I can see the accusation in their faces and it’s uncomfortable.

She’s 8 months old now. Yesterday my wife went to to the grocery store and so we were in the basement because I was doing computer stuff
She gets sleepy so we work on nap time and one of the things we do approaching nap is that if she’s not all that tired but too tired to be awake I work on walking.
Holding her hands helping her stand, then we do “down” then “up” a few of those and she’s ready for sleep.
Well at some point during that she must’ve gotten hurt
She was whiny in her sleep but she usually is
Then she was sleepy when I woke her for bottle but she usually is
It wasn’t until about thirty minutes after bottle that I noticed she was only hitting me with one arm
I tried to get her to grip my finger and she would but she wasn’t doing anything with the arm.
So I called my wife. She came home. We went to the ER and they did a little juggling and she was fine
Nursemaids elbow. Slight dislocation from a child jerking or swinging a child (something you do with a toddler but not an eight month old) and they sent us home.


So that was that. I was never WORRIED about her arm, she was whiny but not crying. But I did stress about CPS. I had a cousin taken away once by CPS (though that was a child with broken bones) and I get paranoid about how the system treats black families for what they consider unsafe environment and others.

But when I was telling my wife about the elbow she had a look of concern and it was the same look I saw from her mother this morning as I told her. It’s the look of someone trying to see if there’s more. It’s a look of skepticism. Not the look that you give someone that saw their child get hurt, alerted the other parent, then got to the hospital ... but the look you give someone that’s lying or hiding something. And it sucks to get that look in this situation.

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“There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.” -Albert Camus