My Angel

Today was Wednesday, half-day for public school kids in Belgium.  As a good friend of mine put it perfectly just yesterday, "we drop them off and we have just enough time to spin around on our heads before we have to go back and pick them up."

Miss B is going to stay home on Wednesdays.  She needs some mommy time in her now busy week and Wednesday is a tough day for the little ones.  We don't get home for lunch until nearly 1pm, and then we turn around to go back out for everyone's football practices.  (The reason for the half-day is to give kids one afternoon to devote towards an extra-curricular activity.)  It's brilliant, really.  My boys are playing football (i.e. soccer).  This year, we even know that it's for the  whole year.  (Last year we assumed it would end after the fall, just like in the U.S., but it never did.  By about March we figured out that if they sign up to play on a local team, it's for the whole school year.)

But I'm getting off topic from what I wanted to tell about.  Miss B and I had a lovely morning.  We went on a coffee date, a quick stop at the grocery store, she had a chance to play at home and I caught up on a few things around here.  Thinking that I was being proactive, on our way out the door to pick up the boys, I put the glass bottles in the car to dump at the recycling bins at the end of our street.  (Glass bottles aren't picked up curbside, there are bins in every neighborhood and we have to sort our own.) Then I was going to run into the store at the train station to grab one more thing I needed for dinner.

Our glass depository is conveniently located next to the preschool down the street.  Not the smartest placement, come to think of it, especially once you hear this story.

My timing could not have been worse.  I stopped to dump my bottles just as all of the school parents were picking up their children.  Lots of traffic and lots of kids.  But continuing on to pick up the boys with three bags of smelly wine and beer bottles wasn't really an option either.  With the colored glass already sorted, I convinced myself it would be easy enough to jump out, dump each bag in the coordinating bin and be on my way.

Not so much.

Two cars were parked in what was supposed to be the bottle drive area.  My plastic bags were wet from the rain and heavy from the bottles.  They slipped from my hands in my haste and smashed to the ground.  I grabbed bottles and started tossing them where they needed to go.  Another bag slipped and broke.  There was literally broken glass everywhere.  My broken glass.  And children (little children) were all on their way to their cars.  Cars were honking at me.  (Did I forget to mention that the street is narrow and even though cars could get around my car, the one behind me was trying to fit somewhere in or around where my car was stopped.)

I looked down at my mess of broken glass.  I still tried to pick up a bottle or two that was big enough to put in the bin.  Two men who had stopped for some strange reason to have a conversation right at that spot, just stopped talking and stared.  One made a comment of some sort about glass, it was probably about my bad timing, but I prefer to think that he was echoing the thoughts that were ringing in my head about the cars that thoughtlessly parked so as to block the glass bins.  (The language in my head was a little bit stronger than that.)  In any event, I was too flustered for my mental translator to work properly.

Then I saw the blood.  I had blood gushing all over my hand.  I had no choice but to walk away from the mess of glass, get in my car and drive away.  With one hand, I dug out kleenex to wrap around my wound.  By the time I got to the parking lot for the store at the end of the street, it was soaked.  In the parking lot, with Miss B by my side, I realized a tiny cut on my right hand was bleeding profusely.  I found a band-aid in my purse and got that one under control.  But the one-inch cut on my thumb was not going to be so easy.  I was on my second wipe and out of bandaids.  At that exact moment, a cashier from the store came outside to have a smoke break.

She took one look at me and told me she'd be right back.  She came back with antiseptic spray, gauze, cotton, and tape.  I just started to cry.  Right there in the parking lot, she cleaned and wrapped up my entire thumb.  I'm a mom.  I'm the one that always takes care of everyone else.  To have someone like that appear at exactly the moment I needed someone to take care of me, is nothing short of a miracle.

I often hear expats complain about the customer service here in Belgium.  Personally, I've experienced much worse customer service in the U.S. and I've never had a customer service incident here worth mentioning (not including phone calls of course, especially to Belgacom).  Until today - in a good way.  This woman saved me today.  I am 100% sure that I would not have been able to get my cut to stop bleeding on my own.  She saved me from an afternoon in an ER waiting for stitches.  And I even made it to school on time to pick-up the boys.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go un-wrap my bloody-mess of a hand and assess the wound-situation.  On second thought, maybe I'll make Johnny do it for me.  Sometimes it's ok to ask for help.   Speaking of, I think he's going to be on bottle duty for awhile.  It's going to be awhile before I'll be able to return to the scene where today's traumatic events transpired.  At least until someone cleans up the glass, and the rain washes away any possible blood spatter.  I will also say lots of prayers that no one gets hurt on my glass mess.

And I can assure you, I will never, ever go back there with any sort of glass if it's even close to a drop-off or pick-up time.