Home again

First, let me tell you that carrying a 40-some pound 3-year-old who smells like vomit and is hanging like dead weight into the house in December up some slippery porch steps, and then up a double flight of stairs is not fun. Whenever I think about doing strength training, I realize I could just lift my son instead of buying weights, and then I do it once and decide I like my untoned flab just the way it is. But I did it. We got home, we got in the house and we got upstairs. Since I had already changed him into his pajamas at the hospital, I just took him into my room and tucked him in. Joseph already wakes up in the wee hours, crying and disoriented if he is alone. This was not the night to push the "everyone sleeps in his own bed" rule.

By the time we got home, it was pushing 2 a.m. I checked the phone to make sure we hadn't missed anything from either hospital. Matthew called when he was moved up to the cardiac floor to let me know his room and phone number. I headed for a hot, hot bath to relax muscles that felt like sailor's knots. I was barely in the water when Joseph started to scream.

He settled down again as soon as I got into bed. Joseph had colic when he was a baby, and even when we grew out of it, he evolved a habit of napping only if he was curled up with Matthew or me. When he moved out of his crib into his bed, he often wanted to lay with us on our bed to have his stories and lullabye before moving to his own room. He never had a security blanket or a lovey or even a pacifier. He only wanted us.

All night long, he slept in fits and starts, waking up hysterical, making sure I was still there, and then passing out again. It was when he woke up in the morning that he realized his Daddy wasn't there. Only talking to Matthew on the phone made him calm down enough to be functional. That, however, made him want to talk to Grandpa. And Grandpa was not talking to anyone.

Anthony was in the neurotrauma intensive care unit. He had bleeding in his brain that was much more serious than anyone realized the night before. Suddenly the broken legs were unimportant. The compound fracture of his shoulder would never be fixed. We began the first conversations with the hospital, and without Matthew there, I was making the decisions and doing all the talking. And without Matthew, I was alone with Joseph, so those conversations were all taking place with him clinging to me, hearing my side of discussions about bleeding, breaks, resuscitation and words that are scary to people a lot older than 3. And then I would call Matthew and relay the other side of the conversation to him. I wish I knew what it sounded like to Joseph, what he understood, and if he didn't understand, how he filled in the pieces.

Matthew didn't come home that day. I spent it in bed, or on the couch, the phone in my hand, holding a terrified little boy who just wanted his Daddy and Grandpa back where they belonged.