Self Aware?

As M was climbing into the bath the other night, I noticed two rather nasty looking bruises on his lower back. They were both small, but dark and a little swollen. I asked him what had happened to his back and, knowing the answer before he even starting speaking, was told he didn’t know. C is the same way, his knee can be six different colors of black and blue, but he will have no memory of how it ended up that way.

Last week I was home sick for a day and got a call from the school nurse to come pick up M. His right eye was inflamed and his cheek and forehead around it were red and swollen. I rushed down to the school to find M waiting for me, eye only slightly blood-shot, but no swelling or redness to be seen. “He got better,” Nurse Monty Python told me. Mmhmm. Asked what had happened to his eye, M had alternately told the nurse that he banged in on a desk in class or he had smacked his face with his hands, because he was a “silly boy.” The explanation I got, in front of the nurse, was that he had been running in the kitchen this morning and run face first into the counter. Really, I asked, where was I? “Brushing your teeth.” (I’m pretty sure I would have noticed this before we went to school and it wouldn’t have taken 4 hours for them to call me if he had shown up like that.) So, who knew what really happened?

The following day he came home from school with a bruise and goose-egg on the opposite side of his forehead. What happened? He banged his head on a table in class? A classmate had “jumped out of a wall and ninja kicked” him, a soft ball had hit him (“the balls in gym are soft,” not a softball) . Thankfully, the nurse left us a message during the day that he had been running in class and collided with  a bookcase, but had been reactive and alert afterwards. So, we knew the answer there, but why didn’t he? Are they afraid to tell us what happens?

During the summer I keep a watchful eye out for DSS in our neighborhood, convinced that someone has noticed the warm-weather exposed bruises on their arms and legs and dropped the dime on us. I marvel at the new patterns on their shins and elbows at bath time. I know they’re boys, but geez, don’t they hurt? I am told they do not.

Now, I know that some of these magical bruises appear during the commission of acts that parents would not approve of (e.g. jumping from the top of your bookcase to your bed, but missing; running a ninja academy in the kitchen; cutting off your brother’s leg with a lightsaber; and so on). Those lack of stories I get. But, some confound me. M has two bruises on his back, C has a cut on his forehead and one on his cheek. Shins are near permanently bruised and no one seems to know why. Am I just more injury retentive? And why don’t they learn that doing something stupid once and getting hurt means getting hurt the next time you do the same stupid thing?

Babies learn object permanence, do boys ever learn injury awareness?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*


eight − 7 =

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>