Sawyer, of course, was able to handle more than he thought he could. He endured all of the pain and the fear and the blood and the needles. He limped out of the ER with a story to tell. When the worst of the pain came over him, he kept his eyes clenched tight and asked me to pray again, so I did. It’s a comfort to know the Lord, and Sawyer already understands that.

It was a minor injury, really. Sawyer was riding his bike one minute and was on the pavement the next, and I didn’t expect there to be any kind of real issue beyond yet another scraped knee. In his lifetime he has spent every stretch of warm weather covered with the scrapes and bruises that come with testing the limits of boyhood. But this time, when he stood up, I took one look at his knee and recognized right away that this was an injury beyond what I am equipped to fix. I may have a boy mom playbook in my brain, etched there by necessity through the years, but I knew there was no page that would show me how to make this busted knee okay again.

So Sawyer and I found ourselves in the odd position of needing to go to the emergency room in the middle of a pandemic. I’ll be honest: there was hardly any thought of the virus passing between us because we had this very immediate, very messy situation right in front of us, and it seemed obvious that we had no choice but to go to the very spot where one might run if they had a suspicious cough. This, after I hadn’t allowed my children to see so much as the inside of the Dollar General for all these weeks. It wasn’t a scenario I imagined myself living out during such a time, but here we were.

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