The Scream Heard 'Round the World

Last night, my mom let out a blood-curdling scream from her room. I knew my daughter was up there with her, and as I ran up the stairs in a blind panic I just knew that the time had finally arrived.

My daughter was injured, dead, or dying. All the panicky, paranoid fears I have had, had come to fruition.

The world absolutely stopped.

The five second span of time it took me to dash out of the kitchen and up the stairs was enough time for me to play out every single disastrous and fatal scenario that haunts my darkest nights. The palpable fear of losing one of my children.

I could taste it in my mouth.

I am sure we will laugh about it one day. Not soon, but some day. LittleBird had opened up a bottle of dark maroon nail polish and inadvertently cast its contents in a sweeping path on my parent's new carpet. A perfectly reasonable event for my mother to scream like a banshee. I would have done the same.

How this played out left me with several important things to ponder.

If I had done this as a child, I would have had the wooden spoon on my butt so fast and gotten the spanking of a lifetime. I would have been yelled at. Berated. My mom never yelled. She never scolded my daughter. LittleBird was absolutely terrified because she knew that she had done something awful. My mom told me to go comfort her because she did not understand what she had done. And when I brought my daughter back into the room, my mother told her that she knew it was an accident, and that everything was going to be okay.

When I put my sweet child to bed that night, she looked at me and said I made a very bad choice, but Gramma still loves me.

It wasn't a question, but a statement. It made me feel good to know that she understood that even when she does something wrong, she was still loved.

I am proud of my mom for not flipping out. As I said, this would not have been the case thirty years ago. I am proud of my mom for having grown as a person.

As for me, the question remains When will the fear stop? When will that visceral fear of losing my children disappear? At every stage of their development, there is new danger. From the choking on food, to running into the street, to kidnapping, to mobbing at school, to driving in a car with friends. The list is never-ending, and a person could go mad thinking about it all.

I aged a lot this weekend. Those five seconds of pure terror took five years of my life away. I am just grateful that my daughter is alive, well and no worse for the wear. Truth be told, I pray every night that I will not hear that scream again.