Dem Bones

Thankfully, I’ve never suffered a broken bone in my life, but Lori and several of our children have. The most recent occurrence was Lori’s wobbly-rock incident at Girl’s Camp that resulted in a shiny new stainless-steel plate in her left wrist. She now has a small collection of metal objects in her body, but I’m not the least bit jealous. I think perhaps the artificial lenses in my eyes trump the metal she has in her wrist and hip.

Lori’s broken wrist got me to pondering over the children’s broken bones. I’ve decided to write about the time Emily broke her arm. I think there is a life lesson in there somewhere, but only where you would least expect it.

We were living in our first house in American Fork, Utah. It was a starter house neighborhood with mostly young families and tons of young children roaming the neighborhood. Emily was probably about 5 years old at the time. As young kids will do, Emily had climbed a fence and was demonstrating her balancing skills by walking like a tight rope walker along the top of the fence. I don’t remember who the culprit was, but some other neighborhood child thought it would be funny to chuck his shoe at Emily in an attempt to make her fall off the fence. I don’t even know if he was successful in hitting his target, but he was successful at making Emily fall off the fence. She came home with her forearm bent at an impossible angle. It was quite apparent that some bones had been broken and we needed to get her to the emergency room in a hurry.

Not having a sitter for the other kids, Lori and I loaded up the other two children and Emily in the car and headed to the hospital. The treatment for the broken arm seemed rather bizarre to me. They put Emily’s fingers in metal springs that worked like Chinese handcuffs to suspend her hand in the air. They then hung a bucket from her elbow and started adding water to it to use the weight to stretch her forearm as they tried to re-align the broken bones prior to adding the cast. I believe they gave Emily some laughing gas to calm her down, but it didn’t work and she was making a pretty big fuss the whole time. It was all very stressful to watch my own child suffer so much and the procedure was taking a very long time. Lori suggested that she could stay with Emily at the hospital and I could take the other children back home. My nerves were a little bit frazzled by the harrowing experience so I was glad to comply with the suggestion.

I took Ryan and Megan back to the car and loaded them into the back seat. Now this was before the days when seat belts and child car seats were required and my children were quite used to roaming free whenever they were in the car with us. It was also before we were affluent enough to afford a car with air-conditioning, so the windows were down as we left the hospital parking lot. Not long after leaving the parking lot, I could see Megan in my rear-view mirror. She was standing on the seat and quite happy with herself for her accomplishment. Recognizing that this was a dangerous thing for a three-year-old to do and not wanting to have to pay for two broken bones on the same day, I told her fairly firmly to sit down on the seat. Well Megan wasn’t about to comply while she was quite enjoying her newly discovered ability to see the world go by from a much better vantage point. I told her again with even more volume and probably a good deal of anger in my voice to sit down. Again, no result.

Because I was driving and Megan was in the back seat, I realized I couldn’t do much under these circumstances to enforce my command to my non-compliant child. So, with a bit of steam coming out of my ears, I pulled over to the curb and braked hard to bring the car to a stop. I turned around and yelled, “Megan, sit down!” as I rather roughly pushed her into a sitting position in the back seat. Megan wasn’t any too thrilled about this kind of treatment and immediately started to holler over the affront to her 3-year-old dignity.

Satisfied I had reaffirmed that my authority was not to be trifled with, I looked up and discovered I had stopped right in front of a house where some kind of barbeque event was going on in the front yard. Everyone in the party was looking at me with a look of shock and horror on their faces. I was totally mortified to realize that they all had witnessed my little tirade in front of their house. Fortunately, this was before the days when everyone had cell phones and took videos of such spectacles so they could go viral on the internet. However, my shame at being caught in the act by so many witnesses was such that I determined to high-tail it out of there as fast as I could. I put the car in gear and put the pedal to the metal to make my get-away.

Thinking about this memory more than 30 years later, I can recognize the life lesson I didn’t really learn at the time of its occurrence. I wasn’t really mortified by my lack of gentleness and patience with Megan. I was mostly mortified that my little outburst had been seen by others. I wonder how I would have behaved if I had remembered that everything we do here in mortality is being observed by someone. It all goes into the Book of Life and becomes a part of the permanent record. Our choices become a part of our soul and the cumulative effect determines who we become. I think this is one reason why marriage is such a vital part of this mortal experience. We have a built-in witness to our lives and a greater motivation to try to behave well in front of our companion on the covenant path.