Moving Past? What’s that supposed to mean? Moving past… a slow truck?

Hold your horses. I’ll get to it, okay?

I.

Sitting in the foyer at church and preparing my lesson, I was across from an acquaintance who asked where my kids were. I was a little confused until he explained that I always had a child with me, and today I was sitting down uncharacteristically. Ah! The kids were mostly at home, I explained, either coming off of a virus or trying to avoid one with their sick mom. He was being friendly, and I realized that he opened the door to some polite chit-chat. I’m not really in to most guy-type conversation starters (unlike the fellows checking their cell phones through the meetings for scores that would correlate to their fantasy football teams — I kid you not), so I went with the only thing I really know.

Noting his baby in the car seat at his feet, I asked, “How old’s your son getting?” Perfect. A nice slow ball right across the plate. He swings, and the chit-chat moves to kids. I ask if his 10-month-old is crawling yet, and he says, yes and cruising and that sort of thing. Not that he was in any rush for his boy to start walking around. And, perhaps feeling a little twinge of competitive parenting, he quickly explains that he had a conversation with a pediatric nurse who explained that the longer kids crawl, the better it is for their brains — all that left/right coordination getting those little bodies in motion is, in fact, really good for their little brains. So, he was in no hurry and I commended him for that.

I start to tell him about Bennett as a little one: the time he decided to start rolling around with no warning, even though he was still on oxygen. He would spin across the floor, wrapping himself up in his oxygen tubing, and I would have to unravel him, and here I’m getting into it, doing the arm motions of someone pulling on a rope hand over hand, and we’re thinking this is a pretty funny thing to hear, and then the reality of the context hits me, though I don’t let it show.

My boy couldn’t breathe without oxygen support. If I took him off the O2, he would slowly suffocate to death. There’s the context. But we all survived, and to look at Bennett now is sort of surreal, especially if you overlay the dire predictions that haunted us from that 12th week on.

But thinking about a kid coiling himself up in his own oxygen tubing is funny, even at the time, but at the time I think we would have beaten up ourselves over laughing at it.

Moving past the reality of the time, we have the reality of now, and man that little kid did some really funny things. I like laughing about it. I feels good to be able to — to let myself.

II.

When we moved to Texas, and our new friends were getting to know us, Heidi would talk about her family and such, but I tended to stay fairly quiet about mine. This isn’t odd behavior for me by any stretch. Ask my dad: my formative years are often best not spoken of. A real conversation killer. That said, someone would eventually ask something about my mother, is she going to come and visit when the new baby was born or whatever, and I would respond, “Oh, no. She’s dead,” just like that.

Their mouths would drop open, and you could almost see the thought process form, “I just said the most insensitive thing in the world; he must think I’m some kind of insensitive clod.” Yes, they thought with semicolons.

I would quickly let them know that I was young when it happened, and it’s perfectly all right: I had plenty of time to work it all out. I think our friends believed me, after all, they remain our friends.

My mother died the same year I started college. I was sixteen. I wore the pager that would buzz when they had a donor liver on its way. I drove her to the hospital when it was time. She died a few months later at that same hospital — Baylor. The same place Bennett was born.

III.

Losing a parent is one of the worst things some people can imagine — a close second to losing a child. It’s a splash of ice-cold water on the psyche that shocks people right out of their social comfort zone and into another place they never want to find themselves standing.

That’s part of what I was thinking with my recollection of Bennett tangling himself up across the floor. My family often stands in the middle of a time warp. On the outside, we’re just about as normal as can be, notwithstanding the glasses. On the inside, we’ve spent a great deal of time coming to terms with mortality and the tug between the frailty of life and the strength of the spirit. Though we have never actually buried a child, the consideration isn’t as shocking to us as it used to be.

We get up and go to sleep with the sun. We cuddle and read. We sit together and watch cartoons. We eat way too few vegetables and far too much sugar. We straddle our past and look toward our future, and we’re truly happy.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 14th, 2007 at 10:17 pm and is filed under Bennett, Family. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.