On Being Mammal

Last night, while I was at the dining room table, hurriedly trying to sew Cub Scout patches on uniforms and hubby was whipping together a quick meal, I asked one of the boys to help open up my hope chest so that Molly, my nearly four year old, could put a game away.
A second later I heard the heavy lid of the chest drop close, and then a cry. I jumped up, knowing, as mothers usually do, exactly what had just happened. I quickly lifted the lid, pried out the little smashed thumb and picked up my little girl. The flaps of skin and blanched color on the flattened thumb turned my stomach to look at. I rushed her to the sink to run cold water over it before the real pain, and bleeding, began.
Once the blood appeared, the tears and cries of horror soon followed. My little girl could not be consoled. I hurt for her, this little one. I wished that it could be my finger, instead of hers that was smashed. I held her and cried with her, looked closely at her finger, and asked her to move it this way and that. She was screaming. She could move her finger, and I figured it was just soft tissue damage, but she was in pain, and I couldn’t take it away.
I brought her to the couch and held her in the universal hold of comfort. The one I used on all of my babies as they nursed. This little one had stopped nursing on her own many months ago, and so I was wracking my brain trying to think of a way, other than nursing, to help ease her pain. I ordered the ibuprofen be brought, along with a baggie full of ice chips. She continued to cry. And, in an act of motherly instinct, I lifted my shirt and offered my breast. She took it. There was no milk there, but the act of comforting through skin-to-skin contact, and the suckling calmed her. It soothed her spirit, it eased the pain. She relaxed, and her eyes fluttered closed. She stopped thinking about the blood, the torn skin, and the pain. She nestled into my arms, against my bare chest, and found love and security enough to erase her troubles.
I held her like that for thirty minutes. Her body was completely limp, and she looked up at me with love in her eyes. When I asked for my breast back, she joyfully relinquished it, and smiled at me.
“Did you hurt your thumb?” I asked.
“Yeah, mama, I did. Can I pick this skin off now?”
I helped her pick off the shed skin, and we looked at her thumb together. She hopped down off my lap and took off to find someone to show off her ouchie.