Growing Pains

The look of confusion and fear in his eyes was so pathetic, I wished I could've taken his place.  Sitting sideways on H's lap, Little Man, simply openend his mouth and puked.  Not knowing to lean forward, the vomit ran down his chest, like lava from a Hot Wheels-loving volcano, until he was done.  He looked up at H and wailed, "I THROWED UP!!!!"

Up until now, this phenomenon was unknown to LM.  He had somehow survived almost five years in a house with school-aged siblings without once contracting a stomach virus.  While his sisters lay on the couch puking in Tupperware containers, he looked on mildly intrigued. But now he knew well the discomfort of having waffles exit the wrong way. That got me thinking about all the other physical maladies that are indescribable until your first childhood experience and how you are completely convinced you are going to die.

Throwing up is pretty intense, with all the involuntary spasms and such, but what about getting the wind knocked out of you?  I remember being on the school bus on the way home from kindergarten when it happened to me the first time.  My cousins and I were the last ones on the bus and, knowing there was a significant pothole the driver ran over every day, we ran to the back to sit over the bus's rear tires.  Oh, no seat belts for us!  They didn't even exist on the school buses of the 70's.  I'm surprised the driver wasn't smoking with all the windows closed.  And as we hit the pothole (I might even remember us convincing the driver to speed up before going over it), I was tossed in the air like a rag doll and landed on the top edge of the padded set, right on my solar plexus.  My ten year-old male cousins were no comfort as I tried to shriek with no oxygen.  Unti it occurred to them their crazy Aunt Rita was meeting them at the bus stop, and there was going to be hell to pay if her kid was, you know, dead.  I still remember them gingerly helping me down the stairs, all sympathetic clucking, the hypocritical assholes.  But can you really describe that feeling?  You really, truly think the end is nigh.

And what about splinters?  It's not so much the getting of splinters as it is the removal of them that is like something out of a slasher film.  There are those nice ones that are tiny, and only go in half-way, leaving a nice solid tip to be pinched by the tweezers and swiftly removed.  But then there are the real mother fuckers.  The deep ones, that leave no reachable end, lurking deep below the surface, where your mother's only recourse is the dreaded...SAFETY PIN!!!!  Nothing struck deep, sickening dread in my heart than my mother cracking out the safety pins and the Mecuricome - a bright orange anti-septic that actually contained mercury that stung like a bitch.  H swears it was like I was raised in a third world country sometimes, so out of date was my Irish mother's home remedies, and it's a miracle I don't have heavy metal poisoning.  My telling him about her disinfecting the needle by holding it over a lit match resulted in his laughing himself sick and asking is she gave me a leather strap to bite down on.

Now having my own kids, and using, relatively painless, hydrogen peroxide, my children scream just as loudly when I say, "I don't think the tweezers are going to work, sweetie".  How awful must it be as a child to have the person you love most in the world come at you with a sharp object intent on digging into your flesh with it?  Last summer, LM had his first splinter, and instead of whimpering meekly, like the girls did as I stuck a pin into his foot, we had a full on wrestling match where my gentle It's-going-to-be-OK-honey-s devolved into my screaming "JUST STAY STILL!!!" and we both wound up sweaty and crying.  But damn, that thing was almost an inch long.

And the coup de gras, in my opinion, of horrifying childhood firsts is Your First Charlie Horse.  It's not just the pain that makes them so bad, but the fact that they happen most often in the middle of the night. What a terror-filled few moments when you are innocently stretching you little legs, half asleep, and you are hit with  this intense pain.  You are all alone, without your parents to tell you what the hell is happening and you're thinking, "This is it.  I'm dying.  And I never even got that Farrah Fawcett haircut." Even as an adult it's no joke.  Charlie horses are the closest thing I can describe to labor pains, just all over your stomach and privates.  Good times.

There are so many things that happen to our bodies, and it's so strange to think our kids have no idea how any of them feel.  Describing them is often useless to little people who's only comparison is scraped knees and paper cuts.  I guess pain is just a part of life and we learn as we experience it, some sooner than others.  I got stung by a bee for the first time at the age of 38 and expected, from the playground theatrics I witnessed as child, to be in agony.  Maybe it's the fact I've had three babies, but, seriously, what the hell were you all complaining about?