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I Broke The Baby

Well, maybe not broke, but damn if we didn’t all feel like we broke the baby.

In the past 12 years I’ve:

  • Dropped my daughter
  • Twice
  • Tatooed my daughter’s neck (really, post pending)
  • Not recognized that my son needed to be at the hospital
  • Passed out cold when my son needed me
  • Handed them razors to play with (I was very, very, very tired)

And that, my friends, is just the beginning. If you’re parenting long enough you’ll make plenty of mistakes. This week on Momversation we want to ask you a question

What is your biggest parenting mishap? Share it in the comments below so that misery can continue loving company we won’t feel so alone.

6 thoughts on “I Broke The Baby”

  1. I let her run into the street.

    She was 18 months old and she had never, ever left my side so I just thought that she wouldn’t. I was getting the groceries out of the car and looked down and she wasn’t there. I started looking around for her and she was at the end of the driveway. By the time I got to her she was across the street in the neighbor’s yard. I cried the rest of the day. Thankfully we live on a very quiet street and nothing happened, but I still have problems with the “what if” and it has been four years.

  2. I fell, while carrying my son, who was 2 at the time, while running into daycare.

    I fell in the parking lot. Time really did stand still when I fell, too. I had to decide, while falling, whether to toss him away from me, to avoid crushing him when I fell, or to clutch him to me and protect his head. I clutched. I smushed and crushed and was half-sobbing desperately in the street with my screaming boy when another mother helped us inside.

    A daycare worker took my daughter, in first grade at the time, and still waiting in the car, to school. We tried to ascertain whether or not I’d broken my son’s bones. Then another daycare worker found the gash on his head.

    My son and I spent the day in the ER (I was in pain, but I didn’t notice it until afterwards). A radiologist read a skull fracture on my son’s x-ray. My husband was in court across the state. Nurses blew up latex gloves to amuse the boychild. It took three cat scans, with me laying on top of my son for the last two (after the scary tech yelled at us) to get a good scan.

    No skull fracture.

    We went to the zoo afterwards.

    It was a monstrously shitty morning, but I didn’t cry again until that night.

  3. I was shopping in Macy’s for some shirts and needed both hands. I told Heather (who was 3ish if I remember correctly and I was 22.) to stand beside me as I checked out the shirts. (She liked to hide in the center of the shirt carousels.) I turned to look at her and she was gone. I called her name out and she did not answer. I checked the shirt racks and still no Heather. I can’t began to explain the feeling of sheer terror and panic that rises up through your body and into your throat when your child is missing. Everything kind of zooms in on you. I began frantically running up and down the aisles calling Heather’s name. I must have looked a sight. But then I heard my name over the intercom and Heather was with a sales clerk at the check out counter. I had told her that if she was ever lost in a store, to go to the cash register and ask for help. And that’s what she did. Except she said told them that her Daddy was lost not her. It was possibly one of the most scariest thing in my life.

  4. When Faith was 4, she threw the mother of all temper tantrums about doing her hair. She’s only thrown a couple of fits in her life, that being one of them, so I finally took her around the waist and carted her to her room. She was facing outwards, screaming, with my arm around her waist. I went to set her down, she screeched, kicked and fell about 3 feet to the floor. And landed wrong. And broke her arm.

    Thank God, the young nurse at the ER was a dad of a couple of young boys and could completely relate, because I spent the next several weeks expecting CPS at my door.

    Since then, at age 5, she broke her other arm, running in my parents’ backyard, she slipped, fell and threw out her arms to catch herself. And yep, another broken limb, this time with a closed reduction surgery. This time, my entire family was sitting on the deck watching as it happened.

    No broken bones at 6.

    At 7.5 years old (this February), she was messing around upstairs, jumped up to look over our indoor balcony half-wall and tumbled over, 16 feet into the living room downstairs. She landed on her feet, broke both, threw out her arms to catch herself, and broke a wrist. 3 casts and a surgery to pin her foot back together.

    That is my *girl*, my boy is the calm one.

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