I want my mommy
July 29th, 2008There are moments when even mommies want their mommies.
Thursday night I was home alone with the kids, when Sylvie dropped a glass Izzie’s soda bottle on our back stoop. I have this sixth sense, and should have trusted my instinct when she grabbed the bottle and I thought, “Amazing how none of the kids broke those soda bottles at Will’s Pirate party.”
Alas, I didn’t, and as soon as she dropped it and it exploded over the stoop, I reached out to lift her to safety, stepping on a 1/2 inch wide shard with the center of my heel. It was a gusher. I left a puddle of blood on each step of our back stairs, a consistent trail from the back door to the medicine cabinet/linen closet where I grabbed a washcloth as I didn’t have the resolve to dig for a large enough bandaid at that instant, and a trail of large droplets through our dining room to the living room sofa where I sat curled in agony clutching the throbbing, gushing heel of my foot while my son held my head saying “I’m sorry, Mommy. I’m sorry…”
That advanced degree in zoology means that when a foreign object sticks into my body, I envision all the fibers it is tearing through, and often the thought alone is enough to make me pass out. So, my second goal, after stopping the blood loss was trying to remain coherent. I kept running through my options – hobble over to a neighbor with the kids in tow, hobble over to a neighbor by myself, drop the kids with a neighbor and drive myself to the hospital … call mom – not because she could do anything from 2000 miles away, but because I knew her voice would be calming in the same way it soothed me when I was little …
Knowing what my mom would say if I called her (she’d encourage the less convenient but most careful option), as much as I wanted her comforting, I simply IM’d my friends, who all gave me very intelligent advice which ended up calming me out of passing out. This event reminded me how happy I am to have such good friends and the internet that keeps them so close, but I’m most intrigued by the fact that instinctually I wanted my mommy because she could make it all better even though logically, she couldn’t. I thought we grew out of that?
The end of the story is that after about 30 minutes, the blood had slowed to a dribble. I cleaned the wound, slathered it with a generous dollop of neosporin, bandaged it tightly until I could get glue to secure it back together, and spent the rest of the evening hopping around entertaining the kiddos.
I’m walking on it, now. It’s still a bit bruised.