Surely Nothing...

I knew a lady one time who'd had, before I met her, a set of twin girls. When these twins were toddlers, one of them was killed in a household accident. Their mother's grief was such that she wound up with an ulcer, which ruptured one day. She called an ambulance, and the ambulance--I swear--wrecked on the way to the hospital and left her more injured than she was before she called it. Plus, by the time I met her she'd had a mastectomy, and now after battling some other kind of cancer (I believe it was), she's dead.

I always think of her when I'm tempted to say, "Surely nothing else can happen."

This past June my family spent a week in Myrtle Beach, courtesy of George Bush and the US taxpayers, and there was not one thing in the world for us to complain about. We went to a lovely place with plenty of things to do; the weather cooperated; we got along nicely and didn't have car trouble or lose our wallets or anything. It was so lovely, in fact, that I tossed aside superstitious caution and finally (in a hesitant whisper) voiced the thought that I'd been having for months: that we ought to stop and take notice of the fact that all was going well. We had jobs, a house, cars. We were all healthy and the children were not having any trouble. Our parents were alive and living independently.

By mid-July, of course, things had changed as both of our mothers were diagnosed with serious illnesses which have altered (primarily) their lives, but also (no comparison to what they're going through, but still--) ours. So break out the violins and let me tell you that due to various circumstances, last week was really hard. From white-knuckle drives back and forth to the hospital and late-night stays with my severely compromised mother, to a fight with my husband, to work pouring in on me so heavily that I couldn't even return all my calls, much less accomplish the other hundred things my scary boss expects of me--it was a just an exceptionally hard week. By Friday I was so exhausted I felt as though I were underwater, slowly going through the motions of tasks but lacking the energy or concentration to do any of them very well. All I could think of was how much I wanted to get to bed early.

So. Around 10:30 PM I had my jammies on, we'd vacated the living room and brushed our teeth and were just getting ready to crawl into bed when Brandon, my six-year-old, casually and cheerfully mentioned that he had stuck something ("a little piece of foam") into his ear and couldn't get it out. Initial annoyance soon gave way to dull shock as a flashlight revealed an object the approximate color of his Grover hand puppet, waaaaaay down deep in his ear canal. You might be interested to know that tweezers, when held up to a child's ear, suddenly look enormous and deadly. There was no way we could get the little blue thing out.

So my husband started yelling and stomping about the stupidity of it all, and Brandon got hysterical when he realized we couldn't fix him, and I, nearly bursting into tears of self-pity, got to put my clothes back on and drive him (sans husband, you'll notice) across town to the emergency room...where--remember how exhausted I had been even before this happened?--after a stay in the freezing waiting room and after the usual discussion of allergies and copayments and social security numbers, we saw a doctor who eventually used a high-powered suction thingy to pull the piece of foam out of the ear while Brandon cried and I helped hold him still and tried not to faint.

This experience has gotten me thinking. If having a very sick mother and a hellish work week does not mean that my kid won't poke foam down his earhole, then I should consider myself reminded that one crisis does not preclude another. Just because you're riding in an ambulance doesn't mean it can't wreck. I should never take false comfort in the idea that "surely nothing else can happen." Tired as I am, I still have to stop and take a moment to notice all the things that aren't disastrous--the really hard job that hands me a regular paycheck, the kids who do ridiculous (yet typically kid-like) things, the mothers we can still hold in our arms. I'm glad to have them all. I'm just not going to say it out loud anymore for a while.