child safety – Rebecca Cuneo Keenan

The two bigger kids were playing in one of the upstairs bedrooms, the one that used to be “Claire’s room,” but now houses all of the toys. Baby Mary and I were chatting with my grandmother in the living room of the house that she has lived in for 55 years or so and the house that she still manages to keep in pristine condition all by herself at 80+ years of age. Unfortunately the impeccable housekeeping trait seems to have skipped a couple generations and been replaced with compulsive web surfing instead. Genetics, why hath you forsaken me?!

So there we were chatting it up when I heard the first scream. Kids scream, right? That’s what they do. So I ignored it. The second scream caught my attention, but I still kept talking. But that third scream. There was no mistaking the urgency and the pain in that third scream.

I sprinted up the stairs, baby in arms, and found Colum kneeling in front of the sofa bed, screaming and screaming. I plopped Mary on the floor and raced over to find his middle fingertip caught in the hinge. It seemed like both lifting the bed up or folding it back down would just squeeze his finger even worse.

In no time at all my grandmother was squeezing hand soap onto the hinge and I rubbed it all around his finger. Still, he screamed. I tried to pry the hinges further apart with my own fingers, I tried to ease his finger down and out and nothing was working. I started to flirt with the idea of losing it because what on earth do we do?! I am his mother, how can I not just make this better?!

Just then, his finger slid out. Thank goodness for over 80 years of wisdom and liquid hand soap. Thank goodness.

Between tears and ice and nursing hungry, screaming babies we found out that he was just trying to unfold the bed. His finger was bruised and a bit swollen, but he’ll be fine. And he’ll never, ever do that again.

But, holy shit. I forgot that as kids get older they just find more new and exciting ways to hurt themselves and scare the crap out of their parents. *blinking* It’s never going to end, is it?

Hey you! Yes, you with the kid on your shoulder. And you throwing that baby into the air and then catching it. And you kids riding bikes without helmets. Stop it. All of you need to just stop.

At the risk of sounding like . . . no, scratch that, I know that I’m going to sound like an overprotective old shrew, but it is worth repeating. I guess that’ s why us moms sound like a broken record a lot of the time — we will just keep repeating this stuff until somebody listens. Or until it gets so far under your skin as to ingrain itself in your very essence and you will never, ever be able to engage in that behaviour without feeling fundamentally uneasy. (Now that I’m a parent there’s a whole torrent of warnings from my childhood that I simply cannot stomach: kids on balconies, kids running onto elevators — what if it’s not there?!, ink on skin, and young babies bearing weight on their legs, to name a few.) Some of these nagging warnings are just our own particular peeves, but some are real hazards. This is hazard number one.