Got the call yesterday afternoon that we knew was coming but never expected. Our oldest son had been in an accident. Thankfully, it was relatively minor.
He was driving his girlfriend home after the track meet at the high school and he reached into a zip lock bag of pretzels the two of them were sharing. Literally, in the blink of an eye, he took his eye off the road, missed a turned and plowed head on into a mailbox. The mailbox post snapped in two sending the mail box flying but not before it bent over onto the car denting the hood. The front bumper cover was deeply scratched and a fog lamp was broken too.
It could have been so much worse. Had the mailbox not have been securely attached to the post the mail box itself could've gone through the windshield if it had broken free of the post. The fact the mailbox ended up as far away from the car as it did tells me he was going faster than he claimed he was going. Perhaps, just maybe, his speed played in his favor this time. The physics of what happens in an accident being the difference between nothing really happening, serious injury or worse.
He was rock solid on the phone with me when he called to tell me about what had happened. He has this unique ability, that he certainly didn't get from me, where he's able to defer reaction or emotion; he didn't break down in front of his girlfriend. He was remarkably calm, cool and collected. No sooner, though, than the second he got home that he turned into a pile of goo. He was trembling and he told his mother and I that he was "scared" because he didn't know how the homeowner was going to react about the mailbox. What? Yes. He also left the scene without notifying the homeowner that he had blasted his mailbox to smithereens.
On the way back to the scene the poor kid was a mess. I haven't seen him this upset in a very long time, if ever. It's at moments like this we parents must move into triage mode and at the very least, not make things worse. Difficult to do seeing how we're emotionally charged at the moment as well. The last thing he needed to get at that moment was a brutal scolding seeing he was already tearing himself up over what had happened. What more was I going to do to make him feel bad about what had happened? My job was to make him feel better.
He needed to calm down and that's what I helped him do. He's 17 and has never had anything like this happen to him before. I told him that accidents happen to all of us, we all make mistakes and that he needed to suck it up and calm down, to stop overreacting. As much as he can defer emotion, he can overreact like the best of us when the emotions do finally erupt. He kept ruminating about what ifs and what nots and I told him to stop. If anything, it could've been so much worse. Now, don't get me wrong, I was not happy about what had happened. He was careless and made a mistake but what he hopefully takes away from this incident was that he was careless and made a mistake. Not that his father eviscerated him.
He was nervous about what he was going to say to the homeowner once we got back to the scene. I reassured him that even at his ripe old age of 17, there are still things that his father should and would do for him. I would speak to the homeowner and handle it. Fortunately for someone who had left the scene of an accident, literally a hit and run, the homeowner was not home. We put the broken mailbox post by the front door of the house with an apologetic note on it asking the homeowner to call me.
On the way back to our house he had calmed down and I had him laughing when I told him stories of antics that I had gotten myself into when I was his age. He made plans with his girlfriend to come over for dinner and a movie at our house. When it was all said and done, save for the damage to the car, you'd never know anything happened out of ordinary yesterday. As it should be.
Oh, and if you're wondering, yes. He's going to have to get a job to pay for the repairs.
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