Tales From a Survivor of a Broken Butt
By Joy Nicholas
@justyouraveragejoy
“Hey, Mama.”
The mind of my son Wyatt is a mystery. I can’t count the number of times he’s walked up to me—at the playground, in the kitchen, on the sidelines of the soccer field—and out of the blue, asked me a completely random question. And it always starts with “Hey, Mama.”
“Hey, Mama. Could a cross between a zebra and horse have babies?”
“Hey, Mama. What date will Thanksgiving 2068 be?”
“Hey, Mama. How long would it take to drive across Antarctica?”
On the one hand, I’m honored that he thinks I’m smart enough to answer these questions. I’m not, but thanks to my son and a hefty dose of Google, I’ve filled my brain to capacity with knowledge I would never have considered important enough to learn. Sometimes, though, the questions make me blush a little, like when we were wrapping up a playdate and he asked, “Hey, Mama. Could a dachshund mate with a Great Dane?” I stammered for an answer. “Well… um… it would probably depend on which was the male and which was the female. But… uh… it seems that with this kind of thing … um … you know … where there’s a will there’s a way.”
But even that “hey, Mama” moment did not cause the same level of embarrassment as the day we were in the main store of the base where we were stationed in Korea—the largest overseas American military base—where I knew or recognized at least a third of the people around me at any given moment thanks to the various programs I was involved with. We were just approaching the cash register with our purchases when he asked it.
“Hey, Mama.” Wyatt has two volumes, Loud and Asleep, and he most definitely wasn’t asleep as the next words boomed out of his mouth: “You know that time you broke your butt?”
The store suddenly seemed awfully quiet. My face burned as I tried not to think of how many people I’d casually said hi to in just the past five minutes. I plastered a smile on my face and through gritted teeth, forced a laugh and asked in a volume that almost matched my son’s, “Do you mean the time I cracked my tailbone?” Word choice matters, and I intended to clarify details for whoever just heard Wyatt.
Only then did I dare lift my eyes to look around, praying that I would not see any familiar faces but also searching for a place to hide as I died of humiliation. The cashier—bless him—remained somber, looking intensely at each item that he took off the conveyor belt to scan, examining the kids’ multivitamins and pack of paper towels as if they were ancient Egyptian artifacts.
“Yeah, that’s what I mean,” Wyatt said earnestly. “Did you have to get a cast on your butt?”
At this point, I was about ready to drop to the ground and crawl out of the store without my purchases, but we really did need those paper towels. And honestly, this was hardly the first time I was publicly humiliated by my children.
I sighed. “No, Son, I did not get a cast on my butt.”
“Well, how did it get better?” His eyes widened with concern. “Is it still broken?”
The accident he referred to happened during PE when I was fifteen, and after more than a quarter of a century, my wounded derrière was definitely healed.
“It just … ” I sighed again, “got better on its own. It took a long time, though.” Now that everyone in the vicinity knew about my butt injury, they should also know it was doing fine.
Scraping together the last of my dignity, I squared my shoulders and paid, then pushed our shopping cart out of the store, thinking hard about my life choices. Like how I specifically bought a car without a television in it to minimize screen time, and how I’ve always told my kids stories from my childhood instead to pass the time on long car trips or when we’re stuck in traffic. I’ve regaled them with these tales while waiting at the doctor’s office or for meals at a restaurant when we ran out of books to read or tired of coloring. In fact, that’s how Wyatt learned about my posterior—when he broke his wrist and as we waited for the cast, asked if I’d ever broken anything.
But was it such a good idea to tell my kids all these stories?
As I loaded my purchases into the car, I recalled my kids’ astonished faces when I told them that I had been sent to the principal’s office a few times—and not to run an errand for the teacher. From the fresh age of six, I was determined to establish myself as wholly different from my teacher’s pet big sister. So I stood on a desk (!!), pulled James Passmore up next to me (!!!), and kissed him in front of the whole first grade class (!!!!). Unfortunately, the teacher walked in just at that moment to find the class hooting with laughter and me planting one on James. I’ll never forget the long and terrible walk to her desk, like Marie Antoinette to the guillotine, where I had to stretch my hand out before her, crying for mercy, as she whacked my knuckles with a ruler.
It was funny what struck each of my kids as most impressive. “You STOOD on a DESK?” the safety-oriented, perfect angel child asked, while another was shocked to learn that I’d kissed someone other than her father—“And you were six?!” All were appalled to hear that a teacher was allowed to hit me.
Some of the stories I tell come from photographs the kids have found, like the one of me and my sister on the back of a camel at the Pyramids of Giza. Or another where I’m standing next to an elephant in our front yard when I was 3 years old and lived in Bangladesh. They know how my dad was chased by an elephant at a wild animal preserve in India, and another year, I was chased by dogs after a midnight trip to the bathroom in a sketchy backpacker’s lodge in Kashmir.
Other stories come from scars, like the long, curving ridge that goes from the outside of my left knee almost to my hip because I slipped from a footbridge while hiking in Malaysia. And on my chest, close to my armpit, there’s a scar from the nails of a gibbon that attacked me in Thailand. As my older kids have faced the pressures and body image issues of their teen years, I’ve told them how I had an eating disorder that nearly cost me my life.
My kids also know the story of how I met their father, how heaven once shone a light down on that guy who teases them and has an endless supply of fart jokes—or at least that’s how I remember it. They know the first words he said to me—”nice shoes”—and how I told my sister as we drove away a few hours later, “If I don’t marry Matt Nicholas, I want to marry a guy just like him.”
They also know their birth stories by heart. Wyatt loves to brag about how he was my biggest baby, weighing in at nine pounds, five ounces despite being born over a week early. He knows that I was terrified, watching his heart rate plummet from a healthy 140 or so down to 28 beats per minute as I pushed him out, and that the doctor said in a voice so unnaturally calm it scared me even more, “You’ve just got to push harder.”
“Because I was stuck?” Wyatt asks every time I tell him the story.
“Yep.”
“In your—”
“Welllllll, I mean, it was more like your shoulders were stuck on my hip bones,” I always say quickly. “But basically, yeah.” He came out looking like a baby linebacker. After letting me hold him for a solid hour (the one major stance in my birth plan), the nurses asked if they could please weigh him before their shift ended because they had bets going about his weight. Wyatt knows all of this, and I can tell he loves knowing it.
As I drove out of the parking lot after the world learned of my broken butt and headed toward our home, I thought about all of this—the stories I’ve told my kids and how well they know them and why it matters. This lore is, on the one hand, screen-free entertainment, but it’s also so much more.
My trips to the front of the classroom to be struck by the ruler, or to the corner where I stood as tears of shame coursed down my cheeks, teach my kids that I wasn’t always “good,” or put better, the mostly-law-abiding citizen who loves order and routine that they know. I was and am imperfect, someone who has made many mistakes but eventually learned to do a little better—like I hope they do too.
They know that two of those trips to the principal happened because I got in fights standing up for people who were being picked on. I never could abide a bully. Likewise, my scars are alternately cautionary tales and badges of honor. Their stories teach lessons such as, “Don’t let anyone *coughbigsisterscough* trick you into doing stupid things” and also, “Certain adventures are worth the pain.”
Our stories tell our kids that we’ve been there too. My kids know all six names I bestowed upon my first dog, which means they know how much I loved her, and how sad I was when she died. They believed me when I cried with them and told them that I understood how sad they were when our family’s first dog died. My stories of near death experiences teach the kids that God protects us, and as they learn of my battle with anorexia, I hope they understand how He heals. As for their birth stories, I want them to know the message so well that it becomes like the rhythm of their hearts: “I loved you already. The day you were placed in my arms was a dream come true, a prayer answered, a miracle.”
So I’ll take the humiliation of ill-timed re-tellings with the wrong words and awkward follow-up questions in public places because these are pictures of what’s important, what I want them to know. And I’ll tell them often so that as they grow up and go out and we aren’t always together any more, they’ll know the words by heart.
Guest essay written. by Joy Nicholas. Joy was born and raised in Asia and currently resides in Seoul, South Korea. She has five kids that range in age from 7 to 23 and a dachshund that believes she is her sixth (Joy doesn’t mind and may encourage this). Other infamous injuries besides the *cracked tailbone* mentioned here include breaking her toe and busting her front teeth falling off the side of the house, though these calamities did not occur at the same time. Long story for another day. You can catch more of her adventures and misadventures on Instagram or on her newsletter.