I did something horrible last night.  Something I am truly ashamed of.

I struck my son.

I honestly didn’t mean to.  It was a complete reflex action, born of shock and surprise.

Normally my evenings until nine o’clock belong wholly to Harry.  I don’t get to see him eight hours out of every day, and the mornings are spent rushing to get him fed and changed and myself presentable and out the door.  Mornings have their “snuggle time”, but evenings are 100% Harry’s to plan.  I feed him his dinner, spend a couple hours playing with him – games of his choice – and then give him his bath and take him to bed. 

Last night was different. 

First I came home late.  I have a major client visiting next week, and I was deep in planning when I looked up and realized I was already a half an hour late in leaving work. 

Then I had to look a few things up on the internet for a friend, and pay our bills, something I usually do on my lunch break (which got sacrificed to the cause of client-wooing).   In short, I was completely ignoring my son.  This was a serious encroachment into Harry’s due.

Harry stood at my elbow, tugging my shirt, talking earnestly in his little Harry-talk (which is unintelligible to everyone but Harry, parents included), and doing everything earnestly possible to gain the attention that was his natural-born right.  And I was ignoring him. I had disrupted the very fabric of the Harry-verse. 

I was so deep in thought at that point that I was only peripherally aware of his escalating distress.  Until I felt an unexpected and unbelievably sharp pain in my arm just above the elbow.

Harry did the one thing guaranteed to command my complete and utter attention.  He bit me.  Hard.  Really hard.  Tears-in-my-eyes hard.

And I had the utterly primal response to pain.  I screamed and smacked at the source.

But the source was my son.

I didn’t hit him hard.  At the final moment of trajectory, it suddenly dawned on me what had happened and I barely connected with his little upturned face.  But I did connect.  The look of complete shock in his eyes lanced right through me.  I was instantly mortified and miserable and ashamed.

All he wanted was my attention.  The attention he had been given good reason to expect.  He just wanted his Mommy.

I gathered him up immediately with remorse and kissed his tear-stained face where I had touched him.  I hugged him and told him I was sorry, that I was just hurt and didn’t mean to hit him.  He cried for maybe one solid minute, and it was over and he was pulling me to his toys to play, transgressions forgiven and forgotten.

I thank God that children are born so forgiving of our parental mistakes.  Because it’s so hard to wash the shame of those bad moments away by ourselves.