The Toenails We Lose for Our Children

“Thank you for not being in a bad mood today,” my oldest son yelled to me from the front porch this afternoon. I was at the curb unloading backpacks and one kitchen-sized garbage bag full of trash from the car.

“Huh?” I asked him. “What are you talking about?”

“I just wanted you to know that I noticed you aren’t angry this afternoon, and I appreciate it. Thank you for not being in a bad mood today.”

Yesterday when I picked him up from school, he was grumpy, I was grumpy. We couldn’t find common ground. I was in a hurry with a thousand things to do. He had his own plan for the afternoon and homework wasn’t part of it.

At one point, he asked me to just leave him alone for the rest of the night. I told him that I had a meeting to go to, would be leaving the house and would see him when he woke up in the morning. “That is good news to me,” he snapped back.

It is true that I have been in a funk. I feel smothered, covered, chunked, diced, peppered and capped like the hash browns at Waffle House.  Tired, evasive, short-fused and reclusive. Out-of-it. “Depressive episode” is what my therapist calls it, which oddly enough sounds way better than the “it’s going to feel like this forever” that the voice in my head is calling it.

Honestly, it was a long, confusing summer and fall has started off as a beast. Just in the last four weeks — between the regular day-to-day, pumpkin patches, parent-teacher conferences, writing deadlines and piano lessons — my car has been in the shop for three of them, my daughter had her tonsils removed, the youngest son broke his foot, my husband was in bed sick for about a week and I spent a day in the ER with an ulcer and ruptured cyst. To top it all off, I had to have my two big toe toenails permanently removed last week.

When I was pregnant the first time, I got a fungus on one of my big toenails. I went to the doctor and he said we couldn’t treat it because of the baby, but after I delivered, I should come back to see him. Jack was born. Fungus disappeared. There was nothing to treat, so we didn’t do anything.

It came back with a vengeance when I was pregnant with my third and apparently did so much damage that my nail beds were shot. It was painful and very unsightly, so the doctor recommended that we just take them off.

It’s like a gift. Now when I am 90, I can scare my grandchildren. I will be the legend that they pass down for generations. “Do you remember when crazy great-grandmemaw used to rip off her gripper socks and wave her toes in our face while she rocked on the back porch at the nursing home in a caftan?” Who knows? Maybe I will have a mouth full of dentures I can pop out by then too.  

This summer I started having this recurring dream. I am balancing on a rope that is stretched between two mountains. It is sunny and there is a cool breeze blowing up there. Because the rope gets less and less secure the closer to either mountain I get, I do my best to just stay in the middle and enjoy the birds and fresh air.

Suddenly, the rope catches on fire from the secured ends at the top of each mountain, and I fall to the ground below. Down there, the forest is thick and there are fast rivers and critters. It dark and dank. I am alone in a place I don’t want to be, plus I can’t feel the sun or breathe the fresh open air anymore. All I want to do is get back up to the top of a mountain. I can see everyone I love up there, but the walk is long and I am overwhelmed with how to begin.

I mean, I do try hard to keep my kids from seeing how sad I can get. I thought I was doing a better job, but that “Thanks for not being in a bad mood” from the oldest felt like a gut punch. While I appreciate his honesty, I should be doing better, right? Should. Do better. There are those magic words that keep me feeling inadequate and the “depressive episode” is trying to convince me to believe them.

Someone smart once told me, “You can’t fly if you are carrying all the weight.” Maybe with the weight of my toenails off of my feet, I will finally be able to march forward through the valley and climb to the top to breathe again.

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