On the importance of looking up.

or, One day at playgroup.

Remembered selectively and not without some mistakes in dialogue, a la a warped gamed of telephone.

I walked up the stoop, opened the door wide, and crouched down to hook it open. I straightened up...and the crown of my head crunched into the corner of the metal mailbox that suddenly stuck out much farther than I remembered.

Ouch.

As I probed at a rapidly growing lump the apartment door opened and J came out with the twins.
"Hi P! How's it going?"

I looked at my hand, which was now covered with blood. I began to feel it trickle through my hair.

"Great J, but I've just had a little accident.." I said. My voice sounded like I'd just noticed the Impling had a poo blast. Matter-of-fact, nothing out of the ordinary.

She hadn't come close enough to see my bloody hand.

"Is M all right? Oh..." she noticed it.

"Hi guys!" I chirped. The twins looked on curiously as blood dripped down the side of my face. "Where's your bathroom, J?"

I hear her directions through a blur of thought. This looks a lot worse than it really is blood trickling through my hair feels really funky I am SUCH a dork and there's M and HA too we are just going to keep on doing the calm thing everyone ok? OK.

"What can I do?"

"Could you get the Impling?" I looked down the stoop to where my little one looked up at me from her stroller with a quizzical, slightly impatient expression. "What's the hold up here, folks?" Good girl. I grinned at her, then left her to J.

I found the bathroom (which M opened for me as I could not for the life of me figure out the lock) and looked in the mirror. A vague image of Jack Nicholson in the Shining superimposed itself on my face. I started to wash off the blood to see exactly what was going on up there. Seconds later, the bathroom was full, the twins alternately stared and played with the toilet seat, AH looked on in curiousity, and my little Impling hugged my legs and looked up with big eyes. "Um, Mom, when are we going to, you know...PLAY?"

J brought out the gauze and I washed blood out of my hair. As expected, it was superficial. But spectacular in the way that head wounds can be. I stuck the gauze pads and the ice on my head, took two ibuprofen, and life continued.


What strikes me now, about this whole episode, is the question: why didn't I completely freak with blood streaming down my face? Why didn't anyone else?

For my part, I can't say it was just because I'd seen my brother in a similar situation when we were young, or that "the violence inherent in the system" is responsible for a certain amount of mental anesthesia.

At some point, growing up, I became a stoic. I was a tom-boy, so maybe the attitude is part of that package. I got bruises and sprains and chewed my feet to pieces on barnacle covered rocks. I fell out of trees and miraculously escaped with bruises and scrapes. I got stitches in my eyebrow from opening a car door into my face (I am a confirmed klutz as well), broke my left wrist, my right arm.

After the first spectacular break caused me to scream in fear (it looked broken), I became stubbornly determined not to cry. Breaking bones hurt so badly I felt nauseous, and I rocked myself to ease the worst of it, but I could not "break down". Because for me, crying was failure. Crying was to admit defeat. "It's all right to cry" was not a notion I grew up with at all. Sure, the words were spoken, but the examples being set for me by my parents denied their truth. Crying meant things were WRONG. It meant someone had been in a car accident, or had died, or was trying to die.

At some point during my childhood, the cold pit of terror that would form in my stomach when situations went out of control became instead a quietness, a clarity of purpose. Thought and action came together and I would know what to say, or what to do to be safe, whether it meant looking after straying toddlers or (when I was older and dangerously confident in my immortality) evading confrontations on foolish 3-in-the-morning walks through Philly.

The emotional tumult of those years has passed, and I am left with the best parts, it seems. The quiet clarity is still within me, and I am blissfully free of the need to fight tears. Crying has finally become for me a natural release. Since I now know what true pain is, both physically and mentally, a scrape on the head is hardly enough to get more than a wince out of me. Which, in retrospect, probably muted the situation at our playgroup.

So our awesome, totally cool babies just took it in stride. If nothing else, we learned that they won't freak out at the sight of blood anytime soon. I learned to look up.