NewEssays Katie's musings, mostly on things related to family life
Friday, May 31, 2002
State of Grace
by Katie Allison Granju
" Oh no. Please God not again."
This was my thought -- my mantra -- as my husband and I carried our three
year old son, Elliot, into the emergency room at East Tennessee
Children’s Hospital last week. Limply draped over my shoulder, he
winced in pain as I handed him over to a waiting nurse for triage care.
It was quickly determined that Elliot was suffering from meningitis,
which required a nightmarish evening of IVs, a spinal tap, a catheter,
and eventually, admission to the hospital. The good news was that his
meningitis was not bacterial, one of the most dangerous and dreaded of
modern childhood infectious illnesses. The bad news was that he was
miserably ill, with a throbbing headache and an inability to sleep or
get comfortable.
Elliot was released after several days of IV antibiotics and
observation, and we were beyond grateful as we carried him out the
sliding doors of the hospital into the muggy Tennessee afternoon heat. This is
Elliot’s third major illness in his three short years with us and I no
longer take his well-being for granted.
I am aware that it could be worse. He doesn’t have cancer or AIDS or
cystic fibrosis. After our many, many weeks in several hospitals since
Elliot’s birth, I have met the parents of the children with those
illnesses and I always feel guilty in my bald relief that we are not
there for the same reasons. However, I also feel blessed in having been
in the presence of these mothers, fathers, and grandparents. There is a
particular radiant serenity that is immediately apparent in the
countenance and bearing of the parents of critically and chronically
ill children. After spending time with others who are in the clutches
of what is almost universally acknowledged as the most indescribably
horrible human experience, I come away feeling that I have been in the
presence of God.
When a pre-term Elliot was hospitalized in the newborn intensive care
nursery at birth, each tiny plastic box in the large room held a very sick baby,
generally surrounded by a rotating band of hovering mothers, fathers,
and grandparents. But the isolette next to ours housed an impossibly
small, intubated being that to my frightened, worried eyes appeared
incapable of being a real, live baby. This infant never had any
visitors. The two pound child lay there day after day, completely alone
but for the attentive nurses and neonatologists who carefully monitored
the machines that kept her alive so that she could grow. But no one
sang to her, or massaged her pea-sized toes, or whispered in her ear to
help her sleep. I began to feel resentful toward these parents I had
never seen, wondering what sort of monsters could leave their sickly,
premature infant in the care of strangers.
However, on the fourth day after Elliot’s admittance to the NICU, the tiny
baby’s mother suddenly appeared at her bedside. She was young, clearly
younger than I was, and so thin that her cheap shift hung on her like a
leaf on a branch in November. Timidly, she offered up a large, battered
cooler to the nurse in attendance, explaining that it contained bottles
of the breastmilk she had pumped every four hours around the clock for
her hospitalized infant.
And then she settled in to the rocking chair next to her daughter and
began speaking to her in a low, shy voice, heavily accented with what I
recognized the regional patois of southern Appalachia. In the hour she
was there, I heard her explain to the baby that she had no car and
thus, couldn’t come to see her as often as she would have liked. She
told the child of the several young brothers and sisters who would be
waiting for her when she was able to come home to a mountainous county
several hours away. She sang a high, lonesome lullabye I have never
heard before or since, as she sat close to the baby she wasn’t yet allowed
to hold.
And then a nurse appeared at her side and informed her
that her ride was waiting in the lobby. With a grace and beauty I have
seen only a few times in my life, the mother rose from her seat beside
her child, blew her a kiss, gathered up her now-emptied cooler and
quietly left the room.
Tonight I will wrap a freshly-bathed Elliot in a soft blanket and rock
him on our wide porch facing the Smoky Mountains off in the distance.
I’ll sing to him about the moon and fairies and I’ll count his breaths
as he finally drifts off to sleep. I will probably weep a few tears for
no good reason other than the almost physical sense of relief I have in
the presence of his sweet smell and strong toddler's body. And I’ll say a prayer
for the parents all over the world who are spending their evening
sitting in emergency rooms and next to hospital beds, drawing on a deep
well of strength they never knew they had.
COPYRIGHT 2001-2002 ** KATIE ALLISON GRANJU ** ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Contact Katie at kgranju@yahoo.com for reprint or syndication info (or even if you just want to tell me what you think)
Once you become a parent, it’s inevitable that you will occasionally
find yourself comparing the childhood you had with the one you are
providing for your children. More often than not, parents seem to come
down on the side of their own childhoods as being somehow better,
safer, and more uplifting than the one today’s kids are getting. After
any sort of high-profile juvenile failing, such as a school shooting or
a rash of pregnant prom queens, the media gets in on the act with lots
of commentary describing just how awful today’s kids supposedly have
it.
Well, I had a pretty great childhood myself, with two loving parents,
lots of extended family around, good schools, and even my own pony.
But on balance, I am pretty sure that the childhood my three kids are
enjoying at the moment beats mine on any number of counts. I know that
this probably puts me in a minority of parents who don’t necessarily
long for “the good old days” (always defined as the period during which
that particular adult was a kid), but I would like to offer a few
modest examples of the superiority of today’s new, improved childhood:
Better Television
My hippie-lite parents were anti-television, so I didn’t get to watch
as much of it as I might have liked as a child, but that didn’t really
bother me that much because most of it was just plain boring. For the
younger set, there were a couple of good PBS shows, including “Sesame
Street”. We also had “Schoolhouse Rock," “Little House on the Prairie”,
and my personal favorite, “James at Fifteen” (how many other 34 year
old moms out there besides myself still harbor a secret crush on Lance
Kerwin?), but on the whole, TV for kids was really stupid. Can you say
“Punky Brewster”?
TV for kids today is just terrific. I love the wonderful Nickolodeon
cartoons like “The Wild Thornberries”, “As Told by Ginger”, and “Sponge
Bob”, as well as the really smart Disney shows for ‘tweens like “Even
Stevens”, “Smart Guy”, and “Lizzie McGuire”. Additionally, my children
can get a small glimpse into the awfulness of their parents’ childhoods
when we all sit down together to watch the Leif Garrett and Rick
Springfield episodes of “Behind the Music”.
Less Cigarette Smoke
Kids today have no idea what it was like to grow up in an era when
seemingly everyone smoked. I remember many interminable car trips in
a closed-up Volkswagen bus (and later, a VW rabbit) with my two parents
puffing away in the front seat while my brother, sister, and I choked
miserably in the back seat. Requests to roll down the windows were
invariably denied because, well, because they said so.
Velcro
Remember when the age at which one learned to tie his or her shoes was
some kind of milestone? And if you were a late-blooming shoe-tie-er,
you felt self-conscious about it? Today’s preschoolers and
kindergarteners (and their parents) no longer have to suffer with the
hassle of perpetually untied shoelaces. Velcro does a much better job
of keeping little feet safely ensconced in little shoes, and we are all
the better for it.
Kids are Nicer to Each Other.
When I was a child, fat kids and kids with glasses or children with
mental disabilities were teased cruelly and constantly by classmates
and young neighbors. My observation, however, is that when it comes to
day-to-day interactions with one another, children today are much
kinder to their peers. For the most part, they have had it drilled into
them that teasing and bullying kids who look or act “different” is
totally unacceptable. And although we still have a very long way to go,
explicit racism among children is less common. Kids today have a
greater understanding and appreciation for the value of diversity
within their communities. As a result, “Fatty, fatty two by four” just
isn’t something you’re gonna hear most kids saying on the playground in the year 2002 (not unless their parents want to deal with a lawsuit anyway).
.
Routine Use of Sunscreen
Back in the day, most kids had at least one nasty, painful, peeling
sunburn episode per summer. I remember one particularly brutal sunburn
that left me lying in bed for two full days, covered in some
nasty-smelling ointment that was supposed to make my skin stop flaking
off my body. My own children, on the other hand, never leave the house
for the pool, lake, or beach without being slathered in protective
sunscreen. They even ask for it. As a result, they never end up fried
to a crisp.
No More Scary Nuclear Holocaust Dreams
I distinctly remember the recurring nuclear nightmare from my
childhood. It involved a archetypal mushroom cloud rising above my
school one morning as I sat at my desk gazing out the window. Then the
dream would suddenly shift to many surrealistic hours of me trying to
locate my parents and siblings in the ensuing societal melee. Every
child I knew suffered from similar dreams on a fairly regular basis. My
own children, on the other hand, without benefit of scary made-for-TV
movies like The Day After, probably wouldn’t know a mushroom cloud
from a cumulus. That’s not to say that they don’t have other, updated
fears (such as the one my 6 year old daughter has about the hole in the
Ozone) , but nuclear winter isn’t one of them.
Better Birthday Parties
As the mother of three children, ages 4, 6, and 10, I am compelled to attend at least one children's birthday party per month. Multiply that by the number of years I have been a parent and you will realize that I have a pretty good handle on the evolution of birthday parties. So far this year, my kids have been invited to a child's party in which each guest got to create his or her own customized teddy bear with a matching wardrobe, one in which a huge country western dance hall was rented out and a live band played swing music, and an afternoon of horseback riding in the Great Smoky Mountains with a tour guide dressed as Daniel Boone leading the way.
Leaving aside the question of whether these parties represent immoral excess, the fact is that they completely trump the parties of my own childhood in which we pinned a tail on a donkey and played musical chairs.
I could go on and on with examples like these, demonstrating the superiority of today's post-modern childhood. After all, barrettes and hairbands for
little girls no longer have those cruel “teeth” that many of today’s
adult women remember as nearly ripping the hairs out of their youthful
heads, and playground equipment just keeps getting bigger and better every year.
So the next time you want to scream as your kid’s N’Sync CD is being played at full
volume in your house for the tenth time that day, just remember: it
could be Menudo.
