Oh NOOOOOOOOO!

Three days from the end of the year my billy goat child was leaping down stairs in the Skirball garden when he landed wrong and fell hard. He broke his ankle.

I heard him and sprinted across the landscaped riverbed to my boy's side. It is hard to explain what that cry of pain from a child is like to a mother. This was different than any cry before. I got there and he was crying and crying, but also rocking back and forth. All he could say was: "I wish I could go back in time. i wish I could go back to one minute ago. I wish this never happened."

So true.

At the time we thought it was a sprain. My father told him to walk on it. The security guard gave him ice and we sat in the lobby with his ankle on ice and his head on my lap. An old Jewish man who looked like he had survived the Holocaust was working as a docent. He had a soulful kind face so open it felt young again. He comforted Theo, then turned to me like an oracle. "You will dance at his wedding," he said.

We went to the doctor and got an X-ray, all family members in tow. They could not see anything. That night Theo crawled to the bathroom on hands and knees, never complaining, and in the morning he hopped around the house on one foot. We took him to an orthopedist who felt him and said it was broken. Not shattered. A hairline crack so small she can't even see it on X-ray. But the way he jumped out of the chair when she touched it she knew it was broken.

On went the cast, a little boot wrapped in green. But then he could walk again. Already he can run and hop so fast I bet he could beat half the kids in his class across the playground in a race. And he is still trying to leap off things--with one foot!!! He spins around on the bottom of his cast like a ballerina, delighted with himself. So fun! At night his foot swells up inside and he cries.

But the doc says it will heal. At this age she said it is better to break than to sprain. A hairline break like this in his growth plate will heal completely. Ligaments never really do.

Couldn't write about it until now. But it stirs you up somewhere deep when your child is injured. I cannot even imagine with something permanent, or possibly permanent, or whatever.

He is OK. That is all that matters.

"Maybe he will stop leaping around like a madman now," Jonathan said. "He needs to learn. To be more cautions. To know he can hurt himself."

Maybe he will stop. Maybe he will not.

I don't know.