Hurting Someone I Love

Yesterday I did one of the worst things I’ve ever done to our boys. For the past few days, I’d been noticing that their fingernails were growing long, fast approaching claw status. Every time they grabbed my neck folds for support while I carried them, I felt them dig in hard. Fortunately I’m a grizzled old stay-at-home father of three with battle-hardened skin that’s impervious to the machinations of pre-toddlers, so their grasp just hurt and maybe left a red mark for a few minutes instead of drawing blood. The boys still have baby soft skin though, and kept marring their faces as they thrashed in the agony of lying awake in their crib. Yesterday morning I finally had enough discoveries of new red dots on their faces, and I grabbed the fingernail clippers intent on trimming some cuticles.

I started pruning with Ian’s right pinky toe. I’m still not sure why I started with the toenails. No matter how sharp they grow, they remain sheathed inside their sleepers. When their toenails start slicing through their footies, then I may need to trim them back a bit, but otherwise I should have just left them alone.

Even though I am growing the parental eyes in the back of my head, I still don’t have the gift of using hindsight before completing an action. I grabbed Ian’s little toe, lined up the nail with the blades, and squeezed. Instead of hearing the standard “click” associated with the clipping of nails, I heard nothing. Then I saw Ian’s face scrunch in agony so horrible that he refused to breath. Then I heard screaming, a lot of screaming, that was accompanied by a growing spot of blood on his toe.

Looking at it now, I missed his toenail completely. The incision mark is a good 1/10th of an inch below the toenail, which may not sound like much, but keep in mind that his toe is still extremely small, maybe a quarter-inch in diameter, or approximately the same size as the nationwide level of interest in the Seahawks-Panthers NFC Championship Game.

I grabbed a tissue, and did the only thing I knew to do; I applied steady pressure to the wound to stop the bleeding. Of course applying steady pressure to the toe of a wriggly infant is no easy task, much more difficult than finding a plausible way to bring Jack Bauer back to CTU after killing him in last season’s finale. After 15 minutes of trying and failing to stop the bleeding, I woke up the big gun, aka “mom.” She had his toe bandaged and the bleeding stopped in minutes, averting the crisis.

Except that wasn’t the worst part. After everyone calmed down and I set them down for the nap, Ellie noticed that I had put them in the other one’s spot. I looked at them, and realized that I had forgotten who was who. After fretting for several minutes over what I thought was Ian’s toe, I had actually cut Tory’s toe. I have no idea when I switched the two, but it was the longest I had ever gone while misidentifying them. And I’d gotten so good at identifying Tory as the plumper one. Forget the toe cutting thing, that stuff happens; misidentification was the worst thing I’d ever done to them. Somehow they’ll have to find a way to forgive me.