Who Can I Blame? And, Quickly!

Who can I blame?

And, quickly!

Pulling upward as hard as I could on the handle above the passenger side window, I held onto him with my other hand. Glass flying everywhere as our car was sliding down a snowy cliffside mountain flipped onto its driver side. Literally ten minutes before we left to go to our holiday dinner, I called my kids who were with their dad that weekend to tell them I loved them.

It was one of those “I just have to” kind of phone calls, despite having recently spoken to them. With the anticipation of appearing to be a helicopter parent, my guts radar must’ve seen this one coming, so I picked up the phone anyway. Ten minutes later, while we slid, railing to car ceiling, hopeful we didn’t fly over the cliff, I looked at the headlights moving in our direction on the snow-covered road we were surrendering in battle to.

I was thankful that I made that call in that peaceful moment that happens if you’ve ever been in a serious car accident where for a second, there’s a pause, and in slow motion, you know you really actually can’t control this one. Whoever “this” is up to, certainly isn’t you at that point.

My son had a freak heart condition called myopericarditis that could’ve killed him. I’d never had taken him to the hospital that night if his face didn’t explode from what doctors retrospectively tell me was an entirely unrelated condition to a heart that was killing him. The story is too long to write here, but that night, if it were not for that one sign, my son would likely be dead right now. I think about this fact every single day. To be fair, it scares the shit out of me.

The other day, my last client of the day was late for our call. Fifteen minutes into when we were supposed to be on a call together, I heard a loud thump downstairs followed by a blood curdling scream. It was one of those mama-bear-knows-a-primal-scream type screams. I ran down the hall screaming for Chris who, working with the blender, couldn’t hear the baby screaming, and came down to a bloody show to match the scream. I realized he needed stitches and was so thankful to get to take him with zero work related conflict.

Hang with me for a sec.

Tonight, my son’s friend sat on our cushioned wicker chair that sits behind my infant sons porch swing. After I secured him in, I walked inside to clean up our Christmas tree decorating fiasco while all of the older kids laughed and hung out on the back porch admiring the full moon peering over the mountain. Minutes later, Chris brought the baby in, sobbing. He told me that one of the bolts holding up his swing, just popped out, and when it did, the instant weight, pulled the other along with it. Our infant son was in his swing, about five feet from the ground, that sat above a small wooden table.

Had the swing popped out with no one there to catch him, he’d likely have hit the table, rolled off, him, still strapped in the swing, likely having hit his head bluntly on the fall, and then rolled down our stairs. Ok! This is a worse case scenario here but, the kid could’ve gotten seriously hurt or even the unthinkable, depending on how he fell and my mom brain can’t unsee these potentials when what we love feels so out of our control.

The thing is, that swing was gonna fall. Apparently, that part was inevitable.

We needed the information to let us know our device was unsafe for our baby especially because I only ever use the swing to put him in when I’m doing yard work, so I’m not really ever next to him when he’s in it. Tonight, by Grace, my sons friend caught him, midair. Had he not been there when that swing did the inevitable, we’d be having a much different experience.

I wonder every single day how anyone who truly lives, can do so until they’re over one hundred years old. Like, how, after all those near misses, and all those real potential last kisses, add up, and we somehow take it for granted and call it the drudgery of life.

Years ago, I rode alongside a guy, a bit younger than me, on a small motorcycle in the left lane, while I drove in the right. We gazed at each other at the red light. I liked a warmth about him. A minute up the road, an SUV turned into our lanes and before my eyes could blink, he was under it.

I went from looking him in the eyes to knowing he didn’t even know what hit him as his body lay lifeless under a strangers giant mistake.

I’ll never know why the order of things happens the way it does. Why some people I love are gone, and others I hardly like, are here. Why some mothers celebrate their child’s engagement while other parents daily engagement involves burying their most precious heart. None of it seems fair, or even right. None of it makes sense, and the nonsensical sense of it all, makes it feel like a cruel joke some days.

I’ve seen miracle after miracle occur in my life, and I’m sure you have too. Though that man on the motorcycle broke every bone in his body and needed insane amounts of rehabilitation, ten days after the accident, I heard from a stranger that he was actually alive. He died multiple times on the scene. But he rose again, somehow, someway.

That somehow, and someway, that lends itself to the hands of my sons friend while he’s catching his fall, or the momentary lapse of time that my client had when my I was graced with attending to my sons comfort while he got stitched up, or in my sons face telling me with a rare rash, what his heart couldn’t, or in the moment I didn’t know whether I’d live or die, that I was grateful I called one last time to tell my kids I loved them, is holding us up, right now.

It’s been holding us up all along.

When we lose those we love the most, that somehow, and someway, is what lends itself to us in the heaviest spaces of grief. Somehow, eventually, we rise again, someway.

I wonder how we do it, as humans. How the broken heart stays a steady pulse.

How the woman whose illusions were just shattered, collects all of her pieces, and carries them with her as she walks out the door, hoping for a respite and some heavy duty glue, but without a guarantee.
How the athlete goes quadriplegic and finds a way to believe it was the best thing that happened to him, while a woman who’s never lifted a finger complains about her polish not being perfect. I just don’t understand God’s order, or what the rules are, and to be fair, even tonight, I wanted someone to blame instead of someone to thank.

I wanted to blame someone who must’ve put a curse on me to bring my son this much pain. Then, God for not making “me” more powerful than the curse.

I wanted to blame Chris for not putting the screws in right. I searched for about five seconds for a reason for all of this “misfortune,” and for sure, my family has appeared to have a lot of it come up these last few years, but then this rush of never in my life having been so grateful for my son’s friend (who I’ve known since he was in Kindergarten) and of how grateful I am that God gave us the sign that the swing was unsafe, in the safest way imaginable, came over me.

So of course I’m thinking back to all of those every single day moments, the almost deaths, the almost car accidents, the almost falls, the almost, could’ve been absolutely insane moments. There are soooo many in my memory bank, I could list them here for days, and I’m sure you could too. We’re lucky!

Some of the people I love aren’t, and I’ll never understand why, but as for me and you, we’re still here, because somehow, someway, we’ve been saved daily by tiny miracles that we may not even see. We’ve been saved from near misses and potential last kisses, and it’s likely that every day, we look for someone to blame for how bad it could’ve been rather than thankful for how bad it wasn’t.

While I’m here, I want to channel my visions with the focus on miracles, rather than misfortunes. Tonight, was good practice.

*I wrote the above right before bed. I slept like shit, maybe four hours tops. The next morning I woke up to my partner telling me we had to take our five year old to the ER. I had to work all day and we needed him to watch all the kids because the older two had school. I started to cry, until I remembered the kids had off one more day. Then with some guilt, I called for them to watch the baby until further notice.

I followed behind Chris and Hayven to the ER in the pouring rain just to show her I was there, but because of COVID regulations, only one parent could go in, and for the first time in seventeen years of parenting, it wasn’t gonna be me. I was going to work from the parking lot, to at least, kind of stay with her. There are very, very few days when I reconcile my own experience with having to show up for another. Normally, I’m very quick to move myself out of the way to meet someone where they are, but this day, I’d wondered if I’d reached my threshold, and actually couldn’t show up to work. Then I sniffed down the potential path of resenting my partner for getting to go in with her so we FaceTimed together until I had to get on calls.
Mid morning, a client asked me how I was, and apparently I’d gotten out of my own way for a hot minute. I normally wouldn’t start a session with this kind of truth, but I shared with her that I’m practicing looking for someone to thank instead of someone to blame, and that I’m so damn grateful I have an incredibly loving father of a partner that I trust 100% to have her best interest and information at heart and hand (despite wanting it to be me there), and that somehow, someway…my kids didn’t have school. Despite sitting in the middle of a storm, at the ER, I remembered what I wrote the night before, and apparently, it was my own medicine come morning.

Just for today, lets look to whom to thank, rather than be quick search for a place of blame. It just makes life so much more…livable. We think blame keeps us safe, like we’re in the know, but it doesn’t. It keeps us hidden in the dark, from all of the light. That’s all it does. That’s. All. It. Does.