Dwelling in Possibility

Over Sharing?

 

As my friends who are Facebook addicts (as I am) know, I wound up in the emergency room with my youngest son this weekend. He woke up around 2:30 am Friday night, writhing in abdominal pain. My husband was out of the country, and I had to decide immediately what to do. I called 911, the medics came within 5 minutes, and we were at the hospital within 15.

He was in enormous pain. He face was contorted and it took three doses of morphine before it abated and the docs could begin to do the testing to figure out what was wrong. Thankfully, it was simply an intestinal blockage, and all he needed was some cleansing and all was well again.

I called my close friends and next-door neighbors who came and stayed at my house with the other kids and then came and picked us up at the hospital. I am so incredibly grateful to have people I can call at 3 am.

And then around 4 am or so, once my son’s pain was calming down, I felt lonely and scared and thought it would be nice to put a little note out into the online universe so that I wouldn’t be all alone. So I posted on Facebook. I thought both my night owl friends and my friends overseas might be up and around and could provide some company.

They did. And then morning broke here, and my Facebook page was throbbing with love and support and offers of help from all corners of my life. I was like an addict, sitting in my son’s curtained cubicle, checking my page every few minutes to see who else had chimed in.

Rusty Nails v. Helicopters - What's a parent to do?

My mother-in-law has often told me a story about a bullfighter, who, when he was a young child, would hide in the folds of his mother’s long skirts. A bullfighter who was shy as a child, I would ask. How is that?  And she would say, well, if you knew you were going to be a bullfighter when you grew up, wouldn’t you hide in your mother’s skirts while you could?

I was reminded of this apocryphal tale, always told in relation to conversations about my children and their future, when listening recently to several Israeli pundits (whom I follow on a weekly podcast) discuss the question of why Israeli parents are so relaxed with their children.  Apparently, Israeli kids wander and roam very freely, and play with “rusty nails,” according to the commentators, while American kids have padded playgrounds and much less free-range in their lives.

(I, for one, am grateful for those padded American playgrounds, having gashed my head open racing into a concrete tube in a playground when I was about 10. Concrete playground – what were they thinking? My face looked like Carrie after the prom, but the cut wasn’t actually so bad. Can’t stitch a scalp, so the scar remains. But I digress.)

I liked that my kids had a little rubber padding underneath them when they were on the swings and monkey bars when they were little. But that’s about all I liked about the current trends here in America to keep our kids as safe and padlocked as possible.  So, I didn’t. I let them start walking to school by themselves by 5^th grade, and often found myself countering blank stares when I would chat with other moms about letting kids wander the neighborhood alone.

Yahrzeit - a poem

I took the challenge from a fellow Facebook poet to write a sonnet this week, which happens to be one of my favorite poetic forms. I like the iambic pentameter, I like the  structure of the rhyme, when so much of contemporary poetry is free verse.  I like the feel of old fashioned sensibility and language tackling a current issue.

And since this week is the yahrzeit for our son, Ari Joshua, who lived and died 16 years ago, an experience I often write about at this time of year, I decided to use the poetic structure of a sonnet to write an ode. An ode to life, to death, to hope, to sadness, and to a life filled to the brim with love and family and friendship and continued wonderous anticipation for the future.