The Little Things

"Kiki" holds Tallulah for the first time.

A full week or more has passed since my last post. Tallulah has visited the doctor twice now, leaving both times worse than when she arrived. First the dreaded heel stick, the nurse squeezing my daughter's heel to transfer blood onto a sheet of paper. Then a hepatitis B shot yesterday. The awful delay between the needle puncture and the impending cry was heart wrenching, though I have become more stoic in my regard to Lula's experience of pain. "Tough love" I believe it's called. More like callus pragmatism. I know that if I begin to wince with empathy at her pain now, its likely to be a slippery slope and I'll never stop crying until I'm dead.

Lu is a "beautiful baby" in her doctor's words. "They're not all like that, you know," he admits. Do all parents get that, or are there exceptions in which the doctor comes into the room and throws up his hands in disgust?

"You want me to work on that?"

"Gadzooks, that's one heinous child you've made"

But they would still say congratulations upon their exit. And so they should. Our pediatrician is renown for his excellence in care. He also speaks faster than a tobacco auctioneer on speed. Felicity is a nurse, used to hyper-intelligent physicians who use shorthand for English. She understood him perfectly. I thought he was Greek at first. It took me a good thirty seconds to realize that he was speaking in a New England dialect, but also starting more sentences than his mouth could comfortably hold. I began to imagine the exam room as a kind of stage for doctors. They should have a warm up act precede them:

"Ladies and gentlemen, and you there, little girl. Hold on to your ears. You're about to see the greatest doctor in the city; he talks fast, he moves slow, he makes jokes that take a second to get. He's not Greek! You'll love him, (except you, little girl,) heeeeeerrre's Dr. Blah!" In bursts the wry ham.

I have utmost respect for good doctors. I, who am squeamish beyond the pale, could not handle the trauma of dealing with sick people, much less children. When I performed as a clown at Children's Hospital, we began in the terminal ward. Thank god I was only wearing a plastic clown nose, otherwise my makeup would have run down my face. Simultaneously staring into death through the eyes of life was harrowing. But the spirit of a child is buoyant and only knows what it is given. These kids ranged in age from 4 to 18. They were all dying and they knew it, in whatever degree of abstraction they were capable. And they did all they could to retreat into any shred of normalcy available. Humor was a saving grace. They all laughed when I made prat falls, or bumped into nurses, or simply made faces from behind the bed. It was like the most fabulous torture I could imagine.

One child, perhaps nine or ten years old, lay in an isolation room. He could only watch me through the glass separating his fragility from the invisible hoard of spores and germs floating all around me outside. I had to keep ducking out of sight to wipe my eyes, but each time I came back to the glass his face shined with a grin that defied the death seeping in. I sat in my car for an hour sobbing before I was able to drive away.

Now I am a parent and I am terrified for my child. But that is not what I will give her. I will give her my courage, my humor, perhaps my knowledge, or at least the admittance of my lack thereof. Someday I might admit to her my fear of our awful fragility, our human condition. But that will not be until she can openly admit and witness that terrible beauty for herself. Until then, we build a mighty fortress with the little things.