Falls and Doubts
On Monday night, Veronika fell down a few stairs and we had to take her to the emergency room. There we found out that her injuries were much less serious than the damage done to my self-confidence as a parent. She cried for a few minutes and got over it; I was distraught the whole night. She was back to her normal self by the next day; I'm still thinking about it. While we were waiting to be x-rayed, it was the specifics of the fall that were bothering me. I kept imagining the different ways she could've fallen (horrible thoughts to be forced to have) and the unseen injuries she could have incurred: broken ribs, internal bleeding, concussions, etc. After she checked out ok, most of these thoughts disappeared but the tough questions were still to come.
How could I have let this happen to her? Isn't this the kind of tragic neglect that people read about in the paper and shake their heads at? Sitting in the hospital waiting room, I felt myself placed squarely in the lowest ranks of parents, the kind that let things happen to their children that require emergency rooms to remedy. I should have done this, I should have done that, I should have been more vigilant. Eventually the other side of my brain started to retort. Toddlers make their own trouble even in the safest house in the world. You cannot protect them from everything. How many times does she have to climb the stairs successfully before you can stop hovering? Needless to say, the prosecution, representing the State of Doubt, won the case rather handily. I might be capable of deluding myself in some matters (my readers can weigh in on this one) but this is not one of them.
Dinka tells me that part of being a good father is accepting your limitations and not allowing them to be a weakness. I think she's right, but hearing that on Monday night just meant another thing that I needed to work on. I guess all of this is a long way of saying that I'm still learning a lot and trying to mature as a parent. Even when it's hard and I don't want to, Veronika is there, gently pushing me every step of the way.