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---
title: Dem Bones
---
Life Lessons: We become the sum of our choices.
Thankfully, I've never suffered a broken bone in my life, but Lori and
several of our children have. The most recent occurrence was Lori's
wobbly-rock incident at Girl's Camp that resulted in a shiny new
stainless-steel plate in her left wrist. She now has a small collection
of metal objects in her body, but I'm not the least bit jealous. I think
perhaps the artificial lenses in my eyes trump the metal she has in her
wrist and hip.\
\
Lori's broken wrist got me to pondering over the children's broken
bones. I've decided to write about the time Emily broke her arm. I think
there is a life lesson in there somewhere, but only where you would
least expect it.\
\
We were living in our first house in American Fork, Utah. It was a
starter house neighborhood with mostly young families and tons of young
children roaming the neighborhood. Emily was probably about 5 years old
at the time. As young kids will do, Emily had climbed a fence and was
demonstrating her balancing skills by walking like a tight rope walker
along the top of the fence. I don't remember who the culprit was, but
some other neighborhood child thought it would be funny to chuck his
shoe at Emily in an attempt to make her fall off the fence. I don't even
know if he was successful in hitting his target, but he was successful
at making Emily fall off the fence. She came home with her forearm bent
at an impossible angle. It was quite apparent that some bones had been
broken and we needed to get her to the emergency room in a hurry.\
\
Not having a sitter for the other kids, Lori and I loaded up the other
two children and Emily in the car and headed to the hospital. The
treatment for the broken arm seemed rather bizarre to me. They put
Emily's fingers in metal springs that worked like Chinese handcuffs to
suspend her hand in the air. They then hung a bucket from her elbow and
started adding water to it to use the weight to stretch her forearm as
they tried to re-align the broken bones prior to adding the cast. I
believe they gave Emily some laughing gas to calm her down, but it
didn't work and she was making a pretty big fuss the whole time. It was
all very stressful to watch my own child suffer so much and the
procedure was taking a very long time. Lori suggested that she could
stay with Emily at the hospital and I could take the other children back
home. My nerves were a little bit frazzled by the harrowing experience
so I was glad to comply with the suggestion.\
\
I took Ryan and Megan back to the car and loaded them into the back
seat. Now this was before the days when seat belts and child car seats
were required and my children were quite used to roaming free whenever
they were in the car with us. It was also before we were affluent enough
to afford a car with air-conditioning, so the windows were down as we
left the hospital parking lot. Not long after leaving the parking lot, I
could see Megan in my rear-view mirror. She was standing on the seat and
quite happy with herself for her accomplishment. Recognizing that this
was a dangerous thing for a three-year-old to do and not wanting to have
to pay for two broken bones on the same day, I told her fairly firmly to
sit down on the seat. Well Megan wasn't about to comply while she was
quite enjoying her newly discovered ability to see the world go by from
a much better vantage point. I told her again with even more volume and
probably a good deal of anger in my voice to sit down. Again, no
result.\
\
Because I was driving and Megan was in the back seat, I realized I
couldn't do much under these circumstances to enforce my command to my
non-compliant child. So, with a bit of steam coming out of my ears, I
pulled over to the curb and braked hard to bring the car to a stop. I
turned around and yelled, "Megan, sit down!" as I rather roughly pushed
her into a sitting position in the back seat. Megan wasn't any too
thrilled about this kind of treatment and immediately started to holler
over the affront to her 3-year-old dignity.\
\
Satisfied I had reaffirmed that my authority was not to be trifled with,
I looked up and discovered I had stopped right in front of a house where
some kind of barbeque event was going on in the front yard. Everyone in
the party was looking at me with a look of shock and horror on their
faces. I was totally mortified to realize that they all had witnessed my
little tirade in front of their house. Fortunately, this was before the
days when everyone had cell phones and took videos of such spectacles so
they could go viral on the internet. However, my shame at being caught
in the act by so many witnesses was such that I determined to high-tail
it out of there as fast as I could. I put the car in gear and put the
pedal to the metal to make my get-away.\
\
Thinking about this memory more than 30 years later, I can recognize the
life lesson I didn't really learn at the time of its occurrence. I
wasn't really mortified by my lack of gentleness and patience with
Megan. I was mostly mortified that my little outburst had been seen by
others. I wonder how I would have behaved if I had remembered that
everything we do here in mortality is being observed by someone. It all
goes into the Book of Life and becomes a part of the permanent record.
Our choices become a part of our soul and the cumulative effect
determines who we become. I think this is one reason why marriage is
such a vital part of this mortal experience. We have a built-in witness
to our lives and a greater motivation to try to behave well in front of
our companion on the covenant path.
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