Studies Show That the Breakdown of Parenting into Quantifiable Units Demonstrates That it is Largely Chore-Based

I'm thinking about parenting, and little boys, and autism spectrum disorder, and I'm thinking, again, about the way social media is a place to telegraph triumphs in the name of positivity while all of the challenges often remain unacknowledged, neither tweeted nor prominent displayed in status updates.

However, in the interest of full disclosure, you must know there are days where my five-year-old boy has me on the brink of a nervous breakdown. I don't know whether you can chalk it up to age, gender, and/or diagnosis, but being in the house with him is maddening: he doesn't talk to me about his day, he doesn't draw at the table with paper and markers, he doesn't race his Hot Wheels down the long hallway; he pinballs off the walls and furniture while making repetitive, nonsense vocalizations, and this is interspersed with opening and closing the microwave twenty times, sliding open and closed the closet doors, opening and closing the freezer, and turning the sink water on and off over and over and over again. His energy is intense and odd, and his toys remain relatively unplayed with. Then, when we leave the house, he's always afflicted with the ants-in-his-pants jitters, and if I don't keep my eye firmly on him, he'll be gone. It happened twice at the aquarium today. I was looking at a fish, and he was already in another exhibit.

Beyond this, it seems important to also mention that parenting-- which, contrary to what you may have heard-- is not always "rewarding." Perhaps, yes, in the long run when our children are moulded, with our help, into high-functioning adults: I'll use the word "rewarding" then. In the meantime, in the interest of honesty, parenting often feels like a burdensome chain of chore-based activities. From the preparation of breakfast, which must be accompanied by teaching moments (How do you ask to leave the table? Use your napkin. Don't scratch the table with your fork. And so on.) all the way to reading that bedtime story, which I can't skip because of how important it is to his future as a reader. Frankly, my friends, I'm exhausted. Parenting (on a case-by-case basis, of course) can have you close to pulling out your hair or bursting into tears. Or drinking too much wine at the end of the day, which is better, I guess, than bringing a sippy cup of gin to the mall for a mommy playdate.

And yet, and yet, and yet. It's all so paradoxical, isn't it? It's not as though I've ever thought, "Send him back." Or "Why did I become a mother?" Or "Get me the hell out of here." In fact, anytime I've ever felt that my motherhood was threatened, ever worried about my son's well-being, I've become distraught. I've wept from the immensity of my love for my boy. He is my life now, for better or for worse, and I wouldn't trade him for more nights alone in the bathtub with a pile of soggy New Yorkers stacked on the floor next to me.

Which gets me to the other half of the better or worse equation. Of course we're going to telegraph those triumphant moments, the betters for the worsts. Because those moments feel like shining achievements of sanity. Those are the "aha!" moments that remind us why we ever gave up going to shows, taking quiet trips to the art museum, or enjoying loosey-goosey nights out with the girls. Take, for example, this morning: My son walks into the kitchen and says, "I was a baby in a different house, but this is the house where I'm going to grow up to be like daddy, just like a seed grows into a tree." And I was like, "Whoa, way to be profound before I've even had my coffee."

Well…I Didn't See That Coming

Shitmotherfuckerfuck. Not, of course, that such profanity was screamed or whimpered, although I was surprised to hear myself whimpering having never heard such a thing before. Yet this is the kind of language I imagined my vagina would use if it could speak. My uterus and its sick heaving, me vomiting over the side of the bed as I approached transition, my asshole puckering and then failing to hold in the shit as I pushed it and my son out at three-thirty in the morning during a particularly cold March morning in Connecticut. Fuck. Motherfucker. Shit. Because birth is just as profane as it is profound. 

I suppose there are the occasional women out there who have the kind of birthing experiences to be envied. Something more like poofing feathery angels from their twats while they scrunch up their motherly faces all slick with a comely sheen of sweat, and then those babies turn into children that flit about and charm the world with their glitter glue and spangled soccer trophies. That’s okay. I don’t need to wish them into the cornfield anymore. After all, we’re made to forget the pain, to abstract it so that we don’t even have the words to describe the way our bodies are mangled. 

But if I had to describe it, I would tell the whole story. That, for example, the birthing suite and it’s tastefully muted walls, beyond a certain point, were details lost in the rage of childbirth. That the Joni Mitchell I had playing— the candy of her voice— could not be heard over my retching and keening. In fact, all of the ways that I thought I had prepared myself were as effective as closing a slider door on the tsunami crushing towards me. 

Oh, but once I couldn’t handle listening to myself whimper anymore, I called it and asked for the epidural. And the anesthesiologist swept in like a goddess in institutional blue. I sat on the end of the bed and leaned over as still and trembling as I could manage between throes, and the thick, blissful needle slipped deep into my back while I hugged the ball of my as-yet unborn son. Then…numbness. Complete, dead, utter numbness. Because she thought I should get some sleep, the epidural was proceeded by a spinal block, and my legs, the whole bottom half of me, were as rubber as bread dough. 

Thus, it seems the telling should end there. That this is the point where what was should overlay quite nicely on top of what should have been. Epidural. Bam. Birth. But— the word should, it only serves to fuel regret, self-doubt, and worthless obligations. It reminds us that although one’s cervix shouldn’t be torn during childbirth, sometimes it happens. When one commences with the process of pressing a human through a hole that begins as little more than a dimple, one should plan to expect anything. So should can be useful after all.

That, for example, my son’s heart decelerated, the machines binging and my husband going to fetch the nurse. That the nurses and doctor rocked my dead legs back and forth to dislodge my son from the birth canal. That I had to push him out before full dilation so that not only did he tear the opening of my vagina, but he rent my cervix. That he came out as pointy as a pinhead. That the doctor was stitching for so long and the blood loss was so significant, my mother almost passed out. That I would be up for more than thirty-six hours. That I would look pale and bloated in post-partum pictures. That my son, fresh from the womb, slick and a little bit purple, would look me in the face as I floated above the experience. That the minute he latched on to my breast, I became his blubbering fool. That even after all this upheaval and hurt, I would have liked to do it again. That by the time it was possible, I couldn’t.

So consider this a public service announcement, reader. Anticipate the unanticipated. The more you know about not knowing, the better prepared you'll be to be unprepared.

Shoulda. Woulda. Coulda.

Learning to Swim

The swim school is located in a questionable neighborhood of Burbank where safety notices are left on our car by the Burbank police department, and the neighborhood is populated with apartment buildings noted for their dilapidated tan stucco and names such as “The Sea Breeze” or the “Paradise Palms,” but the only part of the names that are accurate are the palms rising up from the parking medians, which serve to remind us that this is, after all, southern California. Yet you’ll find no sign of sea, breeze, or paradise here as summer tries to suffocate Burbank in its smoldering grip.

But once you walk in through the gate of the Lucile Cowle Swim School, all the oppression melts away. Fountains burble, and Canna Lilies bloom from planters. The smell of sun screen permeates the air. Phil Collins drifts out from speakers dotting the stone walls, and parents with cameras sit under large canvas umbrellas as instructors coax children of all ages to become just a little bit less human and a little bit more aquatic. We come every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and the aquariums— a small pool for the babies and a larger pool for the big kids— are teeming with everything from the tiniest minnows to nearly full-grown fish. Some instructors have four-year-olds floating on their backs like otters. Other instructors are cheering on five-year-olds learning to tuck into a dive like penguins in goggles. I watch my son, just four-years-old, leap unafraid off the white diving board into the eight-foot deep water. It is a great and terrifying moment.

According to an article on Slate, Drowning is the number two cause of death in children under the age of fifteen, and the Instinctive Drowning Response doesn't look like drowning. It looks like a person pushing down against the surface of the water, unable to speak, and struggling to breathe. I have a close friend who knows a woman who lost a child to drowning. My brother was on a field trip in high school, and one of his classmates drowned in a pool they were all swimming in when it happened. I read a poem once about drowned twins: five-year-olds clasping hands at the bottom of a neighbor's pool. It's no wonder that some of us parents coach from the sides of the pool. 

My memories of swimming begin in my grandparent’s pool on Fremont Street, when all the neighborhood kids would come over on the hot days to play. I floated around in the kind of orange life-vest you wear on boats, but floating around wasn’t enough for my mother. My swimming lessons were held in the mornings, before summer camp, when the air was still cold. The pools were never heated, and my strongest memories of learning to swim are visceral: gripping a kick board, legs churning, teeth chattering. When the lessons were done, and I was dressed for the day and finally warmed up, I felt a little wrung out and rubbed down by the cold water.

Now I watch my son as he tries to learn how to push off the wall of the pool and glide to his instructor, who offers him the appropriate high-fives when he follows instructions. I watch him kick his legs wildly as his arms flail at the water when he forgets about “big arms and scooping hands.” Every time we visit the pools, he does a little bit better. But sometimes he pushes off the wall, and instead of gliding to his instructor, he goes under. His head is gone, just like that. But then he sputters, laughs, and once again tries to execute the glide, scoop, and kick that constitutes swimming. 

In the rippling oasis of Lucile Cowle’s swim school, I watch some kids sink as their instructors lift them back up to the surface. I watch tiny, blond girls in frilly swimsuits whose spastic movements look like ecstatic drowning, but really it's swimming without coordination, and it's a delightful thing to see. When my son is done with his lesson, I change him into dry clothes and he picks out a red lollipop, which glows in the sun on the way back to our car where a notice about carjacking is pinned under the wiper. 

The Circumstances of Your Birth

Either you were pushed from your mother's womb with great effort or a doctor cut the red lining and lifted you into the glare of hospital lights. Either your mother fed you from her breast or fed you formula like the majority of us 70s babies. In the worst circumstances your mother was gone too early for you to have a memory of her.

Either you were born whole or something happened in utero when cell met cell or during birth, and you've been forced, by nature of your bearing, to rise above a physical or mental handicap. In the worst circumstances, genetics or delivery has rendered you so broken that people avert their eyes when your mother rolls you into the neurologist's office.

Either you were born into a family as an only child, or you had siblings for companions. Either you were happy with this scenario or not. In the worst circumstances, you had a sibling once, but something happened to him or her. You may or may not remember. Your family may or may not talk about what they lost. Photos may or may not be displayed. This feature sometimes hangs like a thread. Pull it, and the whole family falls apart.


Either you were born of good stock, your parents both bright and attractive, neither harboring hidden fuck-ups, or you were born of parents, one or the other (or sometimes both), who struggle with deep-seated dysfunctions that were handed down to them by their parents, and you wonder if you can make it all stop with you. In the best circumstances, nurture overcomes nature, whether its a self-provided nurture or one afforded by family. In the worst circumstances, the defective aspect of your nature has been compounded by a lack of effective nurturing, and you either have no idea that you're a mess, or you have no idea how to clean up the mess that is you, thanks to a lack of both breeding and upbringing.

Either you were born in the best hospital your town has to offer, your mother given a basket of diapers and formula samples, or you were born in a home with a midwife and doula present. In the most remarkable situations you were born in an emergency room when your mother didn't even know she was pregnant, in the back of a cab because your mother waited too long and your father was on duty, or on your mother's kitchen floor because she was single and didn't get help in time. In worse situations, you were born in the grass of an impoverished country where you were sent off to an orphanage to wait, hopefully, for first-world parents you may or may not ever connect with.

Either you were born into a family that pulls you to them, the physical second-nature, all mouth-kisses, bear-hugs, and spooning in your parents' big bed, your mother's breasts as commonplace a sight as the hummingbird feeder in the kitchen widow, or you were raised by a family that was afraid of the body and its affections, and you're still unsure which way to tilt your head when you awkwardly wrap your arms around your father on special occasions. In worst situations, you were never shown tenderness and you've grown up unable to connect in a meaningful way with another human being.

Either you were born into a world where the car seats are Britax and the preschools are competitive, or you were born into a world where your mother has three jobs or no job, your food is government-provided, and you're often shipped off to the house of a grandparent or aunt when your mother or father is deemed an insufficient parent by the state. Many assume you'll amount to nothing. In worst situations, you're born in a country where famine and disease are commonplace, and any opportunities for labor that your mother may have are offered by first-world countries looking to take advantage of the circumstances of her birth.

Or some combination; it's rarely either/or. How blessed are you?

The Other Polarizing Disorder

Sometimes, late at night, well into my second glass of wine, my husband at work and my son sleeping, I mourn the loss of other people’s children. It’s usually during that hour when I’m immobilized by weariness yet unwilling to drag off to the bathroom to brush and wash, so I sit in front of the computer, study the photos of little boys, and have an unhealthy cry for Ronan, the one who died of tay-sachs; for the Staten Island mom whose sons were yanked from her arms by Hurricane Sandy; and for another mother whose entire family was washed away by the Southeast-Asian tsunami. My grief is discriminate; I mirror the bereavement of mothers who had and then who did not have anymore. I pluck stories from around the world about the entire annihilation of motherhood.

Let me tell you something about the way parenthood can change you: It is like an anti-anti-depressant or like a polarizing disorder that doesn’t just swing to and fro but that swings wildly. This is not to say that the opposite of anti-depressed is depressed or that it’s all bad; I’m talking about the loss of casual numbness about anything. Joy, for example, is amplified into something wildly exuberant. Love for a child can make you as giddy as a teenager, with all the angst-y hysteria, plus some added depth. On the other hand, anger is a coiled whip that now sits closer to your hands, and sadness can grab your lungs and squeeze them until your heaving tears in front of your computer at midnight for people you have never met. This sickness of parenthood may just be mine. I don’t know…

Fear, too. And compassion. They become more palpable. At Disney’s California Adventure there is a Ferris wheel that features gondolas on tracks that roll and swing out wildly hundreds of feet in the air above the park. Yesterday my niece and I rode up and around, and what looked like fun on the ground became nauseous, instinctual discomfort. Far below I could see my son asleep in his stroller, his grandmother waiting for us on the bench. Across from us in the gondola a girl visiting from Arizona clutched her father’s jacket in abject terror, the tears gathering but not yet falling. All I could do was talk to her in a low murmur: “It’s okay honey. I know it’s scary. We’ll be on the ground soon. Don’t worry.” And so on. I couldn’t stand to see her like that. I didn’t even know her.

I think this is probably more personal that I can fully grasp. Last summer my son suffered a series of partial seizures, and for a week we knew from his MRI read that something was wrong with him, but we didn’t know whether it was a disorder that would work itself out over time or whether he was showing the beginning signs of a “demyelinating process” that would piece-by-piece disassemble the puzzle of what makes him him. We wouldn’t know until we saw the neurologist. In fact, we’re still not completely positive. I have seen two full-blown febrile seizures that turned a very busy three-year-old into a vegetable for a half-hour. The things I have seen. I’m all too aware of the possibility of losing the one, small person that marks me as someone’s mother, not just from my own experiences with my only child, but also vicariously from others less fortunate, which sounds too mild to describe the catastrophic ending of motherhood.

At amusement parks there is always that game where you’re supposed to climb across a ladder made of rope to win a prize. The rope is anchored in the middle on either end so that the climber must rely on speed and balance to make it across, or the ladder will spin on its one tether and knock the climber off. This is what it feels like to be the parent of an only child. I imagine that two children would be like two tethers at either end, and I could climb across with more confidence, but since I wanted two and only have one, sometimes I feel like I’m spinning around on this rope ladder, and my grip is really compromised. I’m really worried I’m going to slip. I don’t trust my ability to balance.

Dragging My Heels

I dragged my heels around Silverlake Reservoir a little while ago before Michael left for work. The sun was hot but the air was cold, and the San Gabriel Mountains were dusted with snow. The music plugged into my ears and the sunglasses over my eyes just made me feel even more apart from all the other people circling the water. There was a cramping sort of ache in the left side of my chest. I mean literally. Not like I'm making purple prose about sadness. I wondered if I have something wrong with my heart because I've been jittery about mortality lately.

Back home, my son continues to lay around, too sick to get up. My husband has now left for work, and the apartment is flooded with light, but we can't leave to enjoy the cold breeze rustling the leaves of the Eucalyptus. Or we can enjoy the view through the windows. I'll spend the day and night inside chasing my son's fever so he doesn't seize again. Go figure about the jittery part. Meanwhile, we watch Pixar movies from the couch because they make us feel good.

And lately I've been bombarded with bad news about other people's children. I read blogs about sick or hurt children, wanting desperately to believe in impossible miracles for strangers only to learn that the children die. I read articles about Hurricane Sandy on Staten Island, and they remind me about the boys swept from their mother's arms. It seems like I can't escape the reminders of our mortality and how it sometimes, stupidly, just comes down to luck. And today, despite my son's sickness, I think I might be lucky.

But, I don't know. After seven months of trying to conceive a second child, my husband has decided that we're too old and it's too scary and why would we want to push our luck, why would we want to rock the boat. However, I'm not convinced by his argument, logical as it is. It's true, though. At 42 and 46, we're really too old. My body doesn't seem to be cooperating to let this happen as naturally and quickly as it did with my son. But I've become just a hopeless, emotional mess of biological yearning.

So on the one hand I feel lucky to have one beautiful son. I know this. Really, really lucky and grateful.  On the other hand, it looks like I'll only get to have the one. All my eggs in one basket. And it doesn't seem fair that we've really tried to do things in a responsible way, and as a result of that, our age, and all the wisdom that comes with it, is now preventing us from making any more children. I should say that we looked (are looking?) into adoption, but the process, at first glance, seems insurmountable and filled with risk.

Anyway...I'm going to go back to watching Toy Story now. The bright colors are very cheerful...

In Praise of the Mundane

We're deep into summer now, and the iridescent fig beetles will appear in a week to gorge on the overripe fruit. Running lady has grown predictably tan and predictably outpaces me every time I circle the reservoir. The grass grows brown and brittle, and in the afternoons I hide in the shade of a palm tree while Dexter runs through community sprinklers. We punctuate the long, hot days with self-serve frozen yogurt, and reliably the moon comes up behind the hill of houses once the day sweats off its fever. We watch it rise from our chairs around the glass table in the backyard where we drink coconut water and white wine. I've hunkered down into the predictability of existence. Let's praise it. 

Cultivating a love or skill

Let's praise the likelihood that Dexter will ace his preschool skills and transition smoothly into kindergarten, already able to read simple sentences and perform very basic math. Let's assume we'll run into expected disciplinary problems in grade school, and let's expect a few trips to the emergency room for stitches. He'll discover a skill or love and pursue it because that's what we do. Maybe he'll torture us by playing scales on the piano. Maybe he'll need shuttling to swim lessons. Maybe he'll be a math wiz. Let's rightfully figure that middle school will be awkward and painful sometimes, but he'll get through it. We can probably imagine that high school will be both hard and easy, that it could come off without a hitch, that he'll escape unscathed with enough of an education to go to an approved college. We can reasonably expect a part-time job serving burgers at Red Robin or painting houses until graduation. Let's praise the admirable career, even if it misses greatness. Let's cheer for a nice wife and charming kids. Let's weep with gratitude for the boring expectedness of it all. Let's rightly anticipate my son watching me lowered into the ground, and let's suggest he might cry, not because it's tragic, but because he will miss his mother, whose love for him was bottomless. Let's cross our fingers and hope and pray for a simple rolling forward of the years. 

Boy in the Plastic Bubble

Those of us who have had children late in life are accused of helicopter parenting because we keep a watchful, nervous eye on our sons and daughters. If this is true, it may be because we have seen a thing or two in our already long lives that let us know how someone can be fully present one minute and taken away the next. We have been witness to stories of loss, and sometimes those stories are merely once or twice removed from personal experience. Maybe we recognize the ephemeral quality of existence even as we watch our kids swing from the monkey bars. Perhaps we know that parenthood begins and ends with that one little boy panting around the house, pretending to be a dog. Because something bad could happen, and I could go from being a mother to once having been a mother, and that's the saddest narrative I can imagine at this wise and infertile age.

Broken Leg Pouty Face

At fifteen months, Dexter broke his leg. At two, he had a severe allergic reaction. At two and a half, he had a febrile seizure. Add dashes to the timeline of his existence with croup-like coughs, fevers, and the usual bruises. Now, at three, he's had a few incidents that suggest something neurological, but they have been so few as to only be suggestions. And so I watch him closely. This morning he pretended to fall three times in a mock ballet dance. Maybe the other falls were staged, too. Maybe I circle him and whir like the police copters that churn the sky in the high heat of these dependable, ordinary August days. 

Raise your glass of white wine or coconut water with me, dear reader, and let's have a toast for boredom. Cheers to you and your loved ones. 

Never-ending Summer

Poetic Interlude

Febrile

He seized on the interchange

as late sunlight glared off game-day traffic

and I just stopped, mid-lane,

and punched the hazards

as he bucked against the car seat.

But I wouldn't say I watched, couldn't say

I stared, won't say now I saw

when his mouth went slack

and his eyes rolled white

as if I could have recorded

those sights. And today his fever

lingers on his face the way

Vermeer's light loved milkmaids.

His brown eyes brimming like a heifer’s;

His beauty like a doomed

consumptive. He clings like August

clutches the Valley, and I sit

and let my own sweat rise.

How could I do otherwise?

In two days he’ll push away my arms,

so I hold this moment in my gaze

the way I spot heat mirages

wavering off the asphalt.

Platitudes and National Tragedy

I was at the gym yesterday and inundated with television news coverage of the shooting in Colorado. To say that the coverage of the event took the wind out of my sails for the day demonstrates exactly how packaged language fails to express the gravitas of what happened in that movie theater, but because this post gives me the breadth to say as much as I want in as many words as I want, without Twitter-like limitations, let me elaborate:

I began the day worried about Dexter, who had two falling spells in twenty-four hours. The day before yesterday, for no reason, his legs crumpled underneath him and he fell over backwards and banged his head against the pavement. He looked like a marionette gone slack. Then, yesterday morning, he tipped over off his potty on to his side, again while in a still moment, so I was scared. Something was disturbingly wrong. We made a pediatrician appointment for the same day.

Add to this the anxiety and sadness that Dexter has begun to express as he tries to transition from baby to big boy, particularly as it relates to preschool, and I was already feeling blue. Then I learn about this shooting in Colorado, and I felt deflated. That's what I meant by "wind out of my sails." I had no loft. I was dragging like a balloon losing its helium. It felt like I was pushing against an environmental resistance, like walking into a strong wind, but without the obvious presence of wind. I felt boggy with emotion. That's the problem with cliches and platitudes; they often have a wealth of good intent and rich description behind them, but the easy words that come to us, if they are too easy, fail to express the complexity of our reactions to events, be they personal or universal.

As I was reading the news at the gym (IPod on, TV volume off, closed-captioning on), I was struck by the preponderance of platitudes and cliched expressions of remorse and solace that played on the screen. Furthermore, I saw more of them as I logged on to Facebook. Maybe they sound familiar to you:

Our thoughts and prayers...
Our hearts go out to the victims and families...
We'll hug our children a little closer...

And after being inundated with such expressions, it's hard to believe that I was tapping into real sincerity. Cliches become so because of their reiteration. However, in the world of social media, where brevity is expected, such expressions are stock, even if the Tweeter or status updater is dealing with a complex and confounding flood of emotions regarding recent events. Furthermore, finding the real, unique, personal words to describe that in a limited space would be hard for anyone, so we use words like "prayer, heart, children."

In some ways we're flattened and rendered dumb by such senselessness. We want to leave articulateness to issues regarding women in the workplace or political ideologies because they're debatable subjects that stir the intellect whereas a senseless shooting of random people turns us, rightly so, into weeping empathizers. If we could really just package the feelings and send them out into the world attached to the flighty words, like the living, breathing carrier pigeons attached to notes they carry, then we could make people understand how stricken we are by random acts of violence. However, we're often left with platitudes as we just try to choke out something.

Our thoughts and prayers: This means that you're wishing speedy recovery for the injured and you're hoping that the families who have lost someone dear to them somehow find a way through and out of the pain. It means that you're trying to figure out why as if some kind of answer will make it better, and you're trying to send those thoughts across the miles to let the victims and victims' families know that you have the same questions and that you're nearly as heartbroken as they are. It means that you're turning to your belief in God as a way of finding comfort and answers even if He doesn't provide them for you because it's often the community of belief and prayer that collectively heals wounds. Even as the shooter was completely divorced from any sense of divinity. It means you've put aside your own personal problems to consider how much worse someone else has it.

Our hearts go out to the victims and families: This is a more secular version of the above platitude, but it essentially means the same thing, although without the presence of prayer to a higher power. What it means though is that when we're lying in bed without the warm down comforter of divinity, trying to make sense of senseless violence, and we're absolutely reeling with emotion, our hearts, some heaviness in our chest, keeping us from sleeping, we're hoping to send out the collective spirit of human empathy. We recognize that we leave the mind out of this. And here is where that repetition does well to uplift: so many of us sending our hearts across the miles.

We'll hug our children a little closer: We mean we can't imagine what it's like to lose a child, and here are all of these families who have just lost theirs. How absolutely devastating. One minute you're doing something as pedestrian as watching a movie, the next thing you know, you're watching your child die. And in the moments of national peace, we're just a bunch of nuclear families protecting our own, occasionally bumping up against another. But the kinetics of such a national tragedy make us bump up against people we don't even know. We say, "we'll hug our children a little closer" because we hope that such attention will prevent such an event in the future. We also hug our children closer because we recognize that they can be taken from us when we least expect it.

So there you go: a little background.

As for us, the visit to the pediatrician offered no information. We were told to continue to watch Dexter for more spells. If anything came up, we were told to make another appointment at which point we would have to begin looking into something neurological or cardiac-related. Great. I'm hoping that these were odd, isolated events intended to make me hug my child a little closer. I know I would be devastated if anything happened to him.