20. Gary

Sometimes our kids fulfill our own childhood dreams. For Nora, that happened when her son broke his arm and got the cast she always wanted.

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INTRO MUSIC

I’m Nora McInerny and it’s going to be okay.

When I was a kid, one of my biggest dreams was to have a broken bone.

I will explore the why of this with a trained therapist, but I know I was not alone in this. My cousins also wanted broken bones, and we would take turns pushing each other out of trees or off of playground equipment because what we wanted was not the broken bone itself…but the cast. 

A cast, at least in the 90s, meant…attention. It meant walking into school with a fresh canvas ready to be signed by all your peers. It meant kids and adults asking “what happened” and listening in rapt attention while you replayed the source of your injury for them. I wanted that cast – that attention – so bad.

Unfortunately, I was a Minnesota girl who drank whole milk with every meal, and no matter how hard I was pushed off the monkey bars, I’d get up and find that all of my appendages were just fine. Tragic, right?

But sometimes…our kids fulfill our dreams for us. 

On our youngest kids’  second to last day of preschool, I got a call from the teacher telling me that he’d had an accident. Now, this kid has a lot of accidents. He likes to run while looking over his shoulder, not at the path ahead. I’ve held my breath many times after a fall or a collision waiting to see if he’ll get up and shake it off…and he usually does. Usually the teachers don’t even call, they’ll just slip a note in his backpack and let me know there was an incident. But this time they called and I could hear him crying and when I went up to get him he told me what happened: he was walking, and then he was on the ground. There was no inciting incident. There was no pushing off the monkey bars, no fall from a great height. He was just walking, and then he wasn’t, and he felt…a little wiggle in his arm!

After SEVEN HOURS in a hospital waiting room we found out that the little wiggle was a broken bone, and he would need a surgery to set it, and yes, he would get a cast.

He woke up from his surgery and went home and started the summer with a cast that looked bigger than most of body. It meant he wouldn’t get to swim, or have a water fight which was the activity for the last day of preschool. It meant he had to sleep on his back. He couldn’t get off the couch without help because the cast was so big and heavy it threw off his balance.

He did not care about the cast. And he asked the doctor to make it BLACK so that nobody could sign it.

The cast was not a treat, and he didn’t like the attention. He just wanted it gone. Apparently times have changed or my child is more secure than I was and didn’t need a BROKEN BONE to fill his cup?

The cast was on for weeks, and he made the best of it. He still wanted to play soccer, but he tucked his cast inside of his jersey and honestly, if you’re thinking should he have played soccer??? THey were 5. They weren’t playing soccer they were standing in a field of dirt watching a ball go by. He did let some people sign it in metallic sharpie. He got to sit in a pool with his arm outside on the pool deck. Very relaxing. And then, it was finally time to get the cast off.

The day had come. And his dad was taking him there, and he said to me, MOM, SAY GOODBYE TO MY CAST!

And I said, GOODBYE CAST!

And he said, No. GARY.

SAY GOODBYE TO GARY.

He named. His cast. Gary.

He doesn’t know a Gary.

He has never– to my knowledge – met a Gary.

His older brother had an imaginary brother named Gary but that was before he was born! 

He named his cast Gary, and truly just knowing that he spent weeks hanging out with his buddy Gary made me so happy. 

At the hospital, when the doctor cut Gary off my kid’s arm, my kid asked to keep Gary.

When he got home with Gary, he asked me to clear off shelf space – literally remove books from a bookcase – to display Gary.

Months have passed. That bone is long healed.

But Gary…is forever.

OUTRO MUSIC

I’m Nora McInerny. And this is It’s Going To Be Okay.

CREDITS