Last month, my two-year-old daughter broke her elbow. She was still strapped into her bike seat when my leg got caught on the dismount, and she came crashing down with the bike.
Hoping to ensure she didn’t have any lasting physical injuries, and feeling more than partly responsible for the accident, I took her to six doctors over the course of the next month.
Briefly, after being diagnosed with an unusual fracture and a dislocation, the possibility of surgery appeared. Instead, I ended up cradling my daughter while she was sedated, her elbow reset and carefully positioned in a hard splint, where it healed for the next month.
Throughout his teenage and early adult years, my older brother struggled with alcohol and drug addiction. For many years, this consumed my family, as he checked in and out of rehab centers, overdosing on more than one occasion.
My parents argued over the difference between rules and guidelines, punishments and consequences, enabling and providing support. Questions of blame proved futile, yet inevitable. All of us were terrified. Trying to escape my brother’s shadow, I didn’t share much with others, uncertain of what to say and whom to trust.
Years later, my mom bravely published a book of poetry about this awful time, exposing the “charmed and fragile circle of family life.” In one poem, she and my dad despair in Central Park after a doctor warned, “Prepare to lose this child.”
My brother has been sober for seventeen years, yet these words continue to haunt me. Now that I’m a parent myself, the possibility of this kind of loss seems more than my heart can bear.
My mom’s book opens with a quote from another poet, A.R. Ammons, who writes: “We tie into the / lives of those we love and our lives, then go / as theirs go.” And try as we may, even if we pay for dozens of rehab centers or visit a plethora of doctors for a broken elbow, we can’t control the outcome. The painful irony of my mom’s book title, To Get Here, lies in the fact that as parents, we can neither avoid danger nor guarantee the safety of our children.
My daughter’s splint has now come off, and her elbow has healed. In a gesture of her newfound freedom, she likes to swing both arms and talk about what happened. In one retelling, she fell while riding a horse, but grandpa caught her, and she didn’t break her arm.
Whatever path we took to get here, I’m thankful for my brave and resilient daughter who teaches me not to be afraid, no matter how uncertain the future remains.
