A Shower Scene

About once a year I find myself suddenly splayed out on a sidewalk somewhere, not having realized I’d lost my balance until, in a pitiable heap, I hit the concrete. This time was different in that I was alone—typically my falls attract the attention of surprised passersby who wonder how in the world I managed to so gracelessly trip over nothing at all. Occasionally, my swan dives will muster a few chuckles from strangers who I know will replay my spontaneous belly flop in their minds throughout the day. This time though, I stood naked in the shower, eight months pregnant, studying my bottle of conditioner, when as my father would say “tit over tea cup” my feet went out from under me.

One foot went so far out from under me, it wedged into our shower drain. The rest of me fell backwards, slammed into the edge of the tub, bounced, and landed hard against the tile wall.

Because I typically fall in front of an unsuspecting audience, my modus operandi is a usual quick mental check for broken bones and a slightly teary, but good-natured laugh at myself, inviting those around me to join in. No need to worry yourselves, folks, we’ve got a pro on our hands.

Here, alone, pregnant, all my comedic training escaped me. I sat trembling, gripping the sides of the tub fearful of somehow falling again. The shower was still running and washing blood from my foot as I extracted mangled toes from the drain. I looked down at my wet, unmoving belly, felt my head shaking a silent NO back and forth, back and forth. Choking with a sort of animal sob, I kicked the shower off with my good foot, and gingerly half-crawled, half-slid out of the tub.

In a matter of about a minute my stunned panic transitioned into a tear around the house, searching for the phone, paging my husband, searching our linen closet for band aids—swearing, wondering how someone so accident-prone could live in a house without bandages. I hobbled to bed, still soaking wet, wrapping some Kleenex around my still bleeding foot, one hand on my stomach saying, “Come on baby, please move baby.”

My husband returned his page and convinced me to lay still. He can be maddeningly calm in what I perceive to be emergencies, but I was in no state to argue. He kept an even tone and asked me to describe what I had done to myself. By the time I had finished describing the fall, I felt a soft, but reassuring kick somewhere behind my belly button. Both relieved, we hung up our phones.

Slowly accepting that I hadn’t smashed my baby, it started to also dawn on me that I was still naked, my foot, still poorly wrapped and bleeding, my beach ball of a stomach still rather pinning me to my bed. Whether it was a break in anxiety or merely force of habit kicking in, I began to laugh at myself.

I picked up the phone, and did what many of us still do when we fall down, when our egos are bruised, and when we need to talk to someone who is equally prone to sudden tumbles—I called my mother.

Of course, when I heard her voice, my laughter died. I described the fall and heard the worry enter her own voice, and I started to cry a bit. With growing uneasiness, I wondered why the baby hadn’t kicked again.

My mother’s reaction was not the typical maternal response—she didn’t panic, didn’t chide me into rushing off to the hospital. She latched on to what was probably the least significant part of my story—our lack of band aids—and launched into reminiscence.

“We never had band aids when I was a kid. They were too expensive. But, oh, it used to make me so mad! Your grandmother never wanted to admit that we couldn’t afford them, and if someone was over to the house and needed one she would say, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I guess the kids got into them. We don’t seem to have any.’”

I remembered my grandmother, having lived through the depression but too proud to admit to any sort of poverty.

“She’d say it right in front of us, and we were expected not to say anything!”

I could easily picture the burning anger I learned early to recognize in my mother’s eyes, filling those of an innocent child, wrongly accused of wasting non-existent band aids.

“Then when I got older and moved out, and she worked for the city, she could finally afford band aids and I couldn’t. Well, that was just infuriating!”

I chucked a little, knowing the bounds of my mother’s righteous rage had only ever been extended to a few people in her life. Her mother was one of them. I imagined my mother finding a new box of band aids in my grandmother’s medicine cabinet, feeling her own poverty, and quietly glowering over the injustice of it all.

“Oh, and when we were kids everyone would just believe her. You know how kids are, they actually do love to stick those things all over themselves. They even make commercials with kids covered in band aids. Whenever I see one with band aids stuck all over them, I just want to smack them right across the face!” She sounded like she might smack them, spit in their eye, and smack them again.

Now I burst out laughing. My mother, one of the least violent human beings I know, laughed as well.

The baby started to roll about, and with a few sharp kicks, confirmed that all was well.

The mental picture of a child covered in cartoon-print bandages, being bludgeoned by my mother evaporated, and sweet, calming relief filled the void. I told my mother that the baby had started moving normally again.

She said that she figured I just needed to calm down a bit, that the baby might have been a little stunned.

As I hung up the phone, I held onto the thought of my mother smacking a child for wasting his good fortune and adhering band aids all over his body. It was an idea that was singularly amusing because my mother is so passive, and would never smack anyone, let alone a child. The hatred in her voice when she talked about her own mother—expecting her children to lie about band aids, living high on the hog with boxes of the things once her children were grown—those emotions were real.

Mothers and children. Until I felt the threat of my own not moving, going still, I had only conceived of him as a sort of magical, moving lump. Between us, and for the rest of our lives, we will carry the things that we each do to scar and heal one another. I worry that I will expect him to help me cover over my own frailties. I hope that in moments when you can either laugh or cry, I can manage to make him laugh.

I glance down at my still unclotted foot. Despite the inflexibility caused by my rounded belly, I manage again to get it close enough to better tie some tissues around the worst of the damage. It’s a pathetic job, what I’ve done there. Briefly, I envision myself attempting to tourniquet a childhood wound with Kleenex and feel profoundly unprepared. At the very least, I really do need to get a first aid kit before we have a kid running around the house.