Heart-broken

So when S was a baby and fell off the bed onto our hardwood floors, and we both cried about it, I swore I would never do such a stupid thing again. I mean, seriously, it's not like I hadn't heard the warnings about not putting babies in such places. There were lots of things with her that I did wrong, and I would tell people and preface it as being a "first-time mom" story. Once I was talking about something I wish I'd done differently with her that I planned to handle better when Baby R arrived, and a woman in my Bunko group said, "Oh, honey. You'll just make different mistakes with the next one." I realized she was right. But I never thought I'd be so dumb as to make the SAME mistakes. Aren't we supposed to learn from them? Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to happen with me.

This morning we were getting ready to leave, and I left the girls on S's bed while I grabbed her toothbrush. I came back in and R was parallel to the edge of the bed. I gasped and she twisted to see me and rolled right off onto the carpet. Luckily, she was at a straight angle, and it was a fairly soft landing; it just startled her. I could see she was fine, so I picked her up, smiled and said something lighthearted like, "Uh-oh! Fall and go boom." Inside I was relieved she was ok and feeling like an idiot for leaving her without adult supervision. So what did I do next? Put them both on my bed so I could vacuum in there before we left. Hello, moron, R just fell off another bed, what makes you think she'll stay on this one?? So she started to reach for something on the nightstand, and my brilliant move was pull the table away so she couldn't reach it. As I was doing so, she put her little hand out to try to grab it, and toppled off the bed - again. This time, headfirst and bending her little neck in an awkward way. I snatched her up and was crying along with her. My poor baby! I don't know what I was thinking. (Clearly, I wasn't.) Sigh....

I was berating myself all morning, and then at lunch I talked to my sister. She was feeling like she deserved the Bad Person of the Year award, too, so we traded stories. She was feeling guilty about our being embarrassed about what our dad does for a living. (He's retired, and now drives prisoners to work-release jobs.) All that did was remind me that I'm not a very good daughter - I need to spend more time playing memory games with our mom and taking her to see other people and to help her find a volunteer job or something. I was able to sidetrack our discussion a bit because yesterday my dad told me that my aunt had called with bad news about mom's family's farm. It's a REALLY long story, but to sum up, my grandmother's will is still in probate 15 years after her death because my mom's sister and brother cannot agree to terms. My mom has given up on it. Anyway, the latest family drama was that my uncle had lost the family farm because he didn't pay the taxes. It's going up for auction. I about started to cry. Not because of the money (though dad thinks it's probably worth 1.5 million, and a quarter of a million should have gone to my mom), but because of family pride and sentimental reasons. My mom is from a VERY small town in Manitoba and her dad was well-respected. He's been gone for thirty years, but the name still carried some weight. We were blessed with the opportunity to take my husband and brother-in-law to visit family there about four years ago so they at least got to see where we grew up visiting. But I always hoped to be able to take our girls there when they got older, and now the farm's gone. Breaks my heart.