I am a parent. Sure, technically I have been a parent for two months now. And, sure, technically I’ve spent those two months fulfilling all the usual parental duties. But, if I’m honest, it felt incomplete. It felt as if I wasn’t doing something that all other parents do. That thing? Rushing my kid to a terrifying, but ultimately unnecessary, emergency hospital appointment. Don’t worry, though. I’m there now. I’m one of you. Accept me.
Early on, you see, my son had a brilliant belly button. An innie, as perfect as the rest of him. But recently I noticed that an outie was sprouting up in its place. That was fine, too, because I’d made a vow to love my son no matter what, even if he did have a gruesome little granny thumb jutting out of his abdomen.
But then I touched it. Reader, it squelched.
It actually, physically squelched under my fingertip. It made a noise. Now, belly buttons aren’t supposed to squelch. Blisters squelch. Frogs squelch. Septic wounds squelch. But belly buttons? No. Something was up.
This is where I made two key mistakes. First, I checked the internet, which told me that he either had a hernia, a radioactive tumour or some sort of nightmarish pulsating internal spider sac. However, if it was a hernia, the internet assured me that it wasn’t life-threatening. Icky, yes, but not life-threatening.
Then I mentioned it to my wife. Now, when it comes to our son, my wife is a ferocious worst-case scenarioist. Since his birth, she has been unable even to glance at a molehill without hiring a team of Sherpas and attempting to scale it. Before I could even finish the word “hernia”, she had decided that this was the cause of all his crying and pooing and vomiting, and that we were slap-bang in the middle of a legitimate medical emergency.
Less than an hour later, we were sitting in a dank, out-of-hours hospital corridor with our son (who, in an effort to play up the drama of the moment, was now clenched and screaming like a child on the brink of definite hernia-related death).
Sitting there, 20 feet away from A&E and its comprehensive aura of misery and grot, I foolishly allowed myself a moment of doubt. Maybe something really was up. Maybe the room would chill and alarms would go off and we would be hurtled into surgery with no warning, just like we were when he was born. I slowly became numb with terror. I braced myself for the worst.
Then, two minutes after that, we were cheerily on our way home again. As I suspected, the hernia would heal by itself in time. All the doctor basically did was take one look at us and, in the politest possible terms, as if to a pair of idiots, tell us to stop being so bloody jumpy.
The take-home lesson from this is that I am destined to be the low-frequency parent. I’ll be the calmer-down, forever assuring my wife that something awful isn’t around the corner.
Which isn’t a good thing, by the way – one day, I’m sure I will be bound to wave away a bleeding eyeball or a torn-off limb as a perfectly normal developmental phase – but as part of the team, it works.
Like it or not, we have both ended up with someone who evens out our worst tendencies; her tendency toward catastrophism, and my tendency to bury my head in the sand. Hopefully, this push and pull will result in a perfectly balanced child. Either that or we will muck him up beyond belief. Fingers crossed for the former, eh?
