With a Child, an ‘Instant’ Takes on New Meaning

Until you have a child, I’ve heard it said, you don’t realize how fast time can pass.

Introduce an infant to the household, and suddenly, months speed past the way days used to. Overnight, you marvel, the mewling baby who lives only to sleep and eat is displaying a personality, is walking, has opinions, and--in my case--wants to borrow your eye makeup.

In some kind of corollary I’ve yet to hear articulated, it also seems that a child instills in a parent an appreciation for the tiniest increments of time, for the importance of instants.

As in: You turn your head for an instant, and your child has dashed into the street after a ball. You leave the room for an instant and the child inhales a grape. You open the refrigerator for an instant and while you grab the milk, the child is on the other side of the room, reaching for the hot stove.

On Friday night, I turned my back for an instant, and my daughter ended up in the emergency room of our local hospital, waiting for a doctor to examine her lacerated lip.

The dog, by the way, still averts his eyes when I pass.

*

I was running her bath. The dog was lying on the bed--content to be getting away with something he isn’t normally allowed to do. (They have a lot in common, this dog and this child.)

My daughter is not mean by nature (and if she were, do you think I could admit it?), but she is a typical preschool specimen. Three-year-olds are experimental: “Peanut butter. My mom’s bedspread. Wonder how they would look together. . . . My finger. The dog’ s eye. Wonder how it would feel to poke it.”

Kids don’t seem to grasp the conceptual. So parents can yammer all they want about how a dog can bite, but if a kid has never been bitten, how is she supposed to believe it?

My back was turned, so I didn’t see what she did to the dog. I surmise that she put him in a headlock or poked him hard. In an instant, he yelped and jumped off the bed; she screamed and ran toward me. An alarming amount of blood (to my eyes, anyway) began to stream down her chin.

My fault, all my fault. I felt a pit of despair grow in my gut. How could I have let my guard down? She is so little, this child, she cannot be expected to understand a dog’s nature. We’ve tried to teach her about being gentle, about what it means when a dog growls. We warn her, give her ultimatums, punish her with timeouts. But it is up to us to protect her, to keep her from harm, to anticipate all that can go wrong.

And I failed, her bleeding lip the proof.

An irony: The day before Kermit bit her, in exasperation, I had opened an advice book that I admire, one that is geared to parents of preschoolers. The very first chapter was--miraculously--”Discipline.”

Perhaps I was overtired, or reading inattentively, or maybe I am just thick, but what I took from the book was a sense that giving my child a timeout every time she antagonized the dog might be reinforcing the bad behavior. I resolved to keep an eye on her when she began to “love” the dog a little too enthusiastically, and to praise her when she was gentle with him. The idea was to “catch” her being good.

Instead, I caught her in a lip lock with my dog’s fangs.

*

So here I am with a screaming, bleeding kid on a Friday night.

Over the phone, the doctor suggests we make tracks for the emergency room. Something about a plastic surgeon. My child’s future flashes before my eyes. I mentally scratch super-model off her list of possible careers.

My best friend drops everything and drives us to the hospital. At the ER, we take a seat on a gurney in a curtained area of the big examining room. My daughter is in fine spirits now. The blood has stopped flowing and is drying nicely into rusty stains where she buried her head on my T-shirt.

As we wait for the doctor, various ER personnel wander by. They are so sweet to my daughter that I feel odd when the thought flits across my mind that perhaps the reason they are so interested in her wound is to make sure it looks like a dog bite and not a back hand.

Guilt over “allowing” the dog to bite her mingles with paranoia over whether I am a suspected child abuser. ( Ridiculous! I tell myself. Oh yeah? I respond. Don’t you read the newspaper? )

The doctor pronounces the wound “superficial” and prescribes big doses of penicillin for the next few days.

We arrive home and I get her medicine ready.

She spies the dog that bit her not more than one hour earlier and rushes him. “I love you, my little Kermie!” she says.

And then, in an instant, she grabs his neck and tries to plant a kiss on his snout.

To his credit, he walks away.

* Robin Abcarian’s column is published Wednesdays and Sundays.