The Art of Payback

“It’s all fun and games until someone leaves with a staple in their head.” Sage advice from a friend and fellow witness that now has special meaning for my four year old daughter. Thankfully, my daughter is just fine and now belly laughs when I refer to her as “my little staplehead”. However, somewhere not far from Fluvanna, I can hear my parents quietly giggling. Payback.

It all started innocently enough, as it always does. Our friends’ had decided to take us in for the evening after we had lost electricity during one of Virginia’s latest Arctic impressions. Not only did my family invade their otherwise quiet Sunday night, but we had also brought along our Springer Spaniel as well. It was our dog that started the evening’s festivities by first repeatedly drinking out of their toilet and then proceeding to leave a fresh present on their screened porch. However, it was our illustrious exit that provided for the post-New Years fireworks.

As I loaded the car to return to a reheated home, the children ran around in last ditch efforts to employ a variety of parental annoyance tactics and assorted kiddy mayhem. Then, it happened. Daughter and friend bump into each other and daughter launches headfirst into the nearest wall. Standard physics and sheet rock density aside, she wasn’t even fazed. That is, until she saw the blood. A quick check by the remaining, non-hysterical adults in the house confirmed it stitch-worthy.

OK. Check the watch. 9:15 on a Sunday night. Perfect. That gives us exactly 45 minutes to get her in the car, get the well “relieved” dog home, and get to the Martha Jefferson Pantops ER before it closes at 10 pm…all on snow-covered roads. Also to impose further on our friends to now watch both our son and infant daughter. Little did they know when they invited us over that this was standard operating procedure for the family. You’ve heard the old saying “Friends help you move, but real friends watch two of your three children at 10 pm on a Sunday night as your daughter’s head is bleeding”. Something like that anyway.

One fun-filled Sunday evening ride to Charlottesville and one staple to the noggin later, the patient is doing just fine. We can laugh about it now, but this brings me to yet another life lesson. A seemingly ever-growing list as I continue down the road of parenthood. “No matter what you do, your children will inevitably take after you…usually at inopportune times and always in grand fashion.”

After a childhood of repeatedly denting and abusing my cranium, our 4 year old has begun to follow dad’s lead. My parents had to endure much of the same from my childhood. If it wasn’t 105 degree fevers while sitting in Christmas traffic on the Jersey Turnpike, it was getting my own skull stapled together after one of those “see-what-I-can-do” moments that I am still too embarrassed to discuss publicly. I think back to some of the other less-than-intelligent feats that I had performed as a child that led to similar devastating results. Is this only the beginning? My parents can now sit in amusement as my wife and I shake our heads in disbelief. Been there, done that.

I shudder to think that I’ll have to look back on my own childhood to get an idea of what’s in store for my wife and I. I’m fairly certain that my parents were on a first name basis with our ER for a good portion of my childhood. It’s amusing that my daughter is the one that has begun to piece it all together though. As I look at her and refer to her as “my little staplehead”, she can honestly look back up at me and stated proudly, “it takes one to know one, daddy.” Touché.

Or should that be “en garde”?

- Originally published in Fluvanna Review February 25 2010