tell me when it's over

How quickly we become accustomed to what is out of place.

We'd heard the crying creature on and off for three days going on four. The first day I had resolved to go look for what it was, on the instinct that something was in distress. But it stopped for a while and after I got Isaac down for his nap I became distracted with whatever I'd chosen as my nap activity. Likely food or paying the past due bills.

I'd gone out eventually and located where it was coming from – just the other side of the fence by or in my neighbor's tree. The calling stopped when I got close. I'd settled on baby bird waiting for its mother to return and went back inside.

On the fourth day, Judy would be the one to find her.

A baby raccoon had gotten one of its back paws wedged in the slats of the fence and hung head down, its front feet resting on a crossbar.

“Stuck?” Isaac repeated over and over again. “No walk,” he told us, paddling the air with his hands in the ASL sign.

I dialed numbers, and more numbers the people at the first numbers gave me, pacing my garage, cursing myself for not investigating more closely, panicked that I had figured it out too late.

The SPCA wildlife division arrived within half an hour, but not before we tried to feed the little bandit a chopped up apple by broom handle.

“Stuck?” Isaac continued, but he refused to go and see for himself. He just wanted it better “Help,” he told us, “help.”

Yes, they were coming to help we assured him.

The thing is, I get it. In truth, my own gander at the critter was brief. I pawned off the apple on Judy and she took broom handle duty.

There are stories my son once loved that he won't let me read anymore, or at least he stops me before the conflicts arise. There's P.D. Eastman's Are You My Mother? in which we must skip past the pages showing the “snort” truck that scoops up the baby bird, and Mama, Do You Love Me? which threatens with its page showing the Mama angry.

When I was little, I would leave the room midpoint during the Flintstones. I couldn't stand to watch when Fred messed everything up or while the other set the stage for mishap and misunderstanding. – I just needed everything to work out and for someone else to get it to that point. I'd reclaim my seat on the couch for the happy ending.

You could say occupations like ER nurse never really occurred to me. I'm a poet who's afraid to look. I live with the irony. But what to teach my Isaac?

The baby raccoon was recovered successfully from the fence and I'm hoping to read about her release back into the wild of our neighborhood garbage cans in the next SPCA newsletter.

To witness suffering and help stop it, you must have compassion without caving in, you must hold the other's story gently as if it were your own while remembering it's not.

Isaac is small now and most of the world is out of his control. It's almost unfair to ask him to watch such things, a trapped animal, a scary snort. Life is unfair. I don't know how to nurture his sensitivity while cultivating in him the strength to take action when he can. There is another gap in my parenting knowledge, about the length of a broom handle.