Mommy Magic

One day not long ago, I decided to have lunch with my daughter at school.

My children’s lunch times are vastly different, so I always choose different days for for having lunch with them. This was Punky’s day– but when I got to the school office to check in, I saw my son in the nurse’s room. Quickly, I rounded the corner of the office to find out what was going on. Bruiser was sitting on a chair and holding a blood-soaked piece of gauze to his nose. Blood stained his shirt and shoes and was smeared on his arms and legs. He looked up with his best trying-to-be-brave face, but there were tears in his eyes.

“Oh honey,” I said. “It’s okay.”

It was my baby’s first nosebleed. Bruiser had had a particularly bad head cold and apparently, the congestion was enough to burst a blood vessel. I took over for one of the secretaries who’d been helping him and cleaned him off as well as I could. Mostly, though, I held his hand and kissed his head and gave him lots of hugs as we waited for the bleeding to stop. He looked at me with the grateful eyes of someone who’d just been helped to safety after clinging to the side of a steep cliff.

“Can you believe I showed up right when this happened?” I said as I wiped off his arms with wet paper towels. “What are the chances? How long were you in here before I came in the door?”

“About a second,” he said, grinning from behind the gauze.

I stopped what I was doing. “Did you wish for me?” I asked him. “Were you thinking ‘I want my mommy SO MUCH’ when you came in here?”

“Yes, I was,” he said.

“Well, that was Mommy Magic,” I said.

And no one will ever be able to convince me otherwise.