A mum has shared an emotional post about the day she accidentally dropped her baby on his head.
Two years ago, Liz Mannegren was having a fairly normal day with her son.
They had some breakfast cereal, they sat around on the couch, they played with some teething toys. The usual.
However, when she picked her son up to walk towards the kitchen, he wriggled, fell out of her arms and onto the floor.
And just like that: “In mere seconds, a perfectly normal day turned into an absolute nightmare.”
In a Facebook post on her page MommyMannegren, Liz detailed the guilt she felt for dropping her son and not being there to protect him.
And how much worse she felt afterwards when she found out that he had fractured his skull.
“We rushed to the ER with a whimpering baby and this mama in tears. As a tiny, hospital band was slipped over my son’s wrist, the nurse assured us that they saw this all this time.
“‘I dropped my baby once,’ she said with a sympathetic smile, ‘except I dropped my baby on a concrete parking lot.'”
“That nurse had taken one look at me and seen the crushing weight of mom-guilt I was struggling to carry.
“While there was some small measure of comfort found in the fact that I wasn’t the first mom to drop her child, it didn’t relieve the feelings of failure that washed over me.”
Liz said that she was angry with herself for letting this happen.
Her son was going to be fine, but she said she couldn’t shake the feeling that she had failed as a mother.
That was until she realised that mothers cannot protect their babies from everything, and just because you have a bad day, that doesn’t make you a bad mum.
“Today we might feel like a failure-of-a-mother, but we are more than our bad days.
“These miserable, distressing, all-round-awful days serve as not-so-gentle reminders to savour life. Accidents happen. Life is fragile.
“Motherhood is not defined by any single action, but rather, by the whole. I look at myself and see a woman who failed to grab her son in time. My son looks at me and sees “mom” — the one who comforts and holds him when he falls.”
Liz’s post has been picked up by other mums who found themselves in similar situations.
They took to Facebook to detail how they too once dropped their baby and how upsetting the experience was for them.
Liz agreed by saying that incidents like these do shake you up from time to time, but it’s important to remember that just because today is horrible, that doesn’t mean that you are.
