fingers

when you’re a mom, you have to pick your worries. your battles, too. but also your worries. i simply can’t worry about all of it at once or life would simply fall by the wayside of my worries. but then, there is still the worry about the worries that i have set aside. this worry is a quiet worry, but it takes up a crapload of space. because, if i didn’t at least worry a little bit about the fact that i may not be worrying about the right worry, what kind of mother would i be?

so today one of those worries i generously set aside came into question.

i let leo play in our backyard all the time by himself. don’t get me wrong. it’s safe out there. everything sharp and chemical out of reach. not far to go anyway. nonetheless, i’ve spent ample time worrying about baby jessica and the way she fell into that 8-inch hole of a well in her own texas backyard and got stuck and had to have part of her tiny baby foot amputated. i’ve seen flashes of our very own movie of the week: “the baby leo story: what happens when one mother stops short of worrying enough.” but there are no holes to fall in back there, and i can see the whole yard from my post here at my desk.

the one problem with this scenario is there is no door from here in my office to there. i have to lap my way through a couple rooms and out the back door to get to the yard quickly, which i have done many times. at least in my mind.

but nothing is going to happen. right?

well, today i am playing on itunes (god help me, i wasn’t even working), looking for some new music finally (why I bought journey and foreigner in this search, i can’t say), and i hear leo burst into tears. not in that way that they make when they skinned a knee or knocked their noggin either. in that way like blood is suddenly shooting out his eyes. so i stand right up and look out toward the noise.

what i see is leo with a big orange 2-gallon bucket, his fingers trapped in the metal handle. his fingers, which are bright blue. and i run.

oh, i run. it takes me a minute to get the momentum, but i run. i run in a way that my body actually skips a beat, wavers and wonders (what be this we are doing here?) and then starts moving again. i run so strangely that i can’t stop thinking of the olympiads and their effortlessness. their bodies skimming like shiny machines around the track. how dare i even take the moment? but i do somehow. until i run right over mr. incredible whose tiny pointy toy nose gashes into my third toe. blood. “#$%@!” and then, rounding a corner too closely, i hit my shoulder on a door jam, now thinking in terror of baby jessica and her foot and my leo and his fingers and how he’ll never play piano or the flute or run those blue fingers through his long, luxurious blonde curls. “i’m coming!” i yell and toward the back door i run, more than anything, over and over in my mind about the misplacement of my worries. “backyard injuries #1, should have been #1.” his precious fingers, blue as the summer sky. bright as robins’ eggs. except in a bloated and puffy dead way like molly ringwald’s face in that after school special when her character’s body was pulled out of the garage, gone, along with her boyfriend with whom she made a romeo-and-juliet-like suicide pact, by carbon monoxide asphyxiation. oh god, the blue!

down the stairs, i toss myself. “just hold on!” i yelp, reaching for leo’s dearly departed digits, which he has almost pulled loose and which now in my own hand, i can see are completely covered in a thick thick coating of blue chalk.

yeah. just chalk. chalk that was soon on my shirt and on my lips. from all the kisses pressed to those little fingers. and i am once again saved. saved from the loss and the regret. and moreover, saved from the headlines—which would have no doubt questioned, one line after another, the fact that i did not worry over the right thing on this fateful, blue-skied summer day.