Everyday, I Celebrate Them.

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Dear Scarlett, yesterday Matthew and I woke you up to sing Happy Birthday.

Matthew remembers the day you born very vividly, and every chance he gets to talk about the time I left him to push you out of my belly, he takes. This particular morning, singing Happy Birthday to you and talking to you while I changed your diaper about what a wonderful day that was in my life, was one such opportunity. He told me I did a good job pushing you out, because he loves his Scarly. He took your hand and he kissed the back of it, the way he always does to me. Normally when he grabs you, you instinctively pull away and protect your face, but this time you let him. You looked over at him and you smiled.

We played outside for a bit, and then Daddy watched you while I shopped for your birthday party preparations with Matthew. Picking out a card for you, by the way, was one of the most deceptively impossible tasks I’ve ever encountered in my life. I thought picking out a card for a one year old would be easy, but no card in the world put to words what this day means to me, or what you mean to me. I kept reminding myself that I write words to you myself all of the time, so what does it matter. But every time I almost settled on something I didn’t love, I imagined it sitting in your baby book, exemplifying what your first year alive has meant to this family, and how it would always fall short. Plus, every card - even the ones I didn’t like - that said any form at all of “Daughter, I love you,” made me cry. Seriously, every one. Until eventually even the cards for four year old boys and twelve year old girls caught my stare and jerked at my insides. I was a train wreck by the time I left that place.

Mary came home from school with her friend, who couldn’t wait to tell you Happy Birthday herself. I spent the afternoon and early evening finishing your DIY pinata (Which, can I just say, turned out AWESOME.) and your flag banner decorations (Which also turned out awesome!), while you scaled the staircase over and over and over again with Daddy and Matthew on your heels -- alternatively cheering you on, and exasperatedly asking if you were trying to kill yourself. Before you went to bed we all gathered around your highchair for ice cream. We sang a chorus of Happy Birthday to you and you helped us clap at the end. I picked out a bedtime story about a surprise birthday party, and I talked you to sleep about everything we were planning for yours on Sunday.

You went to bed as loved as you are every day that has ever come before. I put you to bed feeling like one small day is so inadequate to celebrate you, and feeling very excited for Sunday. When I put Matthew to bed, he asked if we could celebrate you every day. Then I realized that aside from the ice cream, I think we already do, and I told him that. “Every day I have with you guys is a special occasion,” I thought out loud to him. He pulled the back of my hand to his little lips and he gave it a kiss. He turned over in his bed and he went to sleep as loved on that day as he is every other day that has ever come before.

The Apple Orchard

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Last year, the first outing we had as a family of five was to Milburn Orchards. This year, we hit the orchard a little bit early to go apple picking. Neither of us had realized until we got there that this was the first place Scarlett had really been to outside of the hospital and to visit grandparents when she was brand new.

We propped her up against a goat pen when we first got there, so that she was standing solidly on the ground, holding onto the wire for a good look at the animals. She was so into it this year. On her own, she bent down, grabbed a fistful of straw, poked it through the gate and then reached for the animal when it freed the snack from her hands to give it a pat on the head. She looked up at the camera with an ear-to-ear grin when two more full sized goats and a baby no bigger than a basketball came tumbling over too. She bent down for more, and she figured out how to distribute the straw among all of them fairly. Some for this one… Then some for that one… And some for the little guy too. Then she’d start again with the first, giggling contagiously the whole time.

We went apple picking and cider-doughnut picnicking in the grass and hay riding. She had a friendly donkey lick her hand, a horse swish it’s tail in her face, and a turkey gobble huffily at her brother who could have peed himself over the sound. Spencer even hung her upside down into the pigpen so that she could pat a pig-belly over the gate. We played in the sandbox, then fumbled through Mary and Matthew’s favorite inflatable obstacle course near the concessions and played a few fall games they had set up, like golfing for gourds. Mary even took her through the haunted house and haystack maze. It was awesome, and Scarlett loved it as much as any of us.

Last year when we went, she napped against my chest the whole time, snuggled into the wrap, barely weighing a thing. She came out only to pose, crumpled like a raisin in the sun, on a haystack and some pumpkins.

In the last week and a half, Scarlett’s hit quite a developmental growth spurt. She started finally crawling on her hands and knees, pulling herself up on furniture, and even scaled the staircase herself, twice. She’s also using a tightly pointed finger to skim the lines of text in her favorite books to pretend she’s reading, and is able to pick out the right word when we play with our YOUR BABY CAN READ flashcards about 70% of the time. (I never did these with Matthew -- But I totally wish I had, we love them!) Also -- get this, she’s snapping! Well, okay, she’s trying very hard to snap. But still, it’s pretty cool. Needless to say, her ability to enjoy the trip yesterday was heightened a great deal from even what it would have been a month ago.


~~~

I think this has been the most incredible year I’ve ever witnessed come full circle.



Baby, Baby Scarlett - A few days old (Fall 2010)



There aren’t really words to describe how it felt to see these two pictures next to one another on the screen of my computer once I got home -- but I will say, it was a very close second only to the trip itself.

Not-So-Baby Scarlett - A few days shy of a year! (Fall 2011)

Powerful.

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Dear Scarlett,

In four days, you’ll have your first birthday. This letter isn’t about that, though. This one’s a little tougher. It’s about the month that came before, the eleventh month. Last night mom-mom took you and I shopping for birthday clothes. An outfit for your pictures, an outfit for your party. We raided The Children’s Place, and Baby Gap and Gymboree for the pretties little ensembles that we could find; from socks and hats to jeans and faux fur jackets… all in twelve month sizes.

It isn’t that you’re twelve months that made picking out those clothes bizarre to me. It’s that you actually fit them; clothes that aren’t six months behind your actual age. It’s strange still to hold up clothes that have been hanging in your closet for months and months waiting for you to grow into them, and to be able to tell without even putting something over your head now that you’ve outgrown it. Over the course of this month you’ve actually grown into some of those clothes, and then back out of them again within a matter of days. I take clothes down by the fistful every week to box up and give away. It used to feel good to do that. Now it just serves as a unrelenting reminder, like a taunt that you ever had to catch up in the first place. Today I’ll be so happy to hang up these new clothes because I’m more ready than ever for a fresh start.

In four days, you’ll be one. I’ll be honest, it’s been difficult for me to find the words to you for this month’s letter, Scarlett, which is why it’s four days before your first birthday that I’m willing myself to write it. Sometimes I have so much bubbling up inside of me about it I could burst - even now. And other times I recognize again that you being alright is the only thing that matters, so I just want to put it all behind me. I have feelings about this month that make me breathless with joy, so I want to share them. Whenever I try to though, I’m gripped suddenly with remembering that the only way I could have reached those feelings was by making to other side of a time when I was scared for you. And I never - I mean never - want to remind myself about that, not even if it was a gateway to something wonderful.

I can tell myself it’s good because it was that time - that being scared for you - that saved you, but I can’t make myself feel good about it.

I think about you being twelve or twenty-two someday, and I know that it’s stupid to care this much about telling you. I think about how small a hiccup like this, that happened when you were too small to even remember, will matter to someone your age. I think about that and I can’t imagine not wanting to tell you about when you were sick… Because by the time you’re old enough to be told this silly little story, that’s all it’ll be: a story. But even knowing that, when I sit down to write about the eleventh month of your life, addressing it to you, it just feels like I’m not ready. I don’t know why, but for some reason, the healthier you get, the harder it is for me to accept that this ever happened to you in the first place.

It was in the eleventh month of your life that you got better. But it was also in the eleventh month of your life that I really saw for the first time how sick you actually were. You recovered so powerfully, that with every new thing you had the strength to do, I saw all of the things you were being held back from. And they were huge, like the steps of an elephant. It wasn’t just pulling yourself up on the coffee table, or trying to stand on my lap. It was things like reacting to Daddy for the first time, by squealing his name when he walked in the door; or laughing like a loon when I hid behind a teddy and popped out with a silly face. These were things you always wanted to do, but your body wouldn’t let you. It took every ounce of energy you had, just to keep you alive. You couldn’t exert it on squealing or laughing. You couldn’t waste it on feeling something powerful.

You should see the clothes we got you. I’ve never been so excited by a material thing in my life. Not ever. Not my wedding ring, not Matthew’s baptism certificate, not Mary’s most hard-earned A. I look at these clothes and I imagine you inside of them, all put together in your first birthday outfit, eating cupcakes off of picnic table in the park; I see you being strong and exuberant and completely yourself, so happy it’s infectious, and I love these clothes for being part of that image, the way that people love Christmas trees and ocean waves.

I just want to let you know, Scarlett, that this month of your life has been one of the most powerful 30 days of mine. And that even though sometimes feeling something powerful can be scary, or hard, and it can even be something a part of you wants to forget, it is something I don’t want you to take for granted. There is no doubt in my mind that next weekend will hold one of the very happiest day of my life, because you will be glowing with health and beaming with life of your own. But this month was good too, daughter, because it held you. And you are a powerful something to hold.

And that will always be something to celebrate.



Love, (love, love, love, love, love)
Mommy.

Surviving A Family Like Mine, and Living to Blog About It.

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(Everyday around 4:00 the neighborhood kids collect around our driveway. Matthew, Mary, Cheyenne, Mason, Daisia, Kaitlyn, a couple of baby-sisters and Matthew's best friend in the wide, wide world, Jake, for chalk, bubbles, football and crafts. By the way, Matthew is loyally devoted to the older blonde at his side. He very much beleives, without anyone planting the idea in his head, that he's going to marry her when he turns six.)


Even if home schooling Matthew were the only thing going on in my life, it would be an overwhelming experience. So when things started to go nuts between Scarlett’s health issues and then Spencer’s accident, I immediately felt for Matthew… Knowing that home schooling him would be the first thing in our lives to fall off the priority list, if something had to.

It can be exhausting when every person in your family needs you on your toes. Scarlett, for example, was determined to have a gross motor delay that requires her to be seen more frequently by the doctor, and Child Development Watch is suggesting now that she even start physical therapy to catch up. Spencer’s still on watch for seizures; for the blood clot in his lung to possibly get worse; and for a subsequent brain bleed, so he’ll be out of work for a total of eight week and pending. Even Mary is adding to the grey in my hair now by coming home from school everyday positively floating on all of the attention she’s getting from the boys at her new school. She doesn’t know it, but sometimes I think she’s in as much danger going to school with eighth grade boys as Spencer, who’s still at risk for a brain bleed if he yells or strains too hard to take a shit.

Compared to what everyone else is going through, it almost seems ridiculous that schooling a three-year-old who already knows how to read and to write, should be any kind of a priority at all. But to me it is. Last year when it first came to my attention that Matthew was learning things at a faster pace than what was normal for his age, I borrowed four thick library books on the subject of gifted children, trying to figure out if I was a nutcase or not for thinking that Matthew might fit the mold. I returned them having been bombarded from cover to cover to cover with tale of the sorry state of gifted education, and how it’s exactly the “last priority” attitude that got us here in the first place. I decided then that I wouldn’t let that be the case with my kid. That Matthew being different wouldn’t make his educational interests any less of a priority to me than they would be if he were only just now beginning to put sounds to letters of the alphabet.

Above all else, I don’t want to lose sight of what it means for him to be three. That’s my highest priority when it comes to doing this. But Matthew’s learning at a late kindergarten level now -- which is not unheard of, but is certainly not typical for a three year old -- and that makes it hard. He’s reading more than a hundred words on sight, he’s writing a growing number of words on his own, and he’s able to build sentences with me at the pocket chart with our word cards. He can read and record information by bar graph, write out and solve simple equations, and he can both recognize and make specific fractions using pictures and objects already. The kid’s just on fire.

We’re even six chapters into Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, (I mean, we’re talking a twenty-some chapter book I know adults who read.) and not only is he actually able to keep up with this massive load of naked text, he’s made me read one of the chapters six times in one week because he loved it so much. This doesn’t make him Rainman or anything, but home schooling him does require special attention, and an understanding of what it means to be this kind of different … all without losing sight of what it is, and what it should be, to be three.

Which means counterbalancing a lot of this organized learning nonsense with a solid amount of good, hard, peer-interactive play. Which of course, for me, just means surrendering even more time and even more energy, and even more precious, dying brain cells to the cause of educating Matthew right. Or at least, not screwing him up; I’ll take that.

As kind of an exercise for myself, I decided to make nothing mandatory for him this year. Nothing. To see how much of our home schooling activities he’d do by choice, if I weren’t pushing him at all. I’ve also decided to fill our day with at least a few activities that don’t focus on an end product, or on any kind of right or wrong answer. But on good old-fashioned, creative fun -- which I knew to expect off the bat (as these idealistic fantasies of mine usually are) would probably be a lot easier said than done.

Actually, though, it wasn’t. In fact I couldn’t believe with the extra workload around here, how easily Matthew’s schooling weaved into the day. Of course, by now part of it’s just us falling into a routine and part of it’s his own enthusiasm, but I think a lot of it’s the simplicity, too, which makes me proud. We’ve finally found our place, I think; a place where home schooling isn’t just something we’re trying to do, but something we’re actually -- dare I say -- succeeding at.

Obviously, things are pretty neurotic around here so recording all of it in writing has definitely slowed down. On top of everything else, we get visitors on a daily basis who want to check in on Spencer and the baby, so keeping the house presentable isn’t something I even have the luxury of letting slip for a while. Plus, keeping ourselves afloat for an entire season out-of-work is taking energy and time and precious, dying brain cells to figure out too -- so finding time to write is hard to come by.

I do plan on doing it though, even though it’s something I kind of struggle with sometimes. It’s frustrating to me personally that so many parents of children like Matthew aren’t comfortable with sharing much, for fear of being put down for pushing their children too hard, or “hot-housing” them, or for bragging. I’m lucky to have had this blog for about two years and to have met nothing but mega-awesome people through it, so I’m hoping this part of my blog will be as well received. I figure that even if it isn’t though, it’s something that means a lot for me to be able to share. Matthew’s my kid, and watching him grow in any way is endlessly fascinating to me, no matter what pace it occurs. This is also a huge part of our life right now, and an interesting facet of our relationship. I know that if I didn’t include it, looking back on these chronicles someday would feel a little incomplete.

So anyway, until I can get back on my blogging feet, here’s a quick video of Matthew reading a couple of sentences he built himself on the pocket chart; reading a few words of the week, picked from one of the week’s focus stories … as well as the adorableness of his surfboard t-shirt/dinosaur pajama ensemble he most impressively picked out himself: Please enjoy!

The Aftermath.

Pin It His head is shaved now. The day they took off the bandages from surgery, I gasped when I met him in the hall. About a third of his head was shaved. The rest of the hair was still there, framing gashes the accident left, and a long, fresh, surgical scar half a foot long. His skin was zipped together with creepy black stitches in this massive U shape, like someone had used his own skin to sew a pocket onto his head. He was being walked by a nurse; taking slow, hulking steps, hunched over and holding on. When he came home, his aunt met us at the house to cut the rest of his hair off, and I gave him a bath.

Three times a day, I bring a flashlight to his face, and shine a light into his eyes to check for normal dilation.
“Puff out your cheeks,” I tell him. “Stick out your tongue. Smile.”

He’s susceptible to seizures; post-traumatic, post-operative and post-concussive, for like, up to three months. We were home already, and these first two weeks back were supposed to be the most critical, they said. He should make a full recovery with enough rest, but they can’t promise a seizure won’t happen or that his personality or memory won’t be effected to some degree. And that was supposed to be the worst of it.

The biggest change was that he needed to have the neurological assessment done three times a day, but I could do it myself, so he came home.

“Close your eyes. Now hold your arms out in front of you like Superman.
Pull my fingers. Push my hands.
Bring your arms out to the side.
Now touch the tip of your nose with each index finger, one at a time.”
I lay my hands underneath of the balls of his feet, “Push down.” Place them over the tops, “Now up.”
I jokingly ask if he remembers my name, but I really pay attention to the answer.

It’s the memory thing that scared me the most, only because I know how much something like that would piss him off… Well, not only, I guess, but mostly. The personality shift is already there, so even though it scared me the most to begin with, I know now that I can manage it. His mood swings are hard to keep up with, but not impossible. When his patience is short, I know it’s not his fault, and that in another twenty minutes he’ll be on the other side of it; unexpectedly soft-spoken, and feeling awful for making this any harder on the people helping him than it already has to be.

By Friday morning he was still hocking up blood, and that’s when we knew that something wasn’t right. It was early on his second day home, and this was the sixth time I was seeing blood come out of his mouth. I called the doctor and got an urgent call back saying to get to the Emergency Room, like yesterday.

A CT scan showed a that he had a pulmonary embolism; one of the most severe complications of brain surgery. A blood clot in his lung, a potentially fatal condition. Apparently the third most common cause of death in hospitalized patients.

An ultrasound showed more in his legs, which is where the clot in his lungs had originated from. He’s normally so active that a few day’s rest made his blood clot up all over the place, and one of the clots traveled into his lung -- which could have killed him while we were home, thinking everything was fine. He was readmitted. Having just had surgery for a brain bleed, blood thinners can’t be used to treat the clot. So yesterday they operated on him a second time. They put a filter inside of him, and made him lie on his back for four hours wearing the same vibrating boots he’s been wearing since the accident -- boots that were supposed to be a precaution to prevent clots from forming in the first place. The filter should block anymore clots from reaching his lungs, brain or heart, but nothing can be done about the one that’s already there… They say it’s too small to require treatment beyond blood-thinner, and again, blood-thinner is not an option for post brain-surgery patients.




Last night wasn’t anything like the day that came a week before it. He was able to really eat for the first time in a week, the first time at all in almost three days, so I came back to the hospital with Mexican food he’d been craving since Friday and we ate chili rillanos and Spanish rice over a bedside tray on wheels. We talked about how much we miss each other and how I kinda like his head shaved again… laughed about the kids more than anything, and spent every-so-often assuring one another that everything would be fine, and life would get back to normal soon enough. I’m not in any rush, I told him. This is life, I said, and right now living it with you is all I want out of it.

I haven’t told anyone this, but on that night a week ago, Spencer and I came back from a wedding, and I got on the motorcycle with him for the first time. He didn’t want me to -- not without a helmet or him having his full endorsement, or the three-hundred dollar sissy-bar on the back being installed yet -- but I told him I could do it… just around the block. It was dark, and I wasn’t dressed for it and I was terrified, but I needed a little excitement. We arranged a sitter for the kids that night not just because of the wedding, but because Spencer decided I needed to get out… said I was getting Cabin Fever from being so cooped up with the kids, and I thought you know, he’s right. It had to be a little dangerous. I needed to be a little scared. My life is so stale anymore, I complained to him out in the driveway, smiling my very best pretty, pretty please without any words at all.

He let me on, and my heart raced. I mean, I was gripped with fear. Fear like I’d never felt before then. My legs had never felt so bare and exposed in all my life, ripping down the road, between cars and speed bumps and things we might not see in the black of the neighborhood (a neighborhood I’d never cared about being unlit before this night). I felt absolutely petrified and rightfully unsafe in shorts and a tank top on this loud and unfamiliar thing. My arms went a little numb with fear that someone would back out of their driveway and my skin would come tearing off my body on the blurry road beneath me. But I clung to him, trusting that he would keep me safe until we made it home.

Now here I am, taking care of him, utterly too aware of just how much this life is not in anyone’s control. His safety is not my hands anymore than mine was in his the night before the accident that almost killed him; that still threatens us even this morning, in the aftermath of all the damage.

The funny thing is, I don’t know if I regret getting on the bike with him the night before. The logical side of my brain - that nagging side that usually owns my every thought, even when I wish it wouldn’t - knows that I should, that I really was tempting fate by getting on there and saying to hell with what happens. I need to feel it for myself, even if it is terrifying. But, stupid as it sounds, instead I found myself saying to him last night, over our Mexican dinner at the hospital, ‘if I never get on it again it’ll probably be too soon -- but at least I got to feel it once.’

Oddly enough, he understood exactly how I felt.

Spencer Was Hit On The Motorcycle.

Pin It “Yeah, you go ahead,” I said. “I’ll be right behind you.”

The first thing in ages -- beyond ages -- he’d ever done for himself, was buy a Harley. His permit let him practice off of major highways, without a passenger. He ate, slept, and breathed this thing. He couldn’t believe it was really his, he kept saying. For weeks the only thing out of his mouth was all of the things we’d do with this bike; was getting a helmet, a sissy-bar so I could ride, and pipes. And how he couldn’t believe it was really his. My husband isn’t an easily excited man; this thing… this thing did it.

His parents watched the kids for us all night, but we needed to be there by 9:00 a.m. to pick them up. I’d follow in the car so that he could ride the bike. I’ll be right behind you, I said. But on my way out the door I stopped to feed the cat, and then I knocked out some dishes while the house was still quiet. And then I left.

An officer flagged me away. Turn around. My heard stopped. It was right outside of his parent’s turn.

No. No, I was only being dramatic. It probably wasn’t even an accident. My heart didn’t race, my palms didn’t sweat. I took seven, then turned onto forty from another direction. I kept the radio off, but I knew he was fine. He’s always fine. I never really thought for even a second, it could be my husband. That while I was doing the dishes, he was flipping lifelessly over a car.

I could see the officer from this side of the accident when I pulled into the neighborhood. A red car parked sideways in the road. My legs went numb crunching into the drive. The bike wasn’t there. The bike wasn’t there. The bike wasn’t there.

I interrupted her. Where is Spencer! Confusion. Shrug.

I slammed into the door, I tried to say, THERE WAS AN ACCIDENT. I couldn’t get the words out, just noise. Just noise again. Why couldn’t I talk? I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t walk. ALICIA! ALICIA! She screamed after me, coming outside. “You can’t go. You can’t drive like this. Stay with the kids.”

Mary asked one time what was wrong, but she had to know, and she didn’t push. I took the baby from the highchair. I ignored the question. I walked to the door to watch my mother in law peel out of the driveway, take the corner hard. So much noise was coming out of me, and I couldn’t stop it. It wasn’t crying. It was me trying to breathe. Trying not to fall. Trying not to scare the kids. Trying not to drop the baby. Still trying to breathe.

We prepared for this, Spencer and I, after the school bus accident that killed Zach. How we would tell the kids. What we would do if they were around when one of us had to react. We wouldn’t have the luxury of losing it. This was part of being a parent. It was bigger than being a wife or a husband, we agreed, at least in this moment. Mind over matter, we promised each other, for the sake of the babies. And this was the day. It wasn’t the school bus accident. That was only a prelude to the real thing. Zach died to prepare me for this. Spencer died today. He’s dead and now I have to tell the kids. Somehow I have to tell the kids. I started to fall.

But first I have to hold the baby. First, this is all I have to do. Remember to breathe. My hand is over my mouth, to keep the noise in. I can’t react yet. I have the kids. Keep the noise in. Don’t’ let them see this.

The SUV could have flipped, she took the corner so fast. Tires screamed. Then she was screaming. In the kitchen, screaming, “A MOTORCYCLE. A MOTORCYCLE. THEY WON’T LET ME IN! ALICIA, IT’S HIM! ALICIA, IT’S HIM!” She grabbed the phone, calling the hospital. “My son, Joseph Stucky was in a motorcycle accident. Is he there?”

I clung to the baby. I couldn’t look in the direction of the kids. They were watching a movie in the connected room. Mary heard it all, she had to have, but she never come in the room, never asked what was happening. Matthew giggled over the movie Tangled. I couldn’t hear the movie, but I heard him laughing.

An officer called my phone. I was on my way to the hospital. Trauma.

He was in a neck brace, on a stretcher. Blood, everywhere. The tips of his fingers to the end of his toes; hair was missing from his head, where the pavement shaved it off. His fingers glittered with shards of tiny glass. His face was swollen, his teeth were chipped and crooked. His head wasn’t the shape it was supposed to be.

Blood on his brain. Family poured in, grabbing me, hugging him. Crying in corners and into his chest. This is what kills people who make it to the hospital, we all knew it. Everyone there knew what it was like to lose someone like this. Everyone, but me. I realized he was scared. A reaction no one had ever seen on him so it was hard to recognize. He was cold and chattering, asking why he was shaking. If it were happening to anyone else, he would have known something like that. He wasn't being himself. He told me not to stop touching him, even when I knew it hurt.

I held his hand, clasped in mine against my stomach while a nurse prepped him for surgery. She wrote a B in black marker on his temple, above his ear. Stroke, they said. Brain surgery. They always include me, like I’m going through it too. They did it with Scarlett and now they were doing it with him. Nodding at me, to make sure I understood what was happening when they talked. They put a cap on him, they wheeled him away, they walked me to a room where I fell asleep three hours later, two chairs next to his dad, after everyone else left for the night. We woke up at 2:00 a.m. to see him, bandages over his skull; a clear hose, draining a golf ball swelling of blood and traces of cardinal red tissue from underneath. Like the feeding tube that Scarlett had, but worse. Worse because it was blood and worse because this time, I had to leave.

I came home to an empty house last night. A puzzle on the floor. A wine glass sitting out from the end of our date last night. Biscuits on the counter we left before we could eat this morning. The remnants of our life scattered in and out of every room, still with the quiet of an empty house. This could have been it. I could have lost him.

I fed the cat and I put away the dishes before I went to bed, thinking about the day. About clinging to the baby, imagining what his mother was turning that corner to see. About losing all sense of reason in the panic, when I always told myself I wouldn’t… I wouldn’t do that to my kids. I should have thought about them. No, I should have thought more about Spencer. No, I should have thought about his mom, his poor mom, like she thought of me.

He was sitting at a red light when it happened, when I was standing right here, doing the dishes. The car came at him at full speed, never even tapped the breaks, never saw him sitting there. Spencer looked down at his right mirror in just enough time to know that this was going to kill him. No time to react. No helmet to protect him. The bike shot our from him like a rocket, landed thirty yards away. He remembers slamming into the windshield, like a dream. He flipped over the length of the car then skid for a ways. Road rash ripped his t-shirt and shaved his skin. Witnesses say he got up immediately, his body in shock, stood himself up and left a bloody handprint on the back of the car, catching his balance. He walked to the median, and he collapsed.

I should have been there. I should have been there.

Last night I fell asleep with the cat thinking, this could have been my life, wondering what we were supposed to learn from all this. I don’t know the answer to that. But I know I should have been there for him. I should have been there, and I don’t ever want this house to be quiet again.