It was sunny that afternoon when my six-year-old daughter, Eve, came in the front door with blood running down the side of her face. There were other signs of what had happened to her but all I saw was the blood. A thick, jagged line of red running from somewhere under her bangs down to her chin and into somewhere I couldn’t yet see.
I was lying on the couch and as she walked toward me down the hallway and I just stared at her, trying to process what I was looking at. Like I had woken from a nightmare in the middle of the night by the cat knocking something down in the bathroom. Not knowing what was real and not for a moment.
And then like light switches being flipped, my senses returned one-by-one. I could see her pink and purple leopard print bike helmet with the cat ears had slid to the back of her head, the strap tight across her neck where it shouldn’t be. More bright red blood growing out of the shoulder of her t-shirt. On her hands and the front of her legs. I heard her wails and my husband Chris’s voice. I couldn’t’ hear his words but I knew he was behind her, both of them coming closer to me. I felt the weight of my body still sitting on the couch, the tingling of my skin, the hot, fast breath coming out of my mouth.
Perhaps out of the frustration of seeing all of this but not knowing what it was or what it meant to any of us, I let out a scream. And then Eve started screaming, too, and then Chris. But Chris’s screams were at me, telling me to calm down and not scare her. All the screaming only served as final confirmation that she was badly hurt and I buried my face in my hands. I looked away from my bleeding daughter.
It’s hard to imagine I felt shame in such a quick moment but I think I did. I think I was keenly aware of the fact that I was still sitting on the couch with my face in my hands while my daughter was bleeding in the hallway. And so I willed myself to get up and go to her. I lifted her bangs from her face to reveal a gash on her forehead. I inched up her top lip to see if she still had her teeth. I smoothed her curly hair away from the gash on her eyebrow. I peeled the shirt from her shoulder to assess the depth of that gash. I kissed the top of her head and told her everything would be ok.
I tended to my daughter when everything in me was telling me to turn from her, shut down, tell Chris to call me when it was all okay, when she was cleaned up and smiling and eating a popsicle.
Would a mother who had not lost a child like I have gotten up from that couch immediately to see what was wrong? Would a non-bereaved mother’s senses have shut down entirely like mine had? Would she have shielded her eyes or screamed herself? Would she have seen just scrapes and not gashes? Seen blood and went for the Band-Aids and not to call 9-1-1?
Will my instinct as a mother always be to prepare for death of my children?
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