Funning With Scissors

And Other Ways My Kids Tried to Die

My kids routinely tried to kill each other when they were little. And sometimes they tried to kill themselves. Not intentionally, of course. But things went down.

We have two kids, three months apart. (We were in the process of adopting one when we found out we were pregnant with another. Story for a different day…) So we had two newborns, two toddlers, two teens at the same time. Double everything. And double opportunity for disaster.

They were toddlers when Josie came running to me, hysterical, with blood running down her arm from her hand. I thought they were watching Thomas the Tank Engine in my room, but they had gone exploring in my bathroom and discovered the snub-nosed baby fingernail scissors there. Grooming trauma ensued. In an effort to do like Mom and trim Josie’s nails, Keaton cut off the tip of her finger. Besides forever altering her fingerprint, he had also cemented the fact that he would never pursue a career as a nail tech.

This was not the only scissor related trauma we had. Another day in their toddlerhood, they were sitting at their little Ikea art table while I cooked dinner. I enjoyed listening to their banter while I made their mac and cheese. But then I heard the worst sound a toddler mom can hear. Silence. The banter had stopped, and my mom radar perked up. Then giggling. Weird giggling. Like nervous but also gleeful giggling.

I whipped around to the other side of the island where their art table resided. Keaton had the snub-nosed baby art scissors in his hand. His hair was… different. And sprinkles of it were scattered on the table in front of him. Josie’s back was to me. But when I came around the front of her, I think I gasped like a victim in a Friday the 13th movie. Her hair was…gone.

She barely had any hair to begin with. She was a bald baby until well after her first year. Her hair was a beautiful golden color, but it was wispy, sparse, barely there. And now she had Dumb and Dumber looking bangs that were about an eighth of an inch long. She looked like a cancer baby for the next year and a half. (And yes, I quickly learned that snub-nosed scissors are still scissors!)

Another day, another screaming Josie running from my bathroom. This time, they had discovered my stash of Q-Tips. Josie was bleeding from her ear. Keaton was also crying from a combination of thinking he had mortally wounded his sister and the fear of my impending freak out. Chris was out of town. So was my dad, a pediatrician. In fact he was out of the country on a European vacay. And it was nighttime.

One emergency clinic visit later, we were safely home and reassured by the fact that it was only an abrasion and not an ear drum puncture. No permanent damage had occurred. Except to my mental state.

Yes, Josie was usually the unwitting recipient of Keaton’s accidental murder attempts. But not always. Sometimes, she tried to obliterate herself. Once when she was three or four, she almost took out her own eye.

We had a trike thing that had a long handlebar in the back so a lazy or uncoordinated child could be pushed from behind. Fiercely independent preschooler that she was, Josie insisted on pushing the trike down the sidewalk herself. Never mind the fact that the trike now had no passenger. She was going to steer that ship, by God. Now that she was in charge, she joyfully took off down the sidewalk as fast as her little girl legs would carry her. You can see where this is going. And so could my pediatrician dad who was with her at the time.

He took off after her as fast as his old man legs would carry him. But it was too late. She hit a bump in the sidewalk, tripped and face planted right into the end of the handlebar. It fit perfectly into the scoop of her eye socket.

Another emergency clinic visit. Another sigh-of-relief assessment. She would not lose her eye like she had her hair. No torn retina. No serious damage. No more trike with a handlebar in the back.

One evening around this same time, Chris took the kids to the neighborhood park after dinner. I was a dance teacher and often worked evenings. On these nights, Chris was on his own for the dinner/bath/bedtime routine. After their return home, he noticed that Josie was being kind of strange. She kept sniffling in an odd way and touching her nose. Cut to Chris having a flashback of Josie digging around in the gravelly rocks at the playground and tossing said rocks down the slide.

“Josie, do you have a rock in your nose?”

“No,” she said with shifty preschooler eyes.

As Chris was tucking her in for the night, Josie sang like a canary. “Daddy, I think I do have a rock in my nose.”

“Did you put one up your nose?”

“I don’t remember.”

Chris tried to peek up her nostril but couldn’t see anything. Whatever was up there was way up there. This was going to require either a delicate procedure or another emergency clinic visit. Sure enough, when Chris gently inserted tweezers up her nose, he hit solid ground. He could tell by the tapping sound it was a rock. Not a pliable clump of dirt or a small piece of gravel.

Although Chris is not a pediatrician, he successfully performed tweezer surgery and got that rock out. He said it was like pulling a cork out of a wine bottle, which I think he actually did after this ordeal.

It wasn’t always Josie who sustained damage though. When Keaton was not even two, he managed to dump an entire can of paint on his head. It was in his nostrils, mouth, eyes - he looked like a baby Casper. That was our first call to Poison Control.

Our second was about a year later when he somehow managed to open a “child proof” bottle of Flintstone’s Vitamins with Iron. When I found him in the bathroom with the open bottle in hand, he couldn’t tell me how many he had scarfed down. We read books and colored in the bathroom while waiting for the Syrup of Ipecac to kick in. That was probably the happiest I’ve ever been to see throw up.

But one of the most dramatic Keaton incidents happened when he was still a baby. I was loading groceries into my trunk while he was sitting in the front of the shopping cart. Unbeknownst to me, as I was leaning into the trunk arranging the bags, he was leaning over behind me to see what Mom was doing. I stood and closed the trunk.

It was like a slow motion movie moment as I realized in complete horror that I had closed his hand in the trunk. The trunk was fully closed ON HIS HAND. Just his thumb was visible. The rest of his hand was inside the back of the car.

I don’t know who screamed louder between the two of us. It was another excruciating slow motion moment as I scrambled to dig my car key out of my purse to be able to release my child’s hand from the jaws of the trunk.

In the five agonizing seconds it probably took me to locate and press the release button, a flood of what ifs and worst case scenarios flashed through my head. What if all his fingers are broken, what if I cut off all his fingers, what if I have to pick up his fingers out of the trunk, what if he can never use his hand again, what if he thinks I did it on purpose, what if he never forgives me, how will I ever forgive myself, what kind of mother CLOSES THE TRUNK ON HER BABY’S HAND, what will Chris say, will he ever forgive me if we now have a six-fingered baby, oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no, please oh please let him be ok…

When the trunk finally popped open, I almost vomited with relief to see that all of his fingers were in tact. They looked kind of… fine. There was no blood, not really even a mark. But my baby was wailing (and probably asking the universe why in the hell he got this distracted dumbass for a mom), and I still didn’t know if I had broken all the bones in his hand.

Besides the actual my baby’s hand is slammed and enclosed in the trunk moment, the worst part was having to drive the 12 minutes or so to my dad’s office unable to comfort my screaming child who I had to secure in his carseat behind me. I desperately apologized through my tears as I frantically raced to the doctor’s office trying not to have a wreck.

After an X-ray and exam, I was relieved and flabbergasted to learn that his hand was perfectly ok. Keaton had such fat baby sausage fingers, that absolutely no damage had been done. (Besides the trauma to both of our psyches.) He didn’t even develop a bruise.

There were other incidents during their childhood. Multiple times Keaton sprinted away from us into the street or in a busy parking lot narrowly avoiding being hit by a car. (In an attempt to get him to understand the tragedy that could befall one who runs into traffic, I once took the opportunity to show him an up close and personal look at a squirrel that had been hit by a car in front of our house. I think he found my twisted show and tell more grossly fascinating than fearsome.)

There was the time Keaton, barefoot and in only a swim suit, stood squarely in the middle of a red ant pile without noticing until the entire ant army made its way up his legs and into his shorts. And the time Josie was nearly suffocated by a malfunctioning seatbelt that Chris had to literally cut off of her. Or the time Keaton nearly drowned while giving his younger cousin a piggyback ride in the pool. Chris had to dive in fully dressed, phone in pocket, to save both of them.

Of course the worries got bigger as the kids got older and the stakes got higher. There’s nothing quite like the constant low level anxiety of parents of kids who drive. There were wrecks and tickets and bad decisions. But thank God, there were no tragedies.

I know how exceedingly lucky we are to have come out of their childhoods relatively unscathed. All families are not nearly as fortunate.

But all parents know that the worry doesn’t end just because the kids grow up. In fact, the worries and what ifs get bigger and scarier.

Part of the price of parenthood is forever stressing about the safety and security of your children. Mine both live in big urban cities far away from me. I worry about Josie navigating LA traffic and dark parking lots. I worry about Keaton taking the New York subway at night or taking his own safety for granted just because he’s 6 ‘3.

I worry about both of them being taken advantage of. I worry that they don’t apply sunscreen as they should. That they aren’t as vigilant as they should be about protecting their drinks at crowded bars. That they listen to their ear buds too loud. That they don’t floss as they should, save enough money, get enough rest.

Surviving the mishaps and mayhem of their childhood was only Phase 1. I know the shape and specifics of my worries will change as we all age, and that new and currently unknown worries will pop up even when my kids are well into their adulthoods. The worries will morph and multiply as worries do. When one worry drops off the list, another one slides in like emails in an inbox.

I know I probably worry too much. I have a busy imagination, and my mind definitely goes places without me. But I also know that my mom worried about me and my sister until the moment she died. I’m sure I’ll do the same.

There are some worries, however, that I have been able to let go of. At least I’m pretty confident I’ll never slam one of their hands in a trunk again. And thank God I no longer have to worry about them playing with scissors, snub-nosed or otherwise.

For more from Leslie Senevey, check out Distracted by Pretty Things.