TWO weeks ago, my son, Julian, gave his Dad a Father’s Day present to remember: An emergency trip to the doctor’s.
While tearing up and down the living room like Flash Gordon on speed, our hyperactive four-year-old boy tripped and crashed head-first into a side table.
He came up hollering.
Blood spurted out from a nasty looking gash on his forehead.
As he bawled like a thing out of the 1980s horror movie Child’s Play, I turned white as rivulets of red streamed down his face, staining his clothes and dripping on the floor.
Luckily, the Supportive Spouse (SS) spent a lot of his youth watching the then-World Wrestling Federation programme on television, and knew a trick that professional wrestlers used for realistic bloodletting: They would cut themselves near the brow bone with concealed razors, as a minor cut in that area produces an impressive amount of blood.
“It looks worse than it actually is,” said my husband calmly, as he applied a towel directly to Julian’s similarly-situated wound to staunch the bleeding.
True enough, after 10 minutes, the bleeding stopped. Julian even started to giggle like a maniac – post-traumatic hysteria, I swear – when I was unable to
find any bandages in the house and suggested taping a big, absorbent pad to his head.
Nevertheless, just to make sure it was nothing more than a flesh wound, we bundled the boy into the car and drove to a nearby clinic.
While I waited in the carpark with my younger son, seven month-old Lucien, who had fallen asleep en route, father took his first-born son to the family clinic to get patched up. I postponed our Father’s Day dinner reservations.
As I cooled my heels, I thought about the irony of Julian sending his concerned Dad into battle stations on this day of all days.
Not only was the SS not being pampered with thoughtful gifts and the luxury
of a lie-in, his annual Hallmark moment-cum-appreciation fest was fast evaporating as he dealt pragmatically with the unavoidable business of childhood injuries.
Like a typical Mum, I spent another 13 1/2 minutes trying not to think about whether my darling son was going to be permanently scarred.
Feeling shallow, but unable to help it, I reasoned that any scar on his face would, far from reducing his handsome-ness in my eyes, up his macho quotient.
Imagine: In the future, hordes of small girls weaned on Harry Potter novels and films might find my son irresistible – not unlike a certain young wizard with a lightning-shaped scar on his forehead.
Then, I got a series of SMSes from the SS, updating me on their quest for medical treatment.
Apparently, the big bloke and small bloke were having a ball of a time in the waiting room, playing with the toys there, counting down to their number flashing on the electronic queue system’s display screen, and generally talking rubbish and horsing around.
The good news?
No stitches were required. The doctor merely glued shut the 1.5cm-long, deep-ish cut, and prescribed some antiseptic cream to be applied twice a day. Julian cried
when the Doc cleaned his wound, but Dad was on hand to soothe and hug the boy.
The cut is now healing nicely.
Much later, I asked the SS what he thought of this year’s Father’s Day.
“Quite fun,” he replied, breezily.
“We had a good time bonding at the doctor’s.”
I doubt Julian will forget this honour-thy-father occasion any time soon. All he has to do is look in the mirror, and the eventual scar on his forehead will remind him of it.
Scar tissue may lighten and fade. But the early memory of a good, fun hour in which you had the most heroic Dad in the whole wide world all to yourself?
That lasts forever.
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