Hard Thanks

Things have been hard around here, and I find myself sitting at my desk chair, not quite knowing where to start with it all. There's one question that keeps going around and around in my mind, and that's when do you know for sure that your child is going to need ..more...than the other kids their age? At what point do you accept that you're going to spend their whole school career having 'special meetings' with their teachers?  

It's one thing to wonder, and another thing to know. At some point you look at them and say 'okay, this isn't normal anymore'. I think I've just reached this point with my dear little boy, and it's hurting. Please don't tell me everything is going to be okay, because either I will want to scratch your eyes out or I will cry, and I hate crying, and I bet you would hate having your eyes scratched out too.

I don't really have the words to write about any of that properly yet, so how about I just tell you a story instead; something that  happened last week. This is where it happened: 

You should all move here. It's super pretty. Not. 

Pink, Blue and I were walking to the park. Not a great morning- I can't remember why, but I'd lay money on someone refusing to get dressed and someone else feeling aggrieved about the colour of their toothbrush, probably. We'd finally made it out the door, on time, (miraculously) and were scurrying along when Pink fell over. She started screeching, and I turned to comfort her. As I knelt next to her, she screamed my pony ball, my pony ball and I realised that she wasn't yelling because she was hurt, she was yelling because the off-brand not-quite-my-little-pony ball she had been carrying was rolling towards the road. 

I turned around to see the ball and instead I saw Blue chasing it, ready to dive headfirst into four busy lanes of traffic. 

This is maybe the first time that I have really felt time freeze, as I saw him running towards that road and I sprinted - far faster than I knew I could - to stop him. Later I looked back and saw that my handbag had been thrown onto the pavement and was sitting there upside down, the DSLR inside somehow unbroken. I have no memory of sloughing it off but I must have, same as I must have shoved Pink back to the ground to stop her following me.  

I caught him, just.   This left the ball in the middle of the road, and Blue screaming the pony ball, mummy, let me go, I need to get the pony ball while I screamed stop, get back, get back!   He tried to wrest himself free of my grip and throw himself back towards the hurtling traffic. 

I had no idea what to do. In the end, after checking for a space in the cars, I ran into the road to get the pony ball, accompanied by the wailing of children who aren't worried about my safety but worried I might not be quick enough to save their toy.  Once I had it back, they were nearly calm enough to listen to me yell at them. (Normally, I try not to yell, but if they run on the road I am going to yell at them as loudly as I can manage. Yelling is scary and evil, etc, but if they run on the road, I want them to be terrified. I want them to associate that action with every sort of fear and bad emotion they can muster, because however much it is it will never be enough). 

If the ball gets squished, we will get a new ball, I yelled.  If Blue gets squished, we cannot get a new Blue. Pink kept on crying. We can't get a new pony ball! She wailed. There was only one pony ball at the shop! Was there? I have no idea. How can she even be thinking about the pony ball? Her brother nearly got run over. But he was crying too. The pony ball nearly got squiiiiiished!, he said again, and couldn't quite believe I wasn't really entering into his sadness. They cried and cried. I cried and cried too, not just because of the near miss but because he would clearly do it again, given the chance.

They have no idea how fragile their little bodies are; no idea how much more precious they are than a plastic ball. They chase after the wrong things, even when it could destroy them. Sort of reminds me of someone else I know.

The whole thing was horrible. A man came out of a cafe and asked me if I was okay, and I said yes but this was a lie. By the time I got to the park I was a mess, and I keep thinking about what nearly happened and how terrifying it was. Yet in the middle of everything that is hard right now, this was a sharp reminder that, in an instant, everything could change. In a way, it reminds me just how idyllic everything is right now, at least on paper, even when it doesn't quite feel that way. 

In an instant, everything could change. But that day, they didn't. And I'm thankful. I am thankful for red traffic lights that held the cars just feet away from the part of the road my boy was trying to run onto. And I'm thankful for the newly-widened pavement that gave me extra inches to grab the hood of his jacket and tackle him to the ground. Most of all, of course, I'm thankful for these two precious, complicated, difficult, awful, wonderful kids that I still - after four years - get to call mine.