Soundproof Glass

He's so big in my lap now. Twenty-one months old. He tries to pumpkin up his little bottom and bury his face in my neck, but the fit is poor, between his gangling length and my round belly. He settles for snuggling his face to my chest, his long legs dangling, his little arms tucked under his body, clutching his butter-yellow nanny blanket. His breath rasps around congestion.

I sit quietly and rock him. My baby, for two more months, my baby. I rarely rock any of our kids to sleep. We have a lovely, but set, bedtime routine that doesn't include me after books and songs and lights out. I like my long, quiet evenings. I am (mostly) unashamedly selfish with that time.

He has an ear infection, though, that the doctor found today at a well baby check up. I feel sad. He's been fussy, but I wrote it off to teeth and a cold. I've plied him to sleep with a dose of baby pain reliever several nights this week.

We rock and he sleeps, relaxed and comfortable in my arms, despite his sore ear and stuffy nose.

You can't catch everything. I know. There's no way to perceive all in this dizzily spinning world. I miss much I wish I would see. Friends' pain. Children's leaps forward. The struggles of others. Great books, persuasive arguments. My many faults and strengths. It's impossible to drink fast enough to take it all in. I'm uncertain I would even want to be that perceptive, I'd drown.

I'm grateful that a drawn-out cold is not a big deal in our world. I'm grateful that I trust his lungs to handle the strain, his immune system to win eventually, but I'm sorry I missed the source of his pain. It makes me wonder how much I'll miss in the next twenty years. The things I'll misinterpret and the things he'll hide from me.

I have a very specific super hero fantasy. I've mentioned it previously. I imagine that I am capable of being present at the exact moment before something goes wrong. I am unbelievably small and unimaginably large. I see the very first cancer cell and destroy it. I can make blood carry more oxygen, cause a car to turn down another street.

Instead, I am human. Fallible and small. I miss an ear infection for two weeks. I would never know the moment something larger went wrong inside of someone I love. I lack the power to divine the dangers lurking around sunny corners.

A friend told me a story that lives in my head. I think of it a lot, with tears in my eyes. It's not my story to tell, but I think she'll forgive me if I sketch the scene. It was her young daughter's first swimming lesson. Her little girl sat with the other toddlers, lined like sparrows on the edge of the pool. My friend sat in the observation room a floor away and watched through the glass. She watched the teenage instructor take each child out into the pool to practice floating, turning her back on the line of bright, wiggly swimmers. She watched her daughter, unseen by the instructor, slip off the side and sink to the pool floor. Pounding on the soundproof glass with her fist, she screamed for someone to notice her drowning child. A man poolside did notice and dove into the pool in a full business suit to save her life.

A close call. A miracle. A mother's worst nightmare.

At Saige and Garrett's swimming lesson last week, I straddled a narrow bench in the same type of observation room, situated sideways so that I could watch and chat with friends. Quinn sat in front of me. He lost his balance and fell backwards off of the bench, head-first, maybe three feet, to the hard tile floor. A horrible smack echoed in the room. The other parents gasped in horror. My friend's husband, a doctor, leaped up and headed toward us before I had even processed what had happened. He looked scared by the noise of my son's head hitting the ground.

I wasn't watching Quinn. I wasn't really watching my small swimmers either. My head was turned to the side, away from all of my children, my mind engaged in conversation. But, my hand wedged between Quinn's head and the floor. I don't know how. I must have felt him go backwards somewhere in my subconscious. I caught him by one ankle and his head smashed my other hand into the floor.

Instinct? Luck? Both?

That's the crux of it. That's what keeps me awake some nights. There are no predictions. No guarantees. Sometimes, your hand is right there, between your precious child's head and the cement, and you don't even know how it got there. Other times, you are too late, too far away, too slow, too small, pounding uselessly on soundproof glass, hoping against hope for someone else's hand.


This night, he sleeps safely in my arms and I let him just a little bit longer.