Listen to this story: If you’re in the car, or cooking, or just lazy… you can listen to me read this story for you, in the audio file below.
I’ve been missing. Tired. Distracted. Living life, basically. Not a lot of writing. Nothing worth sharing here, anyway. Writing was starting to feel like simply looking at my own life, rather than being in it. That's not a good thing. For a writer, or any person. Particularly when you have young kids and they need you. They need every bit of you. Now. And before. And later, too.
I’m also married, and we need each other sometimes.
So I’ve been trying to be around.
My brother and I were watching Australian football at my house the other night and there’s a player on our team who drives me crazy, because he’s always just beside the play. Not in it. Whenever he popped into the corner of the television screen – outside the pack, waiting for the ball – I imagined him saying, “Here if you need me, guys!”
In real life though, fatherhood and marriage can be a bit like that. You’re not always in the action, but it’s important to be there if anyone needs you.
A couple of weekends ago we were in the desert with a bunch of friends, the family too. On the last morning my six-year-old daughter fell off the rocks. I was in the house when her older brother came racing back on his electric dirt bike, no helmet. “She fell and she’s bleeding… a lot!” he said, breathlessly.
“A lot?!” I repeated.
I was already running when he answered me, “Well, not a lot… but bleeding.”
It was still early. The air too cold for the t-shirt I was in and I don’t know how my slippers didn’t fly right off in the sand. The sound of my breath followed me to the back of the property, where they had been climbing.
There she was, sitting on top of a big flat rock, wailing. I was relieved she was conscious, not covered in blood. When I reached her I stood with my eyes at the level of her feet, trying to push away cascading thoughts of broken bones and lacerations and concussions and rural emergency rooms filled with okay doctors and fentanyl addicts, all rushing through my brain at once. It’s amazing how much horror one can conjure in a moment of crisis.
She looked okay, considering. A little banged up. I told her to jump into my arms, which she did, without screaming. A good sign. She’d slipped coming back down the boulders, she said. A rock broke. “I’m never taking that route again!” she finally declared. I thought that was a pretty good idea.
She let me carry her. She was okay. My wife pulled up in the car. We wouldn’t need it, thankfully.
In the house, on the bed, my daughter cried and moaned as my wife tended to the countless cuts and scrapes. Hands, wrists, arms, chest, belly, knees (of course). “I’m gonna dieeeeee….” she kept wailing. It was hard not to laugh at that part. We assured her she wouldn’t die, and I tried to distract her with another rerun of Bluey on a tablet. Which didn’t really work.
We bandaged her up, gave her some pain medicine, then the three of them took off back to town. She had a Girl Scout meeting to attend, of all things. (Is there a badge for that? My wife could do with one.) I stayed back a while to tidy up.
After a sleep in the car my daughter was fine, apparently, she made the Girl Scout meeting. But she chose to reapply the bandage on her forearm for school the next day. When I picked her and her brother up in the afternoon, she’d decorated it with pink marker.
She said she felt good now, and asked what was for dinner.
I’m still recovering, but here if you need me.