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Doubting Thomas

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lostsoul



Joined: 28 Mar 2005
Posts: 372
Doubting Thomas

The first time my blood ever ran cold, Thomas was four. He’d had what doctors like to call a “night terror”, a waking nightmare common to toddlers. I knew it was more. My daughter had had the terrors and they were nothing compared to that night. The poor little guy was covered in sweat when I got to him. He screamed and shook as he stood beside his bed, eyes wide open and hands working at the neck of his pajama top. I knew he wasn’t awake, that he was “dreaming” but I felt his fear as if I was living his dream.

“Unbuckle me! I am going to drown!”

Over and over Thomas called out in a voice that grew raspier and raspier. I held him, and tried to calm him down. His strength was unbelievable; it took all I had to hold him—to keep him from flailing himself against the walls of the room.

Suddenly he went limp in my arms. A minute later he drew in a rattling breath, a sound I never heard again until I was at my father’s side when he died, and then began to breathe normally. I sat and held him for the rest of the night that night, needing his presence much more than he needed mine. Hours passed before the pinpricks left my body and the needles dislodged from my brain.

What had happened? What had Thomas seen and what could cause a four year old to imagine such a thing?

By morning I was sure of two things. One, I could list other times Thomas had been too precise for it to have been written off as an active imagination. Two, I needed to talk to him about it.

Over breakfast I asked how his night had been.

“I slept great!” came the answer.

“Did you wake up any?”

“Just to hold your hand, you were scared Mommy.”

“Why was I scared?”

“Because we were dying, but we are ok now. I told you we would be.”

The needles and pinpricks came back in a flash as I tried to act as if this was a conversation every parent had with their child. I started the list that day, and have added to it more than I would care to admit. That first day it read:

Infancy - hated to be swaddled, or held by sleeping wedges – would fight with immense, irrational strength to escape beginning the first night he was home at 2 weeks old
1-2 years old – kicked and screamed when put into a car seat or high chair, resisted being held in lap etc., refused to be in elevators and restroom stalls
3 years old – informed me one morning that he knew everything about my “accdent” because he’d seen it, with Granny Dee (who had died 12 years prior) and then told me it all in great detail, ending with “I don’t like bugs”
pointed out Granny Dee, in a photo, correctly on his own the next time we were at my parents’ house
**I was hit head on by a car while bike riding when I was 21, 10 years before Thomas was born, and lost my left arm. The car was a green volkswagon “bug”**
4 years old – The dream

I did not talk to anyone about any of this except my partner. We were both fairly freaked out about it and could not come up with any explanation that a rational person would believe. My partner summed it up best when Thomas was seven; “He just sees the world very differently than the rest of us.”

What has me up late writing this tonight is the question I asked in response.

“It is real to him. Does that make it reality?”

She answered what I already thought, “Maybe.”

Tonight’s adventure with Thomas started when I got in late and he was already in bed. He was talking when I walked down the hall, so I assumed he was still up. I walked into his room quietly. He jumped, and then said, ‘I was just talking to Taylor.”

I looked for the house phone, or his sister’s cell phone, and started to give him the lecture about not calling anyone after 8:30 p.m. He and Taylor are best friends, both seven.

“No I mean, she’s asleep, and is holding that bear I gave her on Valentine’s Day. I was just talking with her, you know, without a phone.”

I have gotten good at acting since Thomas’s birth. The cold sweat had started but I imagine I appeared as if this was perfectly normal. I know if I call Taylor’s mom in the morning she will have chosen that particular bear to have slept with.

I get Thomas and myself to bed, stopping in only to remind my daughter to read her summer reading book some before she sleeps. She is WAY behind.

I had gotten dressed for bed and climbed in next to my partner when I hear Thomas leave his room and walk into the den. It’s a small house, and I am familiar with the sounds. He walked back from the den into his sister’s room. He went in and didn’t say anything and came right out. I call through the door to him to get to bed.

“I was just doing Liz a favor mom. I brought her book to her.”

Pins and needles, and cold sweat.

I went out and retucked him in, before going into Liz’s room and closing the door behind me.

“Ok, how did Thomas know you needed your book?” My mind is racing, did she IM him or something?

“I don’t know. I was looking for it and he just walked in with it and gave it to me and left.”

He sees the world differently than the rest of us. How do the rest of us accept it?

Tomorrow I will add to the list that has become a journal of life with Thomas. Between the dream and tonight, many, many things have happened that have constantly challenged my sense of reality. My son is at the center of all of those things. He is a bright, sweet, very active seven year old that I feel blessed to have. He very often appears to be just that and nothing more, but there are too many times when he is tuned into things in ways the rest of us are not. I will write more about him another night, but I know I will never really understand him.
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At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet. - Plato

Post Thu Aug 13, 2009 5:18 am 
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