“Out of a clear blue sky.” I think that means you have no idea that something would happen. You’re holding a baby and all of a sudden the baby bucks and lands head first on the concrete floor. That happened once. Liam suddenly launched himself right off his father’s lap. He turned bright red and yelled for all he was worth.
When I dropped my cousin M. on the floor (I was six and she was a baby), my aunt told me that M. squalling was a good sign since it meant she was ok. It did? After that I had to be sitting down to hold M. Well, when Liam squalled mightily, I remembered my aunt’s words and tried to reassure his father that Liam was ok. I looked up head injuries in the child care book and enumerated the steps we needed to take to notice should he have in fact suffered a severe head injury, but most of them involved waiting for nausea or excessive sleepiness. Despite my reassurances, Liam’s father was inconsolable. I realized all of a sudden that I was trying to take care of him somehow and that he really was not about to let me do that. I decided that I needed to get out of the house with Liam, so into the stroller he went and we set off to find our favorite night roaming dog that lived near the post office and sometimes emitted wonderful howls. We found the dog, but he chose not to howl that evening despite the imitation siren noises I made trying to provoke him to do so. His howling invariably reduced Liam to giggles, and giggles would be a definitive sign that Liam was ok.
We went into the post office and Liam had a grand time crawling around, pulling himself up on his stroller, pushing it around in circles and other such toddler business. It was surreal to be in the well-lit but deserted post office in the middle of the night only a block from home, feeling unable to go home.
A phrase jumped out at me from a Gulf War memoir I am reading: “the divorcée’s caustic revisionist history.” The phrase immediately threw all my memories of that marriage into question. Do I write revisionist history? It is possible that in my memories now, I focus more on the bad aspects than I do on normal life. To some extent that is because I worked so very hard not to see the unhappy moments. I am by nature fatalistic, by which I mean that I easily accept what is and figure out how to make the best of it. It’s a sort of unanswerable question. I’ll never have perfect clarity on any aspect of personal history; all I can do is trust my memories. At some point, when I am very old, I plan to go back and read through journals that I sporadically kept over the years. We’ll see if their contents match the stories I tell.
I do remember fairly clearly that night at the post office. I thought about how strange it was not to want to go home with my child because his father was there wanting something from me that I not only could not give him but also was too busy at that moment to even attempt to give him. I just wanted to play with Liam in the empty post office. I also remember very clearly that when we did go home, I tried to give comfort and reassurance again, but stopped trying almost immediately and went to bed.
