Day 7, 2009

It was just 5 minutes. I stepped out into my new garden to check on the tomatoes I hadn’t looked after at all this week and to weed just a little bit. I had told Madeline I’d pay her if she watched her cousin while I took a short nap, and I guess she didn’t count weeding as the start of her official watch. I came back inside, glad to have been in the sun for awhile, glad to be by myself, glad to not have minded for just five minutes that I had eight more hours of Hayes camp before bedtime.

In retrospect, we were done on day #6. Maybe Hayes sensed it, too, and that’s why he didn’t remember not to stick his hands in other people’s food, like the ice cream of the young man Hayes reached before I caught up with him at the town-wide picnic. Or that if the line for the Moon Bounce goes the length of Edgemont Park populated with other children who want to jump just as badly as you do, it doesn’t shorten the line length or lessen their desire if you flail on the ground screaming, “BOUNCE HAYES NOW!!!!” You get the picture. Maybe he was as ready to go home on Day #7 as we were to have him go, even though it had been a pretty great week. Seven days was enough. For us, and apparently for him. I’ll make a note of that.

Anyway, I mentioned casually to Madeline in the living room that our first cucumber had appeared. And then I heard a crackling sound in the kitchen that I only have heard once before when we first moved into this little house, and the bathtub overflowed upstairs giving my brand new kitchen a bubble bath downstairs. It’s kind of like my first earthquake I was in out in California – my brain didn’t know what to do with the bizarre, rumbling jolts and registered that a train was running over the house. Second earthquake, I was under the door jam before I bothered to register squat. So hearing this crackling sound for the second time ever, and without even turning the corner to investigate, I screamed for Jack to grab the trash cans from outside and bellowed, “WHERE’S HAYES?!??!?” to Madeline the newly unemployed babysitter, who bounded up the stairs to find our little plumber sitting cross-legged in an inch of water, mesmerized by the sink over-flowing full-force, and plugging his ears in case there was anything startling to come besides a two story Niagra Falls inside our house. Kerri had said they were working on the difference between hot and cold, but I didn’t realize he’d be studying up while on vacation in New Jersey.

The oddest part to the story was relaying it to my girlfriend just now, who mostly kept shaking her head and stating that it couldn’t have been just 5 minutes (rather than telling me what a saint I am, which is why I was explaining about all the towels drying on bushes in my front yard, anyway)…She just shook her head the whole story, saying “Not five minutes. No way”. Not if the water traveled down 2 stories to fill my brand new sparkly blue Kenmore front-load dryer in the basement to the brim with brownish-black water. “More bad chocolate”, Hayes probably would have evaluated. At least I can safely say that that the innards of my 1922 house are now fresh as a daisy. And it is not lost on me in retrospect that my girlfriend is a teacher of a school for special needs children, and probably has endured way too many stories from guilty parents on a Monday morning about the accident that happened on Saturday in “just 5 minutes”.
In retrospect, the problem wasn’t whether I let my guard down for 5 or 15 minutes, it was that I let it down, period. And all I could do, other than cry as I sopped up bad chocolate water, was go over and over in my mind how grateful I was that it wasn’t swallowed money instead, or a fall from climbing on the counter to get the Lucky Charms cereal I had protected on the top of the refrigerator that morning. I didn’t even want to consider and still don’t, what could have happened during “just 5 minutes” if he had been more interested in electricity rather than plumbing, while I dared to mulch in the garden, and Madeline lounged during a repeat episode of Hanna Montana. “Well yes I heard it, Mom, but I thought you were giving Hayes a shower!”.

This is my sister’s life…ears perked at all times for a strange noise or worse – no noise at all, eyes in the back of her head not daring to blink, chores on the other end of the house only taken care of after Daddy has come home. Checking, checking, listening hard, re-checking, only allowing the volume on low in her adult life that is happening as she puts it on hold until Hayes is a little better equipped for her to have one.

In case you were wondering, ShamWoWs do work “as seen on t.v.”

Even being in the same room doesn’t mean it’s all hunky dory with a boy like Hayes. Once Kerri glanced out the front window while talking with the babysitter, going over the day’s therapists and activities ...the usual babysitter low-down. I’m sure it was kind of Kerri’s“first earthquake moment”, not quite knowing how to register that the same Hayes playing with a toy at the kitchen table was now the Hayes walking towards the house with an unknown woman in a bathrobe. (?) And just so you can have a sort-of “first earthquake moment” yourself, I’m not going to help you make sense of it by explaining that the new neighbor a few houses away also happened to glance out her window while sleepily sipping her Folgers, only to see Hayes thankfully frozen on the double yellow line of their very busy road while crafty commuters avoided the highway in both directions.

The good news is that you build on this sort of experience: I had two chains installed high on my doors after I suggested my keeping Hayes for a week. Next summer I will have searched out every bit of loose change sleeping on a counter top before he arrives. And I have already found a special-needs horseback riding camp for him to attend half day, as I’d much rather pay Rocking Horse Rehab than the emergency mold remediation team that ripped out my kitchen ceiling last night and left giant dehumifiers to make noise instead of the fireworks neither they nor we got to see, exhausted by the day’s events.

It does have a very happy ending, though. When I met Kerri half way between our homes to return her little son and his 11 prized stuffed animals that my dog graciously did NOT rip up for seven whole days, Hayes actually bounded into her arms in the Applebee parking lot off Exit 5 of the New Jersey turnpike, squealing, “I missed you, Mommy!”

She has never known that before.

Although I haven’t looked up my home insurance deductible to see what the damages are for this week’s visit, I’d easily pay a thousand more tomorrow for him to understand another emotion that the rest of us take for granted. Kind of like his own “first earthquake moment”: he missed Mommy, his very own Mommy and my fabulous sister, whom I will gladly help again next summer, spending seven days with Hayes.