There’s nothing quite like an accident to snap life into focus.
For the past 6 months, as I’ve focused on my writing career, I’ve barely had time to shop for groceries. This isn’t a complaint. Although we’ve run out of milk twice, I’m happily, ecstatically, writing and have met a slew of wonderful writer friends whose works I relish as I read them in print and online. But there’s a trade-off to everything and in the short-term my trade off is leisure time. Last fall, when my writing class instructor, Meagan Francis, asked all of us, “What are you willing to give up to find time to write?” we all laughingly agreed that we were willing to give up cleaning the house. But her question was important because it helped us understand that you really can’t do it all. When you add a writing career, something else stops. So if you notice that we run out of bread or that I’m not caught up on the latest TV show or even that I’m not running on Wednesday mornings, it’s okay. I’m figuring out how to make this all work, and in the long run, we’ll have bread. Really, we will.
All this to say that when my 9-year-old took a head-first 5-foot fall into a large boulder at a park last weekend, I suddenly had time. I had time to calm him down. To re-assure my other kids that he’d be fine. I had 6 hours to spend in the ER, watching them do x-rays on my little boy’s jaw, wrist and elbow. Watching him lay on a gurney as he slid in and out of the cat scan machine. I had lots of time to text my husband, away on business, with updates and to wait for the doctors to re-assure us that our boy would be fine.
And he is fine. He’s banged up but good, has a broken (permanent!) front tooth, and might not be climbing over any railings in the near future, but a little Dermabond here, and a little Bacitracin there, and he’ll be as good as new. Okay, he’ll need a little dental work, too, but these are very minor things. Very. Minor. Things.
He doesn’t remember falling. In the moments after the accident, my poor little guy kept looking at the blood, which seemed to be everywhere, and asking, “What happened?” After we explained, he asked again, and, a few minutes later, again. None of his potential injuries was as scary as that—as not knowing how hard he hit his head and what that meant.
In the hours that followed, I re-scheduling carpools, lunch and cancelled appointments for the following day. Because of the concussion, he wasn’t allowed to read or watch TV for 24 hours. So I read to him. We went to the car wash. We visited the dentist. I bought him a milkshake. We did nothing but spend the day together. As I look back on that day the edges are blurry but my son, in the center, is in sharp focus. He’s fine.
And just like that I realized that it doesn’t matter if we run out of milk or bread. It only matters that we use the time we have to love and learn and grow. My kids know that I like to play games with them and take them to new places. But do they know why? Do they know that every hour we spent playing Rumikube together is an hour that I get to know them more? That every trip we take helps me to see them grow in so many ways—in how they interact with each other and with strangers? In how they incorporate the knowledge of this new place into their very being? Do they understand that I only get them with me for a short time, and that’s if I’m lucky?
They don’t, but I do. I understand that the memories we’re creating right now are the ones that will last me a lifetime, the ones I’ll recall when they graduate college or stand at the alter, or when they hold their first child. These are the memories of my life with them. So while I’m willing to let the house get messy, to run out of essential goods every now and then, and to skip my favorite television show, I’m not willing to forgo downtime with my family. More than ever, I’m making time for the memories. And I’m eternally thankful that my little boy is fine and that we have lots more memories to make together.
