Bubbly Toes

Remember yesterday, when I was all "Today! Today this is Zoey!" How I was all live in the moment! Stop with the cameras, the cell phones, the clockwatchers, the blogs! Well, I was. And for two full minutes there was a unicorn in my living room farting rainbows and glitter (it smelled like a mix of fig and Skittles). Zoey and I were dancing to Jack Johnson, as simple as something that nobody knows that her eyes are as big as her bubbly toes... and then Wham! Not wake me up before you go go, but wham! As in she put the boom boom into my heart because Zoey dropped the CD player directly onto her foot, no more jitterbug, no more bubbly toes, just a sudden scream that would not stop.

When I was 9 years old I was making dinner with my friend and poured a pot of boiling water down my chest, resulting in third degree burns, my turtleneck melting into my skin like a bad acid trip tie-dye as I ran down the hallway in my purple corduroy knickers. Yes, knickers. Now all that remains is a very faint scar in the shape of Africa and the memory of a fashion choice that should never have been made.

My brother had terrible asthma, had to be hospitalized multiple times because he was not breathing. One day he was petting our new pound dog, Max, who suddenly lunged at him and bit a chunk off his eyebrow. My mom ran out of the shower when she heard the screams, much to the confused delight of my brother's friend Ben who just stood there taking it all in: the blood running down my brother's face and the naked woman standing before him with the palm tree tattoo on her ass. Later, my brother was sitting on a concrete bus bench, just sitting, when it toppled forward, pinning him beneath and severing his Achilles tendon completely.

How do parents do it? Watch their children fall and skin their knees? Listen to the sudden scream of shock? How do parents quiet the wild look in their child's eyes when they do not understand the pain? (I'm not even sure who the 'they' in that last sentence should refer to, the parents or the child. In a way, it's all the same. In the moment of pain there is no separation and it's confusing to feel, to be felt, like a phantom limb, so certain the pain is your own.)

I called the advice nurse who then asked me if Zoey's foot was broken. I don't know! I said, when really I wanted to tell her I had misplaced my comic book x-ray glasses decades ago, so sorry madam medical professional. Then she asked me if there were any bones protruding from the skin, and I said no, but thank you for asking because I can totally see how a mother might navigate your automated phone system and then patiently hold for the 4 minutes wait time to speak with you while the jagged white of bone is jutting out of her child's tissue, skin and muscle. And then I got in the car and took Zoey to get an x-ray. Here she is accessorizing a Hello Kitty tiara with the lead apron compliments of radiology.

In the end, nothing was broken, except possibly me because Jesus Fucking Christ did that suck! My skeleton hurts is what Zoey kept repeating, and I held her close and felt it, too. The sudden realization that she actually has a skeleton, that her skin can be torn, that she can break, that she is real. That this is most likely the first of a few owie's. My skeleton hurts and the doctor didn't give me a unicorn sticker. Have you ever seen a not-quite three year old limp? It's pretty freaking cute, and so when we finally got home I drew on her bum foot, her very own battle wound tattoo, a unicorn snorting a fine fog of bruises, and on the backside, farting a steady stream of glittery rainbows onto her sole.