A mother's hug

My friend Jeanne has a blog I read all the time, partly because she’s very smart and makes me think and partly because she exposes me to literature—especially poetry—I’d never encounter otherwise.

Her post on Friday got me to thinking about how and when we realize we can’t fix things for our children. I know when I learned this lesson and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since reading her post on Friday.

My first husband was still in the Army, and we had one son, Jordan. We were stationed in Bad Kreuznach, Germany and lived in post housing. Our housing was actually very nice, far nicer than military housing in the States, and we had large windows in every room. These windows didn’t have screens and you could open them either from the top so that they formed a V shape at the bottom, or you could flip a handle and open them like a door. We had a cat so we always opened our windows from the top. Our babysitter didn’t have pets so she opened them from the side.

I was at work when I got the call that Jordan, 18 months old at the time, had fallen from the window and landed on the sidewalk below. He fell what would be about three stories here in the States, landed in a kneeling position and then on his front side with his head turned to the right. The week before, a child had fallen from a first floor balcony and died so I knew this was really bad news. Someone from work drove me to the hospital, and rather than wait for the elevator when I got there, I ran up all four flights of stairs. All I could think was that if I held him, he would be OK, that he wouldn’t die. That thought just rabbited through my head over and over and over.

But when I got to the x-ray room, his sitter was holding him. Looking at her I knew immediately that she was utterly guilt-stricken and she didn’t want to let go of him. So I didn’t snatch him out of her arms, even though I really wanted to. In fact I didn't get to hold him until after we'd taken a two hour ambulance drive to Landstuhl, which was the closest American hospital.

He fractured his skull on the right side of his head, just above his ear. And he had horrific bruises on his shins from landing on them with all his weight—in fact you could see the outlines of his shin bones in the bruises. But he didn’t die, even though I hadn't gotten to hold him.

Growing up, he had a fair number of health issues, completely unrelated to that fall. But I never again had that sense of power or believed I had the ability to fix anything by holding him as I did that day.

I didn’t feel it when he had each of his four sets of ear tubes inserted, or his tonsils and adenoids out, or either time he had pneumonia, or when he developed an allergic reaction to penicillin or even when he got type 1 diabetes. I hugged and comforted him anyway because even though I knew a mother's hug wouldn't fix him, sometimes I needed to give the hug anyway because it helped fix me.