For as long as I've been a mother I've worried about breaking my kids.
They're born as these perfect little people, their feet uncalloused, their knees unskinned, their cheeks rosy, their chins unscarred. As parents it's up to us to keep them that way. But, as I am quickly learning, that is virtually impossible.
I'll never forget a dream I had just weeks after bringing Owen home from the hospital. In my dream I woke in the night to feed him, brought him into the kitchen and was standing at the sink when he slipped from my arms, fell on the floor and shattered into a million pieces. I sat straight up in bed that night, unable to shake the image. Today, more than 3 years later, it's still just as clear.
So far neither of my kids have shattered, but the scarring - physical only, thank goodness - has begun. Some kid threw a truck down the slide while Owen was sitting at the bottom last summer, leaving him with a half-inch scar right between his eyes. He has a mysterious scar on his knee from some injury I can't recall. Jake has a cut on his eye and another on his chin; both from incidents that happened at daycare.
As much as I always feel awful when one of my kids are injured at daycare, I always feel worse when something happens on my watch. Take today, for instance: I took Owen out for the afternoon. We got pizza and went to Chuck-E-Cheese (his favorite) to play. After about 2 hours I noticed he was was walking strangely, and it hit me that I couldn't remember the last time his diaper had been changed. Sure enough it had been long enough to leave him with the ugliest diaper rash either of us have ever seen.
I know it'll go away, and I know that these things happen. But it never fails that just when I start feeling cocky, like I've got this whole "mother of two thing" down to a science, I go and forget to change my kid's diaper and leave him walking around like he just got off a horse.
At least - thankfully - this won't leave a scar on him... just on me.
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Immediately following Casey's birth I began to worry about dropping him. I've never dropped a baby, but I kept experiencing this wave of anxiety that it would happen -- it seemed so real, almost as though it was a flashback. Everytime I closed my eyes I could see and feel him slipping right out of my arms and crashing to the ground. This fear stayed with me for a good year, but eventually it disappeared. Oh, and once as I reached for something on top of the fridge, a metal tray (also being stored up there) fell and landed right on Chloe's head. She was an infant at the time, and strapped into one of those bouncy seats. I was sure I'd caused some kind of serious damage, but apparently the event had no ill effect on her. She's now seven years old and smart as a whip. I now worry more about somehow hurting (or "breaking") my children spiritually or emotionally rather than physically. It's a scarier thought . . . and, I suspect, far more likely that causing them to hurt physically. (Did that make any sense?)
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