Experience Makes Priorities Clear

You look like you’re working but you’re not. You’re waiting. You’re expecting a call from a doctor’s office concerning laboratory test results. You’re opening mail, talking to people and trying to remember what you do for a living.

You can’t.

There’s a big trial in the courthouse only a few blocks away, and the people in your office are talking about it.

You should be interested. You should be concerned. You nod your head and furrow your brow like a person who’s concerned, who’s interested. And you stare at the phone.

Someone nearby is discussing the mysterious drowning of a heiress in a lake north of town. He’s suspicious because she was an older woman with a young husband. You join in. You speak sentences.

But you can’t hear yourself.

It’s like talking underwater.

You appear to be sitting at your desk in your office having conversations. You appear to be opening mail and reading the newspaper and typing on your computer.

But you’re only waiting.

The telephone rings, then rings again, then rings again.

Each time, it is someone other than the doctor or the nurse who’ll tell you about the lab results.

Someone in the doctor’s office said they might call within an hour. As far as you’re concerned, that means they would call within an hour. But they haven’t called. So you call them.

They tell you they’ll call within 30 minutes, and inside your head a voice is screaming No! No! You tell me now!, and you’re wondering if the nurse on the line can hear that voice.

You are a professional person. You tell her you’re a little anxious, hoping she can tell that you’re a lot anxious, that you are nothing but anxious.

“What’s the patient’s name again?” she asks.

And you tell her.

“And you are the boy’s father?”

And you tell her.

Yes.

You’re looking at a picture of him in short pants and a T-shirt, and a cowboy hat. And his mother’s brown eyes. And one hand on his hip. It’s the hand you were holding as you walked with him into preschool a few hours earlier. Holding it and squeezing until it disappeared into your own hand, and not letting go even as he pulled away, eager to run to his friends in the playground, telling you it’s time for him to go to “circle time” and you to go to work.

There are people working all around you.

You receive a delivery from someone who didn’t like one of your newspaper articles. It comes wrapped in a purple ribbon and is carried by a man in an expensive suit. People talk to you about it and laugh, because it’s a gag gift. And you talk back and even laugh, wondering if laughing will bring bad luck. Or if not laughing would bring bad luck.

A routine visit for inoculations had turned up something unusual, something potentially bad, very bad, something a boy wasn’t meant to go through and which could only be ruled out, or confirmed, through laboratory tests.

It happens.

You’ve heard from parents who’ve had it happen to their children. You’ve written about some of them. The father of a sick child once told you that hearing the terrible news was like being thrown off a merry-go-round. The world kept spinning but he wasn’t on the ride anymore, and he couldn’t quite get the attention of the people who were. People like you.

The telephone rang again and it was a doctor, finally, and the only word you heard was “negative.”

The good negative.

The pulling-you-up-from-under-the-water negative.

“It’s always tougher on the parents,” the doctor says.

And you know what you didn’t know before. You get back on the merry-go-round. You do your job, which, it turns out, is not what you do for a living. You’re a parent.

What you do for a living is wait.

xxxx