Our Second Day on Guam
BY KARLA FILIBECK
Photo Courtesy | Karla Filibeck
My right knee hits the pavement – hard. My upper body lurches forward.
I pop back up so fast, I have no idea what else of me, if anything, made contact with the ground. My hands fumble behind my neck to unbuckle my baby carrier. Both of my girls are crying.
I take Talia, my fourteen-month-old out of the carrier as fast as I can and turn her around so I can get a good look at her. There’s no blood. I scan her arms and legs but don’t see any injuries.
“Are you okay?” A concerned woman rushes towards us from the parking lot. She picks up the paper bag containing the cupcake I had just bought at the coffee shop behind me. I turn to Amalie, now four, and pull her in for a hug. She is crying and holding her hand. We were holding hands when I fell, and I must have taken her down with me. It all happened so fast, I really have no idea.
Another woman comes towards us. “It’s okay, baby,” she says to Amalie. “She may have hurt her hand,” she explains to me, “She seems okay, but watch it for swelling.”
I stand up, but I am shaking. How? How did that just happen?
The woman holding the paper bag hands it to me, and I see the water cup I had also been carrying rolling empty on the ground. I’m not one to litter, but my hands are full, and I can’t find it in me to pick it up.
My knee throbs with pain as the girls and I slowly make our way to our rental car.
Once inside the car, I pull up the hem of my dress to take a look at my knee. A layer of skin is gone. Ow. I locate the baby wipes, pull one out, and gently dab my knee to clean it before pressing my head back into the headrest. I take a deep breath. It’s our second day on Guam, and so far we’ve spent most of our time running errands trying to gather all of the paperwork necessary to retrieve our van from Port.
“Can I have my cupcake now, Mommy?” Amalie asks. She’s standing in the backseat, looking over my shoulder expectantly.
“How’s your hand?”
“It’s fiiiiiine,” she insists, “Can I have my cupcake? Please?”
I pull a clear, plastic container out of the paper bag. Inside is a red velvet cupcake with a tiny little Oreo-looking cookie nestled on top of a pile of frosting.
“Here you go, honey,” I say quietly. My voice is subdued – my confidence, bruised. I had been so excited to finally be on Guam and proud of myself for finding my way around with both girls. Now I just feel battered.
Talia flashes me one of her signature, cheesy grins from the passenger seat. Well they both seem okay, I think to myself. But then I see it – a faint red circle on Talia’s forehead.
***
A couple hours later, I’m sitting at the small kitchen table in the extended-stay hotel where we are staying while we wait for our household goods to arrive. Amalie is bouncing around on the couch and Talia is running around, babbling and playing with whichever of the many toys strewn about catches her eye.
“When accidents happen, you should tell someone . . . and they can help,” Amalie sings, a little breathlessly, as she bounces. It’s a song from an episode of Daniel Tiger. She’s sung it many times before, but this time it feels like it's for me. I still haven’t told anyone about the fall.
Every so often I check to see if the red spot is still there on Talia’s forehead – and it is. Maybe it was there this morning, before the fall, I think to myself. Maybe it's rug burn. I open the Photos app on my phone, search for a picture of Talia from earlier in the day, and zoom in on a few photos, but there’s nothing there. No, this is new.
Are all mothers like this or only the more anxious or traumatized among us? I wonder. I’ve come a long way in my healing since Amalie was in the NICU as a baby, but any threat to the girls’ health or safety still sends me spiraling. My thoughts can take me from minor-bump-on-the-head to life-threatening-emergency pretty quickly.
What if there’s internal bleeding or swelling and she seems fine, but she’s not?
Should I take her in? I don’t even know where to go – and this is not how I imagined meeting her new pediatrician for the first time.
“But she seems fine, right?” my husband, Ryan, asks after listening to me tell him the whole story over the phone on his way home from work. His calm, even tone challenges the frenzy in my head.
“Well . . . yeah,” I say, and I do feel better after telling him.
***
Photo Courtesy | Karla Filibeck
I wish I would have asked the women if they saw Talia hit her head.
Ugh. Here we go again.
I’m sleeping in Talia’s room, so I can easily roll over and check on her. As I lie there in the dark, my brain threatens to reprocess everything I’ve already mulled over all day. I know I’m jet lagged, and the lack of sleep makes it harder to cope with my anxiety, but knowing that does little to change it.
“You didn’t expect this to happen. You didn’t want this to happen,” I remember hearing Dr. Becky say on an episode of the Good Inside podcast I found one day after an off-leash dog ran up to Amalie at the park and licked her in the face. “Children’s fears develop when something unexpected or unwanted happens,” Dr. Becky had said. She explained that one way a fearful child gains a sense of control over a situation is by telling the story of what happened over and over again until they have a story instead of a surprise.
I think of my upcoming writing deadline and how I have been far too stressed with our move to write much of anything. And then the thought occurs to me – I could write about the fall. I don’t want to write about it, but I know my resistance usually means I should. Writing has given me space to process and heal from the most traumatic of my life experiences. Why would this be any different?
I roll over to find my phone, open the Notes app, and start typing my thoughts as they come, from specific details of the scene of the fall to related memories. It feels like both a brainstorm of ideas and therapy, and it doesn’t take long before I feel better – lighter.
I put my phone down, close my eyes, and hear Talia sigh in her sleep before drifting to sleep myself.
***
The next morning I sneak out of Talia’s room before she wakes. I pull the dress I wore the day before out of my laundry basket, pick up the pair of shoes by the door, and drop them both in the trash. I’ll never know for certain what caused me to trip and fall, but throwing the clothes and shoes away is something I can do and it gives me a sense of closure.
Amalie’s door opens, and she runs to the couch where Ryan and I are drinking coffee. It’s early, and we are all still adjusting to the time change. Talia is the last to wake – and when we enter her room, we find her standing in the corner of her travel crib, holding her beloved cat stuffed animal by the tail, grinning. She’s happy, as usual, and I feel like enough time has passed that I can safely assume she’s okay.
In a few days, I will open a Google Doc and begin to write the story. I will pick and choose which details to include, read and reread the piece over and over again until I know exactly what comes next. In the wise words of Dr. Becky, I’ll have a story instead of a surprise.
Until then, I’ll squeeze my girls a little tighter, so grateful everyone is okay. I’ll wear a different dress and better shoes. I’ll leave the carrier at home, and we’ll go pick up my van from Port.
It’s our third day on Guam.
KARLA FILIBECK is a wife, mother of two, and writer living in Tamuning, Guam. Although born and raised in Minnesota, Karla has spent most of her adult life living on an island. She and her family recently relocated to Guam after spending more than 13 years in Hawaii. Karla holds a Bachelor’s degree in Family Resources and Master’s degree in Urban Planning and worked in public health for eight years before deciding to stay home to mother and write. In her free time she enjoys walking the beach, hiking with friends, and indulging in uninterrupted conversation.