accidents deserve compassion

I guess it took me 20 years before I talked about my son’s accident. It happened after a night of swimming and playing it at the community center. I told the 3-year-old, “come on, it’s time to go.” I went down the hall to gather up swim gear, towels and toys. As I bent over a stack of wet swim suits, the screech of brakes outside the building caught my attention. I glanced out the windows in time to see my 3-year-old running, then flying in front of a car that stopped just over the lines of the crosswalk. I screamed at my husband and ran out of the building.
The newspaper write-up the next day had the family standing outside, watching him run across the street to our car. I was crushed. Friends, visiting at the hospital assured me that other newspapers said he strayed away. Ten days later, he was awake and ready to go home. Although he suffered some nerve damage, most people never noticed.
Ironically, by the time he got to kindergarten, two other children in his class lost races with cars. One stayed in the hospital overnight for observation. The other, confined to a wheelchair with severe brain injuries, never came to kindergarten.
After one such accident, I was talking with a neighborhood grandmother, the mother of 11 grown children. She clicked her tongue in dismay, “I never let them out of my sight. That would never happen when I am watching children.” I kept very quiet and wished I could crawl in a hole.
Obviously, she was the person to care for my children when I needed to a babysitter a couple months later. My husband had asked me to attend an auction at a small lumber yard down the street from her house. I left my then 3-, 5- and 7-year-old children with her and walked to the auction, between and around trucks of every size and description. I found the stacks of lumber, tools and boxes of metal fittings was to bid on and settled back to listen to the auctioneer.
About noon, as I was trying to kept up with the auctioneer’s chant, my two oldest ran up and grabbed my hands. “What are you two doing here? You’re supposed to be at the babysitter’s house.” They just looked at me. Holding their hands, I walked them back to the babysitter’s house, guiding them between the trucks and vans parked every which way on the usually quiet street. The mother of 11 was inside with my youngest – still eating lunch, “Why! I can’t believe they ran way. They didn’t want to eat, so I told them they could stay outside and play on the porch.” I was not alone, in that shameful hole of failure to supervise perfectly. I told them to stay put.
I walked back to the auction, thinking, “It’s easy to sit on the porch and judge other parents saying, “I always watch. I never …” the reality is, anyone can be judged by those harsh words when they look away for just a moment and a child slips away and is injured – or walks away leaving them scared, but wiser.