The screams coming from Linus nearly gave me heart failure. I dropped my cup and ran…she just kept screaming….Mommy! Mommy!
As I ran through the kitchen, I saw him holding Linus down in the shower, her little arms and legs kicking and flailing as the water overwhelmed her, almost drowning her. It all happened so fast, I only remember putting my foot on his shoulder, as he was squatting to put her down again, and pushing him with all my might and anger. As he went sprawling across the floor, head first into the wall, I pulled my screaming baby out of the shower, scooped up a terrified Boo at the same time and I ran, with both of them, into their bedroom, slamming the door. Somewhere along the way, I’d realized he was holding her down in ice cold water and I’d taken off my shirt and wrapped it around her tiny freezing body.
I couldn’t get Linus to stop screaming. Boo was crying…The rage inside me was like molten lava coursing through my veins. The terror imprinted on their faces is more than I can take. Images that I know will be burned into my memory until the day I die.
He opened the bedroom door and both babies start screaming even louder. Linus is tearing my hair out trying to crawl into me, trying to get away from him. Boo is screaming just because. “GET OUT!” I yell at him. But he needs to defend his actions, to explain. He was suppose to help with their bath…He’d not given them a bath since they were wee babies…Linus did not want to take her underwear off in front of him, because she was too shy….But I’m your father! he’d bellowed…Her refusal to do as he said made him decide that she and Boo were too old to take a bath together and it was high time that Linus learned to use the shower. I didn’t see him leading her by the hand and throwing her into the cold water of the shower, to teach her a lesson…yet that image is before my eyes like I’d done it myself..
He finally leaves but it takes me hours to calm them down, for them to let go of me long enough to get Linus out of her soaked panties and into warm pajamas. I bite down on my anger and focus on letting them know it’s all going to be ok, but tears of rage are blinding me…watching two trembling little babies trying to make sense of senseless things…seeing their big blue eyes filled with tears and terror is more than any mother can bear…
Linus cannot let go of me and we all troop to the bathroom like we are one person. I feel her tense up when she hears him cough but he leaves us alone. Putting them to bed is another ordeal. Linus wants Boo and mommy to sleep with her. She wants the bedroom door closed. The boogeyman is not some make believe monster lurking under the bed…he’s for real and sitting in the living room.
Sometime in the middle of the night, when the terrors have been somewhat tamed and the fitful sleep deepens, I carefully extricate myself from the warmth of the little bed and huddled babies, to stretch my cramped, aching limbs. I can’t shake the images of their terrified little faces…I can’t shake the anger and searing pain they bring…There is no doubt in me as to what I have to do. The time has come…
Next -> Watershed
Tags: boogeyman, drowning, heart failure, soaked panties, tiny freezing body