The Weight of Responsibility

Mal can descend stairs, but he usually prefers for me to carry him. If he's doing it on his own, he'll get down on all fours and put his legs over the side of the steps first, then go down each step backwards until he gets to the bottom. He's learned that on carpeted stairs, he can kind of plank and get down pretty quickly.

If I'm carrying him, he'll usually go down one or two stairs, then stand up and step off of the stair into my arms. I've sometimes thought, "What if I weren't ready? He'd fall!" but secured myself with the idea that he's not going to step off into nothingness; he knows I will get him.

Well, today, he made that decision poorly at the playground at Phil's Ice House on Burnet Road. Yes, I saw that the signs said the playground was designed for 5-12-year-olds. That's why I was right there with him the whole time. He was a lot more confident on the bouncy bridge than I was, but I always try to hang back and let him try, just like I did with Daphne. Even when it scared me a lot.

So, he'd climbed up and across the bridge to a place where there were two covered slides. I stood back a bit, trying to see which slide he'd choose. He ended up coming back down to where there were bars a bigger kid could climb down. Not him, though. The closest bar to the deck where he was standing was a good 18 inches away. Still, he looked at it and stepped one foot off of the ledge. I expected him to grab something or have some plan, but it quickly became apparent that he'd just seen me and stepped, expecting everything to turn out okay.

I reached out to grab him and caught onto him briefly, but I was on the wrong side of the bars. He flattened out on them, then continued his fall, thankfully landing flat (no arm or head taking the brunt), and scraping up the left side of his face on the mulch. He started to cry, and I immediately scooped him up and held him to me, so he didn't cry much. He was shaking like a leaf, and his heart was racing. I sat there, legs splayed awkwardly, until I had to move. When he felt me moving, he clung even tighter. I managed to grab hold of the offending bars and stand, still cradling his head to my chest, and we sent to sit down.

He has no bruises (yet), and wasn't badly hurt, just scratched up on the cheek. He fell asleep on the way home and is still napping it off. I'd actually given him Infant Tylenol earlier in the day because he's teething or something spectacularly awful because he just roared and cried all morning. (Actually, he cried a lot more about not being able to use the computer as we were leaving the house, or about the ice cream passing beneath his nose to Daphne before he got a bite than he did about falling four feet into the wood chips.)

Very often, I am overwhelmed by the sheer amount of time this little monkey man requires of me. It's like the whole being pecked to death by a duck thing. But this today made me once again keenly aware that I am pretty much his whole world. It's not just the little stuff. He trusts me. He trusts that I will be there for him. He is starting to trust that the world is a safe place as long as I'm around. And that's what I want for him... But I also want him to figure out gravity and heat and sharp knives pretty quickly and without having to learn the hard way on every single count.

May I always be up to this task, and may God continue to give me supernatural strength and endurance to keep up with my charge, because I know that under my own steam, I would have passed out months and months ago. What an exhausting and largely unexpected blessing. How I love this sweet, jacked-up face.