Parental Incompetence, Parental Love

What about when you screw your baby up? Make her sick, make her sulk or cry by acting genuinely inconsiderate, accidentally hurt her (like, say, by washing her hands with water that's more suitable in hotness for adults). You take steps to make her or him better, that's what. And then you employ your common sense, or else hike your butt to the internet or a book or a doctor or a knowledgeable parent or a trusted friend or all of these and you figure out how not to screw your baby up again. And this process, in various guises, over various timescales, is part of the lifelong process of parenting.

Kate and I just got through with an adventure mostly concerning Eva, considering she was the one getting sick. She'd come down with a rash covering her arms and legs, reddish spots one-half to one inch in diameter, some with darkened red rings like the dreaded bullseye of Lyme disease. Rhode Island is pretty much ground zero for Lyme disease--we're less than sixty miles from Lyme, Connecticut, for which the disease is named--so it was a head-slappingly humilitating, not to mention slightly scary, moment yesterday morning when I first noticed the apparent bullseye patterns on Eva's right leg, one on her calf, one on her shin.

Kate and I share one car these days, and she'd driven it to work, so I couldn't bring Eva to the doctor's office. All I could do was e-mail Kate about it (thereby making her worry all day) and set up a doctor's appointment for today, which Kate would have off. Lyme disease incubates slowly enough, and the bullseyes typically appear quickly enough, that even if this was Lyme, I had small fear that Eva might suffer from it chonically. But I didn't want her to suffer at all.

It being a fine hot spell in early June, we walked down to the beach, about a quarter mile away, where Eva could run in the sand and wade in the ocean water of Narragansett Bay. She's always loved water and swimming, and even though she's still intimidated by the coldness and waves of the seashore, Eva's learning quickly that getting wet there is fun. For about three days straight we'd gone down and Eva had run on the sand and gotten wet. I was happy to watch her discovering a whole new part of the world, something she'll be able to enjoy for the rest of her life.

We'd spent the previous weekend in Maine, visiting Kate's parents, and Maine is still in the grip of blackflies. Blackfly season precedes mosquito season, is roughly as annoying, and lasts about a month. After tagging along after Mima through the yard, petting the bunnies, and sitting on the Ranger for a ride, Eva had a healthy number of bug bites. No big deal, we all did.

Flash forward to this week, when after a few days on the beach, the bites have become spreading red welts and the bullseyes had appeared. My level of concern rose steadily toward panic as the day went on, and by the time Kate came home in the late afternoon, Eva's legs were swollen and red, and more bullseyes had appeared on her arms. I was now alarmed.

But I didn't dare tell Kate, because I was about to head up to Boston as part of my process of preparing to enter the Naval Reserves--one part of my plan to make it through the doctorate program--and I didn't want to freak my poor wife out just before leaving for the evening. It seemed to me, worried as I was about those worsening welts, that to tell Kate I was scared, and then leave minutes later, would be like putting a grenade in her hands, pulling the pin, and walking away. A very unfriendly and very dangerous thing to do. Kate's good enough at working herself into a frenzy without my giving her a big push.

Besides, I counted on her sense. If I was scared, so was she, and if Eva seemed to require emergency room treatment immediately, Kate would go. And so she did. While I spent the evening in a Hilton hotel near Boston, studying calculus and the history of maps, Kate was sitting in the emergency room waiting area in South Kingstown. The doctor informed Kate that the rash was most likely an allergic reaction to sand flea bites.

"Has she been to the beach lately?" the doctor asked Kate.

"Um, yeah, for the past three days straight," she admitted, suddenly feeling a bit foolish. So we seemed to have our answer.

A few rubbings of antihistamine topical cream, and the rash seems to be going down, especially in Eva's arms. After three days if the rash persists then Lyme or something else might be involved. So we'll be looking sharply at Eva's skin for the next three days.

Of course I knew none of this while up in Boston. Since we're doing without cell phones for the time being, I had no idea, and I knew that if something like this happened, that I wouldn't. After leaving last night I thought it at least 50% likely that I'd come home to no Kate and Eva tonight, with Kate at the hospital having Eva tended to.

I arrived back home at 2 PM, driven by my recruiter, to no family car. I expected as much...but then remembered that I hadn't brought my own key. I doubted that Kate had left the door unlocked, and she hadn't.

Fortunately enough windows were open that I found one I could crawl through. Not the first time I'd had to break into my own place, but after a few phone calls I'd heard the basic story. Kate filled in the details when she arrived a bit later, having wrapped up this whole episode with a few hours' worth of therapeutic shopping for baby stuff.

So our task now is, how to limit these stupid flea bites without cutting the little girl off from the beach altogether? Homework, homework.

POSTSCRIPT--After sitting down tonight at dinner, as Kate and I were playing our normal Roses and Thorns game, Kate asked Eva if she had a rose. Let the record show that Eva answered "Dada!" for her first rose ever. And then said it again for her second.