Face off

Here’s a great phone call to receive at work: I answer the phone, and it’s my wife. “Come home now. Or meet me at the doctor. Just start driving this way.” Click.
My first reaction was to say, “HELLO? HELLO? HELLO?” even though I heard her hang up. It’s as though people think saying “HELLO?” louder and louder will somehow reconnect the call.
I headed out of the office and called my wife with my cell phone. We had this exchange:
HER: Are you on your way?
ME: Yes, what happened?
HER: Parker cut his head.
ME: How?
HER: Just get here. Or meet me at the doctor.
Click.
ME: HELLO? HELLO?
A few moments later my phone rang. It was my wife, calling to provide a few more details. Turns out she needed to get me in motion but didn’t have a lot of time to talk because she was working to stop the geyser of blood coming out of The Dude’s forehead. He apparently opted for a head butting contest with the corner of a couch. The couch, it appears, won.
She had put in a call to the doctor’s office, who said to bring him in. I was near the house, so I went there to help with loading the kids up.
When I came in the door, my wife was on the phone again with the doctor, and a neighbor was sitting with Parker. Parker looked like he had just finished a bar-room tough man competition. He was wearing a pair of blue jean shorts and about four pints of blood. I walked in and saw him, and he looked up at me. Did he cry? Did he whimper? No way. The Dude lifted the cold compress off his head and said, “Daddy -- look.” This is the kid who, when he was two, got a shot from a nurse. She put the Band-Aid on his leg, and he responded my peeling it off and handing it back to her, along with an icy stare.
Underneath the compress was a big nasty gash, even bigger than the one I gave myself a few months ago when I went a round with a door (the door won). Naturally, my caring and compassionate nature led me to respond with, “Cool! We’re gonna have matching scars!” Parker thought that was cool, too. Based on the stares from my wife and my neighbor, we were alone in that feeling.
When we got to the doctor’s office, I went to unload the kids. In putting Parker in the car, I guess I kinda focused a little too much on the whole not bleeding over everything component. My wife asked where his shirt was. Uh... Shoes? Hmmm.
So there we were, blue jeans shorts and a head wound. As I was carrying him in, I am sure it looked far worse, as though I were just carrying him from a disaster scene. “Forgot the shoes!” I said to several people I walked past, as if this would somehow explain to people why my four-year-old son was covered in blood.
Parker was very calm, and seemed to almost wonder what all the fuss was about. When the doctor started looking at his head, he looked over at me and said, “Daddy, should I close my eyes or not?”
The doctor said we would probably be able to fix the wound with glue, rather than stitches. Allie, who is almost seven, has never been a fan of doctor’s office, and she was even less of a fan of watching her brother get super glued back together. “Uh, I’ll just go sit in the waiting room,” she told us as she tried to bolt the room. I told her that everything was OK, and that the super glue could also be used to keep little girls in their seats. She was not entirely certain I was kidding.
We were told that he had to keep his head dry for five days, which is not a very fair sentence for a kid in the summer who lives at a house with a pool. My wife and I weren’t trying to punish Allie, but it would be pretty unfair to let her go swimming while Parker sat at the window watching. We sat both kids down and explained to them that the pool, unfortunately, had sharks in it for a few days.
One nice thing about head wounds on children is that people immediately assume you took a hatchet to your child. I for one make a point of NOT justifying the wound to anyone. When they stare at me with that look, I just stare back and say, “You want some?” And then my wife jabs her elbow in my ribs.
During the healing process, my wife and I did distinguish ourselves as either very creative or very bad parents (the jury is split on it). Any time Parker would fuss, fidget, sass or otherwise be a four-year-old, I would say, “CAREFUL PARKER! Your cut will open up!” And he would freeze. It’s amazing what the fear of your brain oozing out of your head will do for behavior.
The wound is slowly healing up, although it is still rather nasty. He’s definitely going to have a scar, but it should (a) be mostly covered by his hair and (b) add an air of mystery later in life. Maybe he and I can stroll along, our matching scars, people wondering if it was a father-son run-in with ninjas or something. Oh, and for what it’s worth, the healing has occured at just the right time -- I finally got the sharks out of the pool.