The Bride in the Berkshires
The Love Bug broke her arm over the weekend. She was jumping on the couch, apparently practicing her basketball skills after seeing her first live, basketball game. The doctors did what they always do, they discussed it among themselves and then I got to hear about it, in the best possible light. It’s only a little “buckle” fracture, she’ll probably only need a splint, what’s for dinner?
The Groom is a man after my own heart. Instead of letting his Bride take their tumbling toddler into the ER and splint her – why is it all emergencies happen on the weekend? – he insisted they take her to “another doctor who is not the parent” for treatment. When mine were little, I’d let Bob look into their ears on occasion, but they saw our pediatrician for most things. What is that saying; “Physician heal thyself, or don’t even try and heal your family members or whatever?”
The Bride broke her arm the night before the first day of First Grade. I remember coming home to my little family trying to get out the door with her arm wrapped in magazines, a temporary Boy Scout-like splint. It’s one thing for your children to catch cold, but it’s an entire other thing when we parents realize that we sometimes have absolutely no control over our child at all times. For me it was finding out that the Bride needed to wear glasses at the age of 2!
How could that happen? I didn’t wear glasses and neither did Bob, we had 20/20 vision. But I’d been noticing my little girl’s eyes were asymmetrical. I thought she had an ocular muscle problem and brought her to see an Ophthalmologist. It turns out she was squinting in one eye because she had a severe astigmatism, in other words the world looked like a Dali painting on one side of her brain and normal on the other. If we hadn’t caught it as such a young age, she would have been that pirate Kindergartener wearing a patch with glasses to encourage her eye to see normally.
As it was, she wore a tiny pair of glasses with a band around the back of her curly blonde head for a year, until her cornea grew to correct the astigmatism. And like it or not, I felt like I had failed as a mother, if only my uterus held her in the upright position, maybe I shouldn’t have played racquetball? It felt like some part of my gene pool had failed me. Now I realize we are none of us perfect. That thinking we have a tabula rosa on our hands with a brand spanking new baby is idiotic, because that baby has all the genetic material of her parents, and her parents’ parents, and back through the ages.
Temperament is ingrained. They will or will not develop allergies; they might confuse letters. They will or will not jump into the water, they will or will not climb that tree and fall out. Some children hesitate, and some take on the world like a mini Evil Knievel. Some, like the Rocker, will run straight into the ocean or take the ski lift to the top of a mountain, and leave his family in his wake. And I must admit, the Love Bug seems to have a bit of her Uncle’s daredevil streak; what others may call stubborn, I see as determination and persistence. When they are stopped in Nashville city traffic now, the Bug will yell, “GO! GO! GO!” from her tiny car seat! Remember we called her mother, “The Girl Who Stands With Hands on Hips.”
It’s all in the perspective. 
MountainMornings 