was different. My husband, who is rather proud of his relaxed stance towards injury and illness, took one look at the gash on my leg and made me lie down on the floor right where I was. It was obvious I needed stitches. Youngest came into the kitchen at this point and started crying. “Mommy’s okay, honey. I’m fine,” I assured her, lying on my back surrounded by broken glass and watermelon chunks and thinking there was quite a bit of blood on the floor considering there had only been a second or two between when I got cut and when I started applying pressure. “But the bowl is broken!!” she wailed. Maybe I was being a little too calm.
I did get stitches—seven—and I’m sure the scar will be just lovely. It’s one more way that I bear my life outwardly, and it makes me wish I had felt more beautiful when I was seventeen.
I have mixed feelings sometimes about my 10 Bits of Magic posts. They are important to me because I want to keep seeing what is good—it is an excellent antidote to the fears and anxieties and general negativity that want to overwhelm me at times. But I’m aware of the danger that they will sound trite or sentimental. I worry about somebody reading them and thinking I am oblivious to the pain and struggle that they have in their lives, or that I have mastered those things in my own life. The truth is that the more it hurts, the more I feel the need to count the good and beautiful. Keeping my eyes open seems to be getting more and more important.
I can't stop thinking about Youngest’s response to my question about running. There are a lot of things I’m trying to remember, myself. I cannot count how many times I've tried to stuff things where they don’t fit since Monday. My guess is that I will never quite have learned my lesson. And why, exactly, do I expect to be so wise? It strikes me that the whole world is overflowing with any number of things, danger and beauty and pain and grace included. May I never get used to it. After all, nothing fits quite the way I think it will in the first place.
