“You ever play tug of war?” He looked up at me with serious, sad eyes and nodded. “Okay, well, that’s what you’re gonna do with your sister. She’s gonna pull as hard as she can and I want to you pull back without moving, okay?” He nodded again. “Once she’s back as far as she can go you help pull her back until she’s sitting just like that.”
It took a minute for the siblings to figure it out, she was obviously not pulling as hard as she could and the little boy was terrified of doing something wrong. The rope kept falling out of their hands and landing on the mat between them, but eventually that innate rivalry all siblings have kicked in and they started actually tugging and pulling the way I wanted them to. It only took a couple times of the brother yanking the little girl back up into a sitting position for them both to be laughing and having fun with it.
I crossed my arms over my chest and looked out of the corner of my eye at their mother. “He could be an instrumental part of her healing process. She’s going to need help for the rest of her life, including when you and your husband are no longer around. Trying to take him away from her isn’t going to help anything at all.”
The mother put a hand to her throat. “I kicked my husband out. I told him over and over again I didn’t want those guns in the house.”
That didn’t exactly absolve her entirely of the blame, but I couldn’t say I faulted her. “She forgives him. There isn’t any reason you shouldn’t be able to. It was an accident, a tragic, avoidable accident, but now you have to move on from that. She needs her family … all of them.”
“It’s so hard to move on from something like this.” Her voice broke and she excused herself to get some water as I continued to watch the kids play.
The little girl wouldn’t walk again and the little boy had played a hand in that, but to her, all she saw was her little brother. Maybe it was because she hadn’t been jaded by life yet, maybe it was that she was just a sweet kid without a resentful bone in her body, or maybe it was that she was smarter, more self-aware at twelve than I was at twenty-six and realized nothing was going to change. She could hate her brother, blame him and hold him responsible, but that wouldn’t help her walk. She could be bitter, angry, and curse everyone for landing her in that chair for the rest of her life, but again none of that would make her walk again. Her new normal wasn’t something I would wish on my worst enemy, but the clarity, the resilience that she was showing to get back to living life was something magically and particularly eye-opening.
Bad things happened, it was how we navigated the fallout afterward that really defined what our new normal would be. You could do it gracefully, generously, thoughtfully like this precious little girl, or you could do it sloppily, haphazardly, and blindly like I had done.
I lowered myself to the floor and told the little boy to go sit next to his sister and told them both to try and pull me over. They huffed and puffed and obviously didn’t get anywhere until I gave in and let them both fall backwards. They collapsed in a fit of giggles until I pulled them back up.
“How would you guys like me to show you some things you can do together at home, fun stuff like this that will help your sister out?”
The little boy looked at his sister and then down at the floor. “I hurt her. I’m not supposed to be too close to her anymore.” He sounded heartbroken and it made my back teeth clench together. I was going to tell him it was okay, that when we hurt someone it was our job to try and make the hurt all better, but the little girl struggled to get her body – a body that suddenly wouldn’t follow her commands – closer to him. The little boy fell into her outstretched arms and started crying.