Just Really Tired.

An essay.

On Father's Day Steve invited his family over to celebrate and eat. I spent the morning baking scones to be enjoyed with Kerrygold butter and Irish whiskey. Other family members brought cakes, and Steve spent the better part of the afternoon grilling. After we ate, we all sat around the living room discussing Spurs statistics, and eventually Steve's dad cracked open a page of Me Talk Pretty One Day and began to read aloud. Some chuckled, others were hunched over in tears. What a great Father's Day, I thought. 

After everyone left I sat on the sofa and began to check my email on my phone. I heard Miles say, "I wanna wrestle!" The father-son pair took off for the bedroom to perform the MMA routine they've performed a hundred times before. The way it goes is: Steve provokes Miles by asking "What'd''ya got?!" Miles then shuffles pretend soil under his feet like an angry bull gearing up for his launch. He lets out a ferocious growl and propels himself at his daddy, knowing that it will all end with his own face in the memory foam mattress. Normally he laughs hysterically into the pillow, and then stands up, wiping drool away from his face, to threaten Daddy that this time he's in for it.

Within seconds of this particular wrestling match a blood-curdling scream ensued. That's a bad one, I thought to myself but continued to scroll through my email. Anyone with a 4 year old knows that bumps and bruises come with the territory. What isn't typical, however, is the inability to brush themselves off. Kids spend probably half of a 24 hour day getting hurt. It only takes them a few months of this to grow a pretty thick skin, so by age 4 they are more than able to shrug it off and keep going. But this was different because he just kept screaming. I set my phone down, took a deep breath, and flew into the bedroom with my hands covering my eyes and peering through splayed fingers the way children do when a scary scene in a movie is playing. I was expecting to see carnage--at the very least black and blue skin and some kind of bony disfigurement--maybe a jelly arm hanging like a sock behind his back--but everything looked normal.

I fetched an ice pack while Steve did an assessment. Does it hurt here? How about here? Here? And then it came again, the blood-curdling shriek. "That's it!" I said practically leaping off the bed. "We're going to the hospital."

Nondisplaced distal humerus fracture. In other words, a fractured elbow caused by falling on the hyperextended arm. "What happened?" asked the hospital staff time and time again. "My dad did it," Miles would answer. "He just beated me." "He crushed me down." "He falled on me."

Miles had no hesitation when it came to throwing Steve under the bus. After x-rays, the attending physician came in to see us. He's probably going to need surgery, the doctor advised. I melted into tears. One child with a medical history is enough. I can't do another one.

As it turns out, he didn't need surgery. ER doctors who are not pediatricians don't really know what they're talking about, or so I've been told. After being reviewed by a pediatric orthopaedic doctor, it was determined that a long arm cast for several weeks would be enough to facilitate healing. We opted for a glow in the dark cast and returned home to spend the next several weeks with a 4 year old who is regressing back to an infantile state, demanding round the clock care and attention.

The next morning I awoke to a messy house, dishes in the sink, no clean underwear and on top of all that-- an itchy dog. Miles and I spent the night on the living room floor, and at the very same moment that the realization came to me, a flea--as if on cue--jumped onto my arm and off again, apparently dissatisfied with its potential host. Dammmmmmitttttttt.

Not long after I became privy to our infestation, I started noticing a foul smell. It was the kind of smell that alerts one to the fact that something has either spoiled and been sitting in the garbage bin for far too long, something has died under the sofa and not yet been discovered, or something (or someone) has been pooping in an undisclosed location. And then I spotted it in the corner: cat s**t. Apparently my pets had decided to go into full and total anarchy that morning. As I began to feel like we were living in a crack den, I started cleaning up in between tending to the needs of His Majesty with the Broken Arm. When small children discover that they have an immobilized limb, and can control their environment through speech, they tend to get a little demanding. Eventually I decided that His Majesty could also use a sponge bath, so I began rifling through the bathroom closet looking for the appropriate tools. I returned with some bath soap, some lotion and a damp towel. The whole time I was cleaning him I started noticing the smell again. At this point, however, my mental faculties were severely diminished and my brain was not firing at full speed. While "gee, something sure smells like s**t" usually warrants a prompt investigation, my brain was apparently shoving this revelation to the back burner. I simply continued scrubbing the magic marker off of His Majesty's legs until the stench was so powerful, I had no choice but to give up.

I walked back to the bathroom, unfolding the wadded up towel I had been using. The stench hit me in the face like a putrid lightning bolt. I looked down and there it was--cat feces embedded in the very towel I had been using to clean my child with the broken arm.

What happened next was a blur of frantic cleaning and realizing that the cat had used a pile of Steve's clothes as a litter box. I didn't have the luxury of trying to figure out why it was all happening, I just had to react and fix it. In the end, pets were rid of fleas, carpets were steam cleaned and His Majesty was given a proper washing. The following day when everything was clean, and things were relatively calm, I crawled into bed and fell asleep. Steve came in the room about three hours later to ask if I was okay. "I just can't wake up," I told him. "For some weird reason I'm just really, really tired."