Pulling Together in Times of Crisis

I imagined the worst in the moments between the crash of breaking glass and the sound of my daughter’s screams from behind the closed door.

The bathroom shower door had broken; slipped from its track and fallen down, landing hard on the toilet tank and bursting into hundreds of tiny shards. My 10-year-old daughter was trapped by the glass--a mass of bloody cuts for all I knew, for all I could judge from the panic and pain I heard in her cries.

I bounded upstairs but stopped outside the door--weak-kneed, heart pounding, my hand on the knob--trying to muster the courage to peek inside.

Even after eight years raising three kids alone, injuries are something I do not do well. I can remain calm in the face of earthquake or fire, but loose teeth, bloody gashes, goose-egg knots on little heads

When my husband was alive, avoidance was a luxury I could afford. I handled illness--stomach aches, fevers, vomiting--while he did the emergency room visits for cuts and broken bones. Now there was no one to call on for help; I braced myself for the sight of blood and prayed that I’d be able to cope.

Suddenly, my teenage daughter rushed in, pushed past and shoved open the bathroom door. She called out to her baby sister in a soothing voice, one I hadn’t heard come from her before: “Stay still, honey. Mommy will get you.”

I stepped through the glass to my screaming child, lifted and carried her to the sink, where her sister--the squeamish, diffident 16-year-old--gently washed away the blood pouring down her arm.

Then the 12-year-old appeared with a towel and an ice pack, which she pressed against the gash on her sister’s arm. “Here, baby Brit. Ice will make it feel better,” she murmured. She wrapped the towel around her sister, who stopped crying and leaned into the circle of her sisters’ arms.

I could hardly believe my eyes. An hour ago, they’d been locked in combat, yelling and shoving on the stairs, because one called the other ugly or stinky, or somebody stayed on the phone too long, or someone pulled someone else’s hair. Now they were managing a family crisis, tenderly, efficiently, with very little help from the mother in charge.

“I think we should go see Mrs. Allen,” the oldest announced, pulling a T-shirt over her sister’s head and herding us downstairs and out the door to the home of our neighborhood nurse, who bandaged the wound and stopped the blood, then sent us off to the hospital.

Three hours and six stitches later, I pulled back into our garage. The house was dark and quiet. The two older girls had stayed behind and were sleeping together in my bed. I eased their sister in under the covers and watched sleep settle over her tear-stained face.

My stomach churned as I peeked in the bathroom, where piles of glass glittered in pools of blood. How quickly our evening had turned from ordinary chaos to calamity, I thought. And how quickly my daughters had risen to meet the challenge, rallying around each other and filling the gaps in my mothering.

The drama is done, the pain is gone, the shower door has been replaced. And the goodwill from that night has evaporated. The girls are back to squabbling over petty things--who left their dirty socks on the floor, whose turn it is to feed the dog.

All that remains to remind us of our crisis are the stitches that line my daughter’s arm--bristly black threads that poke from her wrist, itching and annoying her. She picks at them constantly, badgering me to have them taken out. “It’s been long enough,” she says. And I sense it’s not just the stitches she hates, but the visible symbol of the fear and vulnerability she felt.

But I’m in no hurry to erase that night from our collective memory. Because if those moments were terrifying, they were also illuminating, in ways that make me feel both proud and safe.

The measure of a family--as of a nation--is not best taken day to day, in our conflicts and struggles and failings. Sometimes it is only in crisis that our true mettle emerges.

I saw in our response that night not my own shortcomings as a mother, but our strengths as a family. It is not our squabbles, our petty fights and jealousies that define us, but our response to tragedy. It is the way we put aside our grievances and pull together, to minister to pain and injury. We are bound by our relationship--whether family or country--even though we may not always get along. I thought of this as I drove to work and watched one driver cut off another, horns blaring, flags flying from both cars. One guy leaned out the window and yelled obscenities at the other driver, who responded with an angry gesture.

We are getting back to normal, and it isn’t always pretty. But we have also learned to call on our strength and maturity, and that knowledge will remain. Even as the scar fades and the rubble is cleared.

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Sandy Banks’ column appears on Sundays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@latimes.com.