What Could Have Been

Yesterday, I could have lost my son.

There was no showy drama: no squealing tires or screeching brakes; no speedy trips to the emergency room or sober-looking doctors with grim pronouncements; no scary strangers lurking at the playground.

It was just dinner.

Manager Dad was out, squeezing in a quick nine holes before the sun set. I was tired from unpacking and hadn’t had a chance to go to the store, so I excavated a meal from whatever was in the freezer and pantry: canned corn, a banana, some nuggets (chicken for The Girl, spinach for The Boy).

He took one look at his plate and threw a massive fit. I don’t know if it was exhaustion or leftover sadness from the end of our trip, but when I tried to talk to him about why he was upset, it made things worse. He finally shouted that the only way that he was going to eat anything would be if he ate alone (“I don’t want anybody LOOKING AT ME, MOMMY!”)

So The Girl and I ate dinner together, our attempts at conversation punctuated by fist-thumps and wails from the living room.

The Girl finished and went off to the playroom. The Boy finally started to calm down, and I tried to coax him to the dinner table with the promise of buttered toast if he would eat JUST ONE [DAMN] SPINACH NUGGET. (Which, by the way, were the exact same ones that he claimed were his favorites EVER, just one week ago.)

He harrumphed to his chair. And sulked. And squirmed. For the next twenty minutes, he stared at that nugget, poking and squishing and picking it up and dropping it over and over, until it was almost as cold as it had been when I first took it out of the freezer.

I got frustrated. I told him that I was tired of throwing away perfectly good food every day, and that I didn’t want to be at the table with him when he was using bad manners, and I got up and went into the kitchen. I watched him through the serving window; he had the nugget on a fork, and I thought, hey, that might have done the trick, he might finally eat the stupid thing.

I turned to the sink to start rinsing dishes when I heard him stomp into the kitchen; I turned around, ready to deliver some sort of exasperated remark when I noticed that his face was red and his eyes were wide and all that I could see was fear.

I ran to him and he doubled over. I might have said something like OHMYGODOHMYGODAREYOUOK? He could not answer. And I know now that sometimes the most frightening sound of all is the sound of nothing: no choking, no coughing, no breathing.

I don’t remember exactly how I managed to get myself to react. I got behind him and put a fist in my other hand, and put my arms around his waist and jerked hard and sharp up into his stomach. He threw up, a bright green asterisk on the wood floor. And then, finally, he sucked in a long, painful, crackling breath.

I pulled him close and he shoved his face into my neck. I felt the sharpness of his shoulder blades; his body was shaking, his heart thumping. He coughed and coughed, and with his head still buried in my hair, forlornly raised his arms over his head, just like his teachers taught him to do at school when he drinks too fast and it goes down the wrong pipe. We stood there in the kitchen, covered in breaded vomit, squeezing each other as if we were the only two people left in the world.

Yesterday, something as ordinary as one spinach nugget almost changed my life forever.

I think I might eventually forgive myself. I hope I might eventually forget.