La douleur exquise....pts. 1 and 2

Into every seemingly blissful life, a little pain must fall.

I collected my tiny, tiny little boy from school on Friday afternoon to find fingernail scratch marks down his left cheek. Actually he is nowhere near being a tiny, tiny little boy but I've never forgotten that moment when I first held him and I scared myself rigid that he would break. A friend at the time wisely commented that it was statistically far more likely that he would break me. It never really came to that but I soon realised she had a point.

As a moderately over-protective parent I strode up to his teacher and asked what had happened, and the only explanation I was given was that there had been some playground altercation although it was all a bit foggy as to what had happened...

Uncharacteristically he was very quiet when asked about how he got them, but I managed twenty-four hours later to extract from him that two of his classmates had chased him and scratched him on purpose.

When asked if he had told a teacher about it, he said no. When I asked if he had cried, he said no.
Then he looked pleadingly at me and asked if I was cross with him. Like a knife into my chest, I decided that this job is really too hard at times......

Rather predictably my father said he needed to learn how to deliver a sly punch on the quiet; I pointed out that, whilst I could see the need to defend himself, it may be difficult to explain the peculiarities and vagaries of self-defence to a four year old.

Sometimes, however, the universe decides it isn't just going to put you to the test in one area (in this instance it was resisting the temptation to pin my son's teacher against the wall and demand an explanation as to why she could not explain his lacerated face.....). Sometimes it decides that you've scraped through the audition, so you're off to boot camp. Oh goodie.

A phone call. That's all it takes.

"If you have an issue with something I've done, can you tell me before you publish it on the internet?"

Oh. Hmmm.

You can see his point, I guess......

Then I remembered the tortured state of disarray I was in on Friday evening and I, thankfully, came to my senses.

"This, you have to understand, is therapy to me; twenty years ago I would have written everything in a diary and stuffed it under the bed" He concedes that point; the world, I point out, has moved on.

Thirty years ago and it would have been in the diary and hidden in a place where I thought no-one went. No-one, that is, except my mother, apparently.

I feel I should point out that the disarray was caused by a brusque comment made by him to me to my entirely vacuous question "are you OK?"

Not that big a deal in the scheme of things, and I know that, all things being equal, I should have cast it off in the manner in which it was intended. Yes, I know I should have.....

So the pain here is actually twofold as the brusque episode and the ensuing shaking of the head and the soul searching seems to go on for hours, days..... And then the squirming on realisation that publishing your pain on the internet may be more than a little unfair when it involves your paramour, someone that you would take a bullet for.

(Don't get too excited; I fired the bullet into that last comment for dramatic effect)

The wild and obtuse tangents caused by misunderstandings can always be solved by one thing. Every time.

A phone call. That's all it takes.