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So far when Phoebe has taken a tumble or hurt herself on a medium level of pain, it’s happened when my wife has been the one in charge. Because she is a terrible parent and I am a great one. Or maybe because she’s the only one who ever looks after the child. I can’t quite work it out. But tonight, just before bed, a proper ouchie happened on my watch.
My daughter is at a really fun age where she’s full of fun and mischief and experimenting with the world around her. She’d been playing with her sticklebacks and tipped them all over the floor and then she took the bucket they came in and put it on her head. I will confess this is partly down to my influence. I had done the same with the bucket her Mr Potato Head stuff is in a few weeks ago and then she’s copied me. But that bucket was see-through, whilst the stickle-brick one is not. Phoebe was amused by her antics and as a responsible parent I should probably have told her to take it off. But it was funny and she was being cute so I just told her to be careful. She didn’t listen, partly because she doesn’t understand the concept of “careful” and partly because her head was in a bucket and she walked a few steps, slid on a stickleback (I should probably have warned her about that too) and then plummeted forwards head first into the little table she does her art stuff on. Obviously as she had a bucket on her head she couldn’t see the table coming or protect herself from it and there was a sickening thud and she fell to the floor.
Her tripping head first into a table is one of the things I worry about most. And perhaps I should have seen this coming, but it had happened at such speed that I couldn’t stop it, but that velocity also made me think that my lack of vigilance and foresight must have led to serious harm. Luckily my daughter had a bucket on her head, which must have taken some of the force of the impact. But then without the bucket on her head she wouldn’t have been hurt at all.
My daughter didn’t go limp thankfully, though she did cry for a bit. I checked her over and things didn’t seem too bad, but then I couldn’t see inside her brain and am all too well aware that head injuries don’t always have an immediate effect. The horror of it all made me feel sick and want to cry. I took Phoebe upstairs to her mum and a red welt was appearing on the child’s head. Phoebe calmed down pretty quickly, but she’s not really a moany kid and we put some ice on the bruise and gave her some Nurofen and then I gave her a bath and put her to bed.
But then spent the rest of the evening and night fretting that my inattentiveness and stupidity would lead to me finding a dead or brain-damaged child in the morning. The overwhelming love you feel for your kids is always tempered by the constant fear of something going horribly wrong and the knowledge that as much as you want to protect them from everything, you are ultimately not going to be able to. It’s incredible to love someone this much and in a way it’s quite a pleasant horrendous nightmare. But it’s obviously also a horrendous horrendous nightmare as you envisage your life without them and imagine how you would fail to cope without them. Although all seemed fine, I slept (or mainly failed to sleep) in Phoebe’s room so I could be ready to leap into action if she stopped breathing. Which in effect meant getting up to check every two minutes when I couldn’t hear her breathing, but it turned out she was.
I lay there, worrying that my life was about to change forever, but feeling grateful that it already had changed forever. I am not sure that it takes letting your child fly head first into a table with a bucket on their head to make you understand how much they mean to you and there’s little point in expressing this as people without kids will think (just as I used to) “Blah, so what? It can’t be all that amazing and awful” and people with kids already know all about it. But every day my daughter completes an orbit of my heart. Alas she is attached to a long ball of string that squeezes ever more tightly around it and will ultimately destroy it. But in a good way.
Phoebe was still alive in the morning. And when she came downstairs she put the bucket on her head again.
