"The world can't give that serenity. The world can't give us peace. We can only find it in our hearts."
"I hate that."
"I know. But the good news is that by the same token, the world can't take it away.”
--Anne Lamott
According to...I don’t know, some expert on the internet, up to fifty percent of children will experience some sort of tooth injury during childhood. I was not informed of this completely horrifying fact when I became a parent, and it doesn’t make me feel any better about our daughter joining the ranks this week.
I’ve been at school until past eight o’clock in the evening for conferences for the past couple of days so Matt has been on full-time Dad Duty. On Wednesday night I pulled out my cell phone to check my messages as I walked to my car and saw that I’d missed a call from Matt. The message first mentioned an accident, and I assumed he meant the kind of accident in which the three-year-old didn’t make it to the toilet and he needs a quick over-the-phone lesson in how to work the little handheld carpet cleaner we keep in the laundry room. Then I heard him mention the ER. I called home before I finished listening to the message. He told me Suzannah had slipped and fallen on the bathroom floor and her face had hit the toilet, knocking a few teeth loose. By the time I made it home, he had already calmed our daughter and spoken to the on-call pediatrician, who said that if her permanent teeth were loose we needed to come straight to the ER. If it seemed to be only baby teeth, we could wait until the next day.
When I walked through the door a few minutes later, Suzannah was perched on the edge of the couch watching Star Wars and holding ice cubes wrapped in a wash cloth against her bloodied, swollen lip. After a little gentle prodding she allowed me to look at her mouth. Her upper gums were bloody, and her upper front teeth suffered the most impact. Her bottom lip was also quite swollen, although a little poking around led me to conclude that no teeth there were loosened that weren’t loose to begin with. Whenever she removed the ice, strings of bloody drool fell from her mouth. If you know my daughter at all it will not surprise you to learn that this was the most upsetting thing of all -- she didn’t know how she’d be able to go to sleep without getting blood and drool on her pillow and pajamas. I covered her pillow with towels and draped a few more over her bedspread. She finally fell asleep clutching that damp washcloth, propped up on extra pillows, but by then the bleeding had stopped.
Needless to say, our bedtimes were thrown off. We were all exhausted by the time we all managed to fall asleep, and Suzannah slept later than usual, but she awoke in a fairly cheerful mood. The swelling had diminished considerably, although her chin was obviously bruised, and she didn’t really want to eat much. Two days later, her teeth are still hanging in there, her chin is still black-and-blue, but she’s figured out how to eat more or less normally.
Tonight when I tucked her into bed, I said, “Looks like the tooth fairy will be coming a little earlier than we thought.” Without skipping a beat she replied, “I hope so. Then I can make some money.”
While my kid smashing her teeth against the toilet is outside our realm of normal, somehow, set against the backdrop of this week, dealing with a relatively minor childhood injury is -- well, so normal it seems unfair. This is what strikes me when someone shoots up a theater. Or a classroom. Or sets off a bomb at the Boston Marathon. I listen to NPR on my way to pick up the kids, I exchange e-mails with equally horrified friends, and I try not to read Facebook because I’m sickened by the speed at which we show our worst selves as we try to make sense of these things. Better to focus on what people are doing in the world and not on the internet. And, of course, there’s the matter of life needing to be lived. There’s the absurdity -- and, I suppose, the blessing -- of the way the world keeps turning.
So on Monday night, I came home with my children. I ran a bath for Isaac and listened to him splash around with his toys while I chopped onions and garlic for Spanish rice. I went through the motions of stirring scallions, shredded cheese, and handfuls of fresh spinach on my stovetop, then spooning the mixture into tortillas for spinach and cheese burritos. Suzannah showed me what she’d written in her planner at school and busied herself at the kitchen counter, drawing or writing -- I don’t remember what now. I brushed the burritos with olive oil. Stuck the pan in the oven. Added rice, tomatoes, cumin, and chili powder to the other pot simmering on the stove. Changed into running clothes. When Matt came home, I kissed him, told him how long the food still needed to cook, and headed out into the cool early-evening air.
People ran for solidarity and support on Monday night and all throughout the week; I’d like to say that’s what I was doing, but that seems a little grand for a solitary jog through the quiet streets of my neighborhood. There’s a part of my usual route that smells like heaven in April, like the trees have held the scent of all the rain that’s fallen this month and chosen to release it in a single burst of freshness so pure I want to stop and drink it as I run past. Breathing it makes me feel sort of desperately greedy and grateful -- both.
I wasn’t sure whether I was trying to run away from the world or run myself into some state of clarity or peace or what. But what a privilege. Just to move, to breathe, to be. To burst through my back door again, sweaty and spent, to smell the melted cheese and the spices from the dinner I’d prepared, to know that I would soon slip into a tub filled with bubbles, soothing for tired muscles even though my kids never can manage to stay out of the bathroom when I’m in there.
So I swing, these days, between desperate gratitude for this normalcy, the beautiful ordinary, and desperate grief, because the world is broken, and we’re broken with it. I’m easily angered and I find it difficult to extend much grace. I read Facebook too much, which almost never, ever makes me feel better about the world except sometimes someone will post, say, a beautifully-written piece by Erica Goode at the New York Times, and I’m nothing less than awestruck that a person can birth such a thing almost instantaneously in response to something that defies rational response.
When my head is muddled and my heart is hurting, it might not seem so strange, then, to find almost a comfort in dealing competently with a minor childhood injury -- a fixable thing. We have popsicles and milkshakes and plenty of ice, not to mention plenty of cuddles. And beyond that, there is my relentless need to notice every little ordinary moment, to place it in the context of our beautiful ordinary life, and to find joy there -- in the chopping of onions while my son splashes in the bath, in watching my daughter fill out her weekly reading log, even in the basic ordering of things -- taking the clean dishes from the still-steamy dishwasher and putting them away, in placing the folded clothes inside the drawers, in wiping down counters and tucking children into bed. It’s the illusion of order when nothing is orderly, sure, and most of the time unloading the dishwasher and folding laundry are simply chores to be completed. But they’re part of our rhythm, our ordinary beautiful daily rhythm, and that makes sense to me when little else does.
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