A Bad Mommy moment

[orichalcum]

I just had my first "I'm a Bad Mother" experience. We were at the doctor's for Mac's 6-month checkup, and while the doctor was out of the room, Mac was on the exam table. I looked away for a few seconds (to weigh myself - oh I am punished for my vanity) and Mac did a double roll and lunge and fell four feet off the table onto the hard linoleum floor on his back. He yelped and cried; I scooped him up, and after about twenty seconds of soothing and then a little feeding, he stopped crying at all and smiled when the doctor came in a minute later. He cried much more at the shots at the end of the appointment.

So nothing's wrong. In fact, he's very healthy and continues to be at the 75th percentile on weight and head circumference and 95th on height (which means his BMI is really low, but that's not a problem.) He's 28.5 inches tall.

But I still feel horribly guilty.

Comments

[retsuko.livejournal.com]

If it's any consolation, my mother blithely revealed to me a month ago that she dropped me on my head as a baby. Or rather, I rolled off the changing table when she wasn't looking. I'm sure Baby!Mac is OK, especially if he got more unhappy about the shots.

[ladybird97.livejournal.com]

*hug* Oh, sweetie, I totally understand feeling guilty, but you're not a bad mommy! It happens to everyone. Mac is fine, and it sounds like he's still super-healthy. He's just a lot more mobile than he's ever been before...

[davidsmom1.livejournal.com]

My Bad mommy Moment was when the kidlet was a toddler. I stepped out on the back porch for a quick cigarette, came back in and he had managed to pull an earthenware bowl from the middle of the dining room table on to the floor, break it and cut his hand. It even required stitches. Which is my way of saying that every mom has that moment when your attention isn't 100% on the kidlet. It is only human and the guilt will lessen over time. Glad to hear that Mac is fine. FWIW I think you are a great mom.

[orichalcum.livejournal.com]

Thanks. I know intellectually that such moments are inevitable, but it's still hard getting the image of him falling out of my head. Not falling out of my head, I mean, the image falling. Anyway.

[digitalemur.livejournal.com]

I know it's gonna take some time to get past it, but at least now it's happened, and he's fine, and hopefully this is your big incident of "I looked away for 2 seconds and he got hurt" and it's over with no consequences. Seriously. You're right that it was gonna happen eventually, in some form.

From my perspective, thank goodness you don't live on a farm where he can get into _all_ manner of trouble once he's walking. And yet, my siblings and I survived such a place! Keep that in mind: at least you're not a farm mom with the various sorts of hell that entails.

[orichalcum.livejournal.com]

yeah, I suspect dogs are much better at calming down babies (Eowyn is a miracle cure for fussiness) than, say, horses.

[havenstone.livejournal.com]

When I was 17, I went on a trip to Mexico where we helped build a new church building in Monterey. There was an incredibly cute little baby there, maybe one-and-a-half years old, and one evening I picked him up and started throwing him into the air...

...not noticing that the scaffold we were standing under had a diagonal bar passing just over our heads. There was a great CLONG, a great wail, and I didn't get to play with that baby any more.

So I'm kind of dreading my future days as a Bad Dad. But you're not a bad mom! The kid needs to learn some lessons about gravity the hard way. Get him a bunk bed when he's a couple years older, and make sure there's a nice soft carpet underneath. He'll figure it out.