The Beginning of Everything

Is it true that his heart stopped for a moment, that after he stopped seizing and stopped breathing he really truly was dead? Or is that only how it felt to me? I’d had an eyeliner pencil in my hand when I ran out of the bathroom to find him. I must have still held it when I’d picked him up off the floor and put him on the couch. Days later I found it lodged between the couch cushions, an indictment of my narcissism, my own self-involvement. And yet when I encountered it, I almost couldn’t recognize it for what it was—was this one of Emi’s pencils? How did this get here? Who put it there? It seemed so out of place. I’d completely forgotten that I’d been holding it when the accident happened. But there it was, reminding me that not everything I remembered was true, and that maybe some things I remembered weren’t.

It took maybe a year to be able to stop living in the parallel world of what might have been, to stop being suspended in that limbo where it was eternally Monday and I was on the phone with 911 and Nate was dying. Every day I had proof that he was fine, that the only actual consequence of the accident was my own inability to shake the shadow of the event itself. I couldn’t write; I stopped writing about my children; even just using that laptop made me sick to my stomach, despite the fact that I knew I was not literally killing them by typing out an anecdote. It took time, and then a serious deadline, to get me out of that guilty funk. Deadline. Eventually I bought a new laptop, a new extension cord, and got back to work.

Would I have actually killed myself if Nate had died? I had been berating myself for my selfishness—for writing about my children; for using a tool to write about my children that had, due to the poor placement of its power cord, nearly killed one of them; for the narcissism of looking at myself in the mirror putting makeup on; for the narcissism of writing down stories to make my life more interesting—and yet how incredibly selfish was the thought of killing myself? To make it even worse, to scale the absolute heights of selfishness, I’d had that thought literally as my other child was in front of me, terrified, more in need of me in that moment than ever. And yet that was my thinking. How could I even consider it, even in a moment of desperation? If he was dead, and then I killed myself, she would have two people to mourn, her six-year-old mind would not be coping with pictures and restorative weekend plans, she would be traumatized for life. And yet that is the thought I felt more certain about than any other thought that day, the memory that haunts me more than almost any other part of that series of events that replayed itself in my mind like the sickest movie: That I would die, too, and that I would deserve it.

But no one died. Not Nate, and not me. Instead I watched them both heal. I marveled at their natural tendencies toward health, at their natural impulses toward recovery. “Trauma doesn’t have to be traumatic,” my therapist told me, and I watched that statement unfold as a true life experience. Nate had no memory of the accident, no lingering effects from it, and although he was aware of the attention and anxiety of the adults around him, he moved on from it even better than could have been expected. And Emi prescribed herself art therapy, suggested healing activities and rituals, stunned me with her innate sense of resiliency and emotional integrity. They could do this at six and three.

Even my foggy brain is capable of thinking: How could I even think of asking them to do this at fifteen and twelve? I already see them struggling to cope, Nate’s natural buoyant happiness giving way to anxiety, Emi freezing, unable to turn her stress into art just yet.

Mirror-me at the medicine cabinet tallying up my medications, plotting my way out, is for a moment indistinguishable from the mirror-me of almost a decade ago, putting on eyeliner and dreading the endless task of filling up the hours until bedtime, calculating the odds of whether at least one kid will take a nap so she can work on an article, or write a quick draft, or just have a fucking break, one moment to herself before she has to cut up more fruit and make who knows what for dinner and sew a Belle costume and settle another fight and read two sets of stories and wait in the dark for the tiny voices of children to quiet down into the breath of children on the edge of sleep until she can finally go work on something or sleep herself. Mirror-me at the medicine cabinet sees the mirror-me before the accident, completely oblivious to what will happen next, no idea that the eyeliner in her hand is an accusation, no idea that her dread of the quotidian is a thing she will regret, will pray for in the adrenaline-sick moments ahead of her, will swear to never again take for granted, although of course she will, we all do, eventually, as we forget and become impatient with everything all over again. Mirror-me at the medicine cabinet and mirror-me before the accident merge into one me for a moment and the small buried part of my brain that is still me says No, this is not a viable plan, no matter how much proof you have that they will be okay, that they have it in them, both of them, to thrive and to survive trauma. No, they will not find you, they will not dial *11 and 811 and 711 before finally dialing 911 and screaming for someone to hurry, they