We went to the local farm the other day. No, not the one where I almost died, but a different one that’s a lot emptier but still has some animals to keep B entertained. And everything was going just fine until we got… our first splinter.
I knew it was coming, because B wouldn’t stop running her hands back and forth over an old picnic table, no matter how many times I told her to stop. And ironically, she didn’t even notice she actually got one until about a minute after it happened, when she looked down at her hand and asked me, “why do I have a brown line under my skin?”
Apparently, my dad’s impromptu decision to explain that it was a splinter was NOT the right call, because milliseconds later, the world ended. Shrieks, cries, yells, you name it – noises I’ve never heard emerging from my child were coming out in droves. It was immediately apparent that nothing could salvage this trip and that the only way to rectify this problem was to get home as fast as possible and remove the unwanted squatter.
So that’s what we did. We drove home, B sobbing hysterically every time she would look at her hand. My mom did her best to distract her by pointing out random things outside the window, but it was futile.
We arrived home, when I tried to explain that I was going to take it out and that it wasn’t going to hurt at all (sorry, I’m all about lying for the greater good, people). The problem, I later learned, was that I said this in Italian, which my daughter understood just fine but my father did not.
So when B calmly sat on my lap and prepared for her surgery, casually mentioning to my dad that, “Dziadziu, this isn’t going to hurt,” he instead interpreted that as a question and responded with, “yeah, it’s gonna hurt, but only for a minute.”
B turned on me faster than the speed of light, with a look in her eye that could kill. The feeling of betrayal was written all over her forehead, as she leapt off my lap like a gazelle and ran to the other side of the room. I attempted to retrieve her, only to have her resume her hyena-like behavior, which continued and escalated until I was convinced our neighbors would call the cops for child abuse.
At this point, my husband – who can’t bear if B so much as swallows water down the wrong pipe – had rushed downstairs and was just about ready to BITE it out of her finger if that meant she’d stop crying faster. Thankfully, my father redeemed himself at this point by throwing out some random jokes that distracted her just long enough for me to wrestle her into a choke-hold and for my husband to finagle the splinter from B’s finger.
The extraction process took about 30 seconds, the lead-up took about an hour, and the toll it took on Mom’s life? I’d say at least two years.