Like most kids, ours are veritable magnets for the little bumps and bruises that life inflicts on us. Unlike adults, their mishaps are usually accompanied by tears and a trip to the magical place - usually in the kitchen - where the band-aids are kept. As I made the trip with my daughter earlier this morning, I was struck by how often we do this, and how poignant the moment can be if only we take the time to stop and remember what it looks and feels like.
So, with that flash in my mind, and a Strawberry Shortcake bandage happily attached to Dahlia's boo-boo just below her knee, I sat down at the computer and quickly brainstormed my thoughts into a previously-empty screen. Here's the result. It's obviously quite rough, but I'm thinking it would make a worthwhile submission somewhere sometime soon. What say you?
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In our kitchen cupboard above the sink sits a collector-style pencil tin box that's filled with band-aids.
It's covered with pictures depicting a Winnie the Pooh theme. Pooh and his friend, Piglet, are meandering though a meadow in the Hundred Acre Wood on a blustery fall day. Tigger happily dives into a pile of leaves. Even Eeyore the perpetually-depressed donkey smiles as he takes in the scene.
Pooh wears a scarf to protect against the cold. But he and his buddies wear smiles because they're all together.
The comforting scene is perhaps appropriate given the comfort that the contents of this little box bring our kids almost every day.
With clockwork regularity, any one of our three children will slowly amble over to either me or my wife and sadly share news of yet another mishap. They'll often struggle to get their words out amidst sobs of pain. "I walked into the edge of the sofa," says Zach, 9. Dahlia, who's 7, reports, "I bumped my knee while doing a gymnastic flip off of my bed." Four-year-old Noah barely manages to say he dropped his cup onto his thumb before he dissolves into my wife's arms in a heap of tears.
Most often, these not-quite-tragedies of childhood draw no blood. Even the tiniest scratch is nowhere to be seen. But a boo-boo is a boo-boo, and in the mind of a child, the band-aid holds mythical powers of healing that adults only wish were real.
The dance of parenthood begins as we look for the quickest way to return our kids to their usual happy state of being. "Do you want a band-aid?" we'll ask. Little heads nod, accompanied by facial expressions so sad and so pathetic that not even the most hardened among us could keep down those inevitable twinges of emotion. The crying slowly subsides and the tears are wiped away as little one realizes Mom and Dad are there to once again set everything right.
We set off on the inevitable trip to the cupboard to see what's in the Pooh tin. We try to shift the discussion to the kind of band-aid that will most soothe the hurt. In the back of our minds, my wife and I struggle to remember what we've got in the inventory: Pooh? Bob the Builder? Toy Story? Strawberry Shortcake? If we don't put the right one on, the tears will start anew and we'll be right back to where we started.
Band-aids do little to soothe real injuries that draw blood and inflict real pain. They do even less for the invisible ones that exist only in the mind of a person too little to appreciate the realities of injuries and healing.
Yet the smile on our little people's faces as they trundle away from the kitchen to proudly show their new covering to their siblings is real. They're healed, only in a manner quite unlike what the good folks who sell us bandages originally intended.
The scene on the collector tin in the kitchen cupboard over the sink never changes, which is part of its appeal. Over the years, my wife and I do our best to keep it filled with the right kind of band-aids, and we continue to act out the same evolving scene to bring our little people just a bit more comfort to their world that occasionally jabs them with a sharp edge.
If only the hurts of the real world were so easily fixed by slapping a sanitary piece of plastic and fabric over the top of them.
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1 comment:
My parents used to hide the band-aids in my dad's dresser drawer, because otherwise they figured we would paper ourselves with them. We probably would have, between the four of us. This continued for at least five years after we all figured out where they were, but daren't retrieve them because it was DAD's dresser. Now they reside in a cabinet in the kitchen in my parent's house. I kind of wish they were still in the old drawer.
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